Get up, Son

Monday, eh? and for the first Time in ages, coffee with cream & sugar and play a game of spider solitaire on screen before even going on line to check email, texts, weather, or news. Possible, I reckon, because the game was already loaded when I turned the machine off at eight-thirty last evening. When tired, or even exhausted, two-deck spider solitaire is a favorite for total relaxing diversion and focus without further running the brain down.

Our weekend: one of my happiest family Easter weekends in memory - -

- - a realization that just now started other Easter mornings and days chronicling through my mind. One, thirty years ago, it would have been Easter 1993 because he was eight years old, in the front yard of the rectory in Apalachicola and Nicholas, resplendent in a light blue suit with tie and white shirt, exclaiming to me, "Don't I look nice, Granddaddy?!" A lifetime heart-stealing moment, and I think, hope, I have a photograph of that moment around here somewhere, but if not, it's just as brilliant in my mind. For us humans, life is more memories of precious moments than any present instant or tentative future, and a child is a person who grows through your life on their way to becoming an adult.

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Easter Monday and we church staff are starting our Other entitled days off to relax for the church year (the Other being the days after Christmas) following the Lenten press of Holy Week, Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday. Easter Day, some insist on, mox nix mir.

Busy week ahead for me though, because Episcopal 101 confirmation class this coming Sunday, Easter 2, and I like to have it well organized. It's completely start from scratch reorganized new every year, with a decent handout and my thoughts lined up. This year I'm going to turn it upside down or inside out and begin with what's usually been the conclusion. It's always with the adult Sunday school class and others who want to come, including folks considering being confirmed when the bishop comes in May. Usually has been four half-hour sessions; this year it'll be two relaxed sessions for the full Sunday school hour, 9:15 to 10:15 in the parish library. Sundays April 16 and April 30, with Sunday May 7 set aside for a "makeup" session just in case. We schedule it as "confirmation class" once every year starting a few weeks before the bishop comes, but it's actually an enjoyable gathering of happy people for refresher discussions about Christianity as Episcopalians.

From the Catechism:

Q. What is Confirmation?

A. Confirmation is the rite in which we express a mature commitment to Christ, and receive strength from the Holy Spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands by a bishop.

Q. What is required of those to be confirmed?

A. It is required of those to be confirmed that they have been baptized, are sufficiently instructed in the Christian Faith, are penitent for their sins, and are ready to affirm their confession of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

Anyone who wants to come is invited and welcome, no reservation necessary, just show up!

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In our family the major gatherings are feast days, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and Easter Day, everyone comes who can and wants to. The gatherings are family reunions of a sort, and they evolve year to year, significantly depending I've noticed, on who has died who had held the family together. In my own childhood, two separate family gatherings, one locally of Wellers especially around the Fourth of July, and a noisier even happier and more loving Time at Christmas with the Gentry family, aunts, uncles and cousins at 1317 East Strong Street where mama grew up in Pensacola.

Generations moving on, seems like there were Times when my parents were living, when we might have been forty people at 2308 WBD, The Old Place. We, as a much smaller group, had our last and final Christmas there in 2014, an almost empty house because that month we had pretty much relocated to 7H but wanted that last Time there. For me, that morning included saying goodbye and I'll always love you to a family homestead that my beloved grandparents had built in 1912 for their own generation at the Time a century earlier.

Family groups and gatherings evolve, and are largely in our mind anyway, and ours in my mind for the past eight years or so have been here in 7H, with loved ones who already are growing away into their own places and families of loved ones. Not maudlin or melancholy, it's noting how life works as Time moves on around us.

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+Time blogposts are nearly always a ramble that started out with some notion of what the topic might be. This one did, and I'd thought to write about doubting the Resurrection of Christ, as Thomas does in John's gospel. So just briefly even though I'm done.

In the church-wide General Ordination Exam that I took at Virginia Seminary forty years ago, there was a question asking whether I felt my theology was settled or was still evolving. I said truthfully that my theology was still evolving, and forty years on I notice that that is still my truth. What I believed, largely kindergarten Sunday school level faith and certainties, when I entered theological seminary, was challenged and severely shaken during my seminary years, and continues to be.

At our final session in his remarkably outstanding course, my theology professor advised us to keep reading, studying and thinking, and I've worked hard at doing that. With a mind open to the Episcopal notion that our theology is based on Scripture, Tradition, and REASON, everything I've believed over the years has been shaken up and poured out again and again. With my scriptural namesake Thomas, I am the quintessential doubter.

In his Easter sermon yesterday morning, our Rector asked us about doubting the Resurrection, that it is okay to do that; which was assuring, reassuring; and, in fact, surfaced the traveling mercies of my own doubts, a mental process that goes something like this: that being somewhat equally in heart and mind an astronomer and a religious nut, I can look at the night sky, contemplate where it all began, and equate the Big Bang with Genesis 1:1f, that "In the beginning the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over churning chaos, and God SAID 'yeh-HI' and it was so." And if I can believe that, I can believe anything, including that, as Episcopal priest and author Martin Bell said ("The Way of the Wolf"), God stepped into the tomb, said, "Get up, Son," and they went home and colored Easter eggs.

RSF&PTL