Saturday meander

Nearly missed her this morning, Enviva WL Totma 591x98, gliding by early dawn, underway with wood pellets for Rotterdam. A new client, don't recall Rotterdam as a destination before.

Photo is bad because I lightened the original, which showed only lights in the darkness, to get an idea of her size and silhouette. One of our larger ships coming into Port PC, four cranes. 

Meanwhile, the top photo is Saturday breakfast, sausage split, served on one slice of lightly-toasted Simple Kneads gluten-free sour dough bread. Excellent. Yes, I like mayo on it, WTH, I like Hellmann's on everything but ice cream. And with sausage, always the curly squiggle of yellow mustard: this time mustard on the flat side bottom of the split sausage so as not to smear mustard on my lips with every bite. 

Sausage? Several kinds of sausage here, both wild game and domesticated. A gift, this is pork sausage from Bradley's Country Store in Tallahassee, incomparably superior to anything you will find in your local grocery.

Tomorrow again: Mary Sunday. I wrote about Mary yesterday. What I didn't write about, maybe we'll get to it in Sunday School class tomorrow morning, somewhere around here, surely I didn't toss it in our move from The Old Place to 7H, is a, I think it was Time, maybe Newsweek, magazine, about twenty years ago, cover article about the Pope considering and apparently deciding "Not Yet", bringing the Blessed Virgin Mary into the Godhead. No, seriously. It would have been an interesting undertaking on several fronts.

One is that the *innocent* Protestant fringe, and maybe even some Anglicans, would have been outraged at the Church's attempt to redefine God; and, as with the Filioque a thousand years ago, offended at not having been consulted.

Another is that changing Trinity to Quadrinity would have created a budget crisis for many parishes, while delighting ecclesiastical supply houses who would suddenly face a tsunami of demand for vestments and paraments with squares instead of triangles. [[BTW, these supply houses, whose prices are universally exorbitant, are the same folks who bought "One for the House" at the success of their marketing campaign to convert our Anglican vestments for Advent from purple to blue about forty years ago. A canny, subtle appeal to "sophistication" led us to swallow the Royal Blue, BVM Blue, Sarum Blue sales pitch and constructed etiology. My confession is that my own most elegant and expensive priest's stole is my Advent Blue one that I ordered when I was ordained those nearly forty years ago.]] 

And the prayers: all the prayers would have had to be updated, and their books, so another parish budget hit but a sales boon for the church publishing houses as well. And, oh, the hymns and hymnals. New hymns across the board, and an added verse for all our Trinity hymns. "I bind unto myself today ... by invocation of the same, the Four in One and One in Four".

But theological discourse would have been renewed for decades, generations, possibly centuries, to come. Perhaps stirring discussion and awareness of how human perceptions, convictions, and then certainties about the Divine evolve in the first place. Of course, we can do this anyway, without encountering a Holy Quadrinity. Certainties evolve, as the Nicene Creed's bloody history proves, as does canonizing the Book of Revelation. And Bart Ehrman has an interesting book "How Jesus Became God" to challenge the imagination of some and stir the apoplectic outrage of others.

Theological certitudes evolve not among the gods but among mortals, and not always peaceably. Is Jesus homoousion with the Father, or homoiousion, or neither, much blood was shed over that iota. Who decided that. Is Mary ever-virgin such that Jesus' sisters and brother must be rationalized in Church casuistry. Christian eschatology anticipates an End of Days with the Son of Man coming on clouds with angels to usher in a messianic age of God's kingdom on earth: as you look out into the Creator's mind-boggling universe on a clear December night and contemplate how nature works, what does common sense suggest? Is God what the Church decides, or does I AM that I AM rule?

Tomorrow in Sunday School (forecast a nasty, chilly, stormy day, so it may be just me) maybe we'll get to some of that. At least, thanks to an Advent presentation by Jane to our EfM group several years ago, we'll look at a sketch of a first century Judean home and see that a kataluma is not necessarily a motel,

and we may contemplate first century Jewish betrothal customs.

Alphabet&PTL

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