Sun, Dec 14, 2025 10:15 AM

 

Saturday morning we did the little $2 tour of Gorrie Museum and two other quadrants of Gorrie Square, John Gorrie's grave and the quadrant in front of Trinity Church with the monument to Gorrie and the sea level benchmark installed in its base. Then we did the shopping stop when I wait in the car while Linda and Kristen are in River Lily. 

Then to Up the Creek Raw Bar, which was closed, so to our next choice The Station Raw Bar, where I had two dozen cold, salty ones, Alabama farmed, I never tasted better oysters in my life. 

Including in my memory are oysters in Sydney, Australia and oysters in Colchester, England. 

We're on Joe's schedule for this coming Thursday afternoon Dec 18 until Tuesday morning and we have two seafood restaurant visits in mind, Captain's Table and Gene's at both of them I'm planning on more cold salty ones on the half-shell. And fried mullet both places, very differently presented.

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Eight o'clock church this morning, we alternate back and forth between 8 & 10-thirty. Today is Advent 3A, Pajama Sunday, part of the original idea as I recall was to wear your PJs and to bring a gift new pair of pajamas for a child, I think Anchorage Children's Home.

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Mass shootings, students in exams at Brown University in Providence RI and Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. What's the matter with us? There are no words. America has returned to the Wild West and other countries, Australia, are following suit. Our human obsession with firearms reveals our crocodilian nature as does our gleeful satisfaction in watching drug smuggling boats explode in a deadly burst of light. 

... shehecheyanu, who has brought us to this Time ...

What is God's will for us, and how do we know God's will for us? More than once in my Time as a parish priest - - following a suicide's funeral in which I'd said in my homily that this was not God's will for the dead youth and his devastated family - - someone corrected me, saying that everything that happens is God's will. That's blasphemy, almost nothing that happens in human life is God's will; and in any case we specify why would any loving being embrace a divinity whose will for its creatures includes violence, evil, pain, death and grief?

A creation in which