Monday & Tuesday
Been up about an hour, one sip of hot & black left in my magic mug, still perfect. Medical appointment first thing this morning, surgery on right ear, Father Nature's vengeance for Time I spent heedlessly baking and browning in the Florida sun year round all my growing up years. Sometimes unintentionally sunburned brilliant red and stinging untouchably painful, we dabbed vinegar or tea on blisters, skin peeled, it was all part of life. We didn't know, did we. Would we change anything? Oh yes, although IDK, when we're nine, and nineteen, and even twenty-nine, we don't worry about when we're eighty-nine, do we.
It's a rhetorical question, so at my sole discretion I leave off the question mark, eh?
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Been reading the lections for next Sunday, November 10, Proper 27B. Here's the Collect for the Day:
O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hatchett says it was composed for the 1662 revision of the Book of Common Prayer. What do we believe, what's our theology? In our Church, lex orandi lex credendi, the law of praying is the law of believing, what we pray shows what we believe, our theology is found in our liturgy: readily discernible in what we do and say and sing and pray when we gather for worship.
In that regard and the Collect, we are uncommonly tied to ancient prayers with their theology, including prayers dating to the early Roman Church - - Galileo condemned and Giordano Bruno burned alive at the stake, his tongue tied with a cord so he could not continue to commit heresy of insisting that the Earth revolves around the Sun - - where theology comes not only from a flat Earth that sun, moon and stars revolve around, but also from developments after the death of Paul.
By the Time this collect was written, the Church had long ago laid aside the vision of Paul and Jesus respectively, Paul's of the imminent Second Coming, and Jesus' of the imminent coming of the Son of Man (Daniel 7), with power and glory to raise the dead, rally the living, battle to overthrow earthly dominions, and establish the kingdom of God on Earth - - laid that certainty aside as a theology evolved, instead of God's earthly kingdom, of immediate afterlife fearing Hell and hoping for salvation into a spiritual realm of Heavenly afterlife; theology controlled by the Church in centuries long assertion of power based on Matthew 18:18.
Today, the church's theology is largely pigeonholed as irrelevant as people go about life and scientific knowledge that evolves over the centuries.
Those are galaxies; there are trillions of them. So to put it, the 1600s Collect is out of date, why do we pray antiquated, irrelevant things. Bruno with his tongue tied.
The church has a little book, which has been used locally, and which I have used in churches I've served, "Prayers for an Inclusive Church" that provides modern collects. With the day's gospel reading of Mark 12:38-44, the collect for Proper 27B reads,
God of fierce justice, you close the mouth of those who devour the poor and hide behind their prayer: humbled by the giving of those who have so little, let us live from your abundance; through Jesus Christ the judgment of God. Amen.
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Today's nonsense was started yesterday, Monday, then I got whisked off at eight o'clock for ear surgery, finally arriving home about two o'clock too exhausted to move, much less think. The ear is all bandaged up so I can't see what Linda described as, "He took off a large chunk of your ear," the thought of which, remembering the smell of cauterized burnt flesh, and sense and sound of sutures being stitched, makes me queasy, nomesane?
At any event, last night was the second worst of my life, at least in memory, second only to the night in the ICU at Cleveland Clinic fourteen years ago with persistently, unceasingly repetitive dreams of situations totally out of my control, dreams that resumed every Time I went back to sleep after rousing momentarily. And the pain in my ear, and having to lie on my left side without changing all night long. Yes, I know, Oh, Poor Baby, but it was a night in hell. Asleep by seven o'clock, up at midnight for a pain pill with a glass of chocolate milk and trying to read a story until the pain subsided and back to bed, about one-thirty.
This morning to the pharmacy to pick up the prescriptions that weren't ready yesterday when we left the dermatologists' clinic.
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My shame at feeling bad for myself intensifies as I read this morning about unspeakably appalling health conditions in Gaza.
And my fears about turning on the television tomorrow morning make me grateful that I'm 89&c in America instead of nine or nineteen or twenty-nine.
God help us. God save us.
From ourselves.
T89&c