We have heroes in life, don't we. One of mine is Winston Churchill, hero of World War II, who stepped in and saved England from Hitler and the Nazis. And saved the world from the notion that bullies can be appeased. To me, Winston Churchill was even greater than President Franklin Roosevelt, because Churchill was on the scene, wandering about during the air raids, shaking his cane at the bombers overhead. Winston Churchill was singularly a greater-than-life man. Closer, another hero was Father Tom Byrne, who was rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church during my impressionable teenage years. Father Tom encouraged me in everything about life, including in my view of myself, in ways that my father and uncles did not. Not disparaging them, but it was different. Looking back, in the blood relationship there was some kind of competitiveness at work, which I did not understand all my growing up years, and frankly still do not as I look over the fence at my seventy-eighth birthday; ...

Linda and I were the first couple married in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida. The concrete block church was only what is now Battin Hall, standing in a sand lot among palmettos and scrub oaks. Metal folding chairs on the dusty concrete floor, the roll-up matchstick blinds weren't yet in the bare windows, and don't get your car stuck in the sand.  Linda was twenty years old and had to get parental consent to marry. I was 21, just graduated from the University of Florida and in ten days heading off to U.S. Navy Officers Candidate School, Newport, Rhode Island and GKW after that. Dating and going steady since she was a junior and I a senior at Bay High, we had been pinned since my freshmen year at Florida and engaged since Christmas 1956. Her father was stunned at our short engagement, protested that I had asked him if Linda and I could become engaged but nobody had said anything about marriage or a wedding, and was hesitant to sign the consent form. But my ...

Courage, My Soul http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GushP8Mh1Qs Hot dog, bit early in the pre-season, but starting to heat up. Sean Frye’s column in Bleacher Report, “Big 12 Football: 4 Reasons the Big 12 Will Be Better Than the SEC in 2013.” What a load of it. How do you like your crow, Sean: well done, medium, or with feathers and feet? Aaron Hernandez, former Gator, bad news, really bad news, bad news unto the personification of Evil Himself. Senate passes immigration bill. House? House? Jahar Tsarnaev charged in four murders. PCB Pirates having a good season. Real soccer right here at home. Congratulations to our own local sports team.  Now and then, Walt’s granddaughter Sarah phones me, “Hello, Papa!” from Phoenix. We came to love Phoenix forty-some years ago while stationed in San Diego when Linda’s parents lived in Scottsdale. Favorite restaurant was Los Olivos, scrumptious Mexican. Sarah says the temp is “in the hundreds,” which b...

If not darkest, “gothic” Southern fiction of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) is surely strangest. A Southerner and therefore one of us , O’Connor knew us . With her eye on hypocrisy, she could have wrung a murky nightmare out of Paula and the N-Word in which evil to the innocent reader might have seemed Paula Deen, but obliquely would be the good churchgoing, Bible-believing, God-fearing Christians picking up stones as they circled Paula in self-righteous damnation.   O’Connor minced no punches and pulled no words, to turn it upside down. For our Seminary orientation week we had her The Complete Stories to read and discuss. The stories are horrifying, though the horror is not what people see , but what we neither see nor recognize that we are. A favorite in one story was a used car salesman’s line, “Anyone with a good car don’t need salvation, and this is a good car.” Another is my image of a 1939 Buick sedan rolled, then uprighted and driven away. You could do that ...

More tea, Vicar? When everybody has an opinion, some idiot priest’s opinion adds no value. Nonetheless Stranded in a Moscow air terminal this morning, Putin inviting him oh.you.tee, Edward Snowden did not go to NSA and discover trouble, he went in planning espionage. His treason dishonoring his trusted top secret clearance may cost American lives. Lapping up the spotlight, promoting himself to CelebrityHero, and running for his life, he's a self-important little man. But sow’s ear cowards don’t make silk purse heroes. The heroes are Keith Alexander and others who despite all the flak are stopping terrorists and helping keep Americans safer. Snowden? To the Wall.  Support our government? Negotiating with Taliban is the moral equal of negotiating with Nazis. These, who behead boys, and kill villagers who dance, and shoot mothers who steal bread for hungry children, and shoot teenage girls who want to go to school, are earth’s most evil subhumans since Hitler and gang. ...

What comes after this, something or nothing, oblivion or pearly gates and streets of gold? And can Saint Peter pull a lever to open a trap door that drops the Calvins into the apocalyptic lake of fire? What differentiates losers and winners? What will I be ? If existence ends I will no longer be , I will have been . Gospel song: "We'll understand it better by and by." If we are , perhaps so. If we are not , no matter. About dying, someone recently said, confidently if smugly, "I know where I'm going." Not ,   actually. To confuse faith for knowledge, knowing with believing, is folly, the scriptural opposite of wisdom. So, believe, but remember: believing, even believing fervently, even believing with every fibre of my being don't make it so .  "She's in a better place now" is not a statement of fact, but a faith assertion. Or, it   may  be a fact, who knows ? Nobody. Nobody knows . This thought has surfaced here before, but yeste...

Compound Eyes & The Katzenjammer Kids Someone throws the Panama City News-Herald our way every morning. Linda pays for it a year at a time, and reads it faithfully. Yesterday it got soaked in the predawn downpour.  For some reason the newspaper habit left me years ago, probably because the news online is more instantaneous and relevant, or more likely because after reading The Harrisburg Patriot every morning our years in Pennsylvania, when we got to Apalachicola the newspaper was only a weekly and the habit lapsed. Now, when there’s something local that I need to read Linda tells me or sets it aside for me to look at later. She just read me an obit, for example. After working the crossword puzzle she sets the comics section aside for me. All my favorites aren’t necessarily in it, and between a couple of websites most all the comics are available online, but reading real comics in a real newspaper is part of being real. Whoever scorns the comics needs to remembe...

D.L. and the Pigs Shell Island Sunday for our church! Almost everyone boats across the Bay for a day of beach, surf, sand and sun. Fellowship, chicken, worship and fun. Beer, wine and Demon Rum? This is the Episcopal Church.  BTDT? Take heart! Worship as ever back at the church, eight o’clock and ten-thirty. From Luke, today’s gospel is the story of Jesus crossing the sea and stepping out of his boat only to be confronted by the Wild Man of Geresa. Ominously, mysteriously calling himself Demon Legion , he is a fearsome creature of terrible strength who rips off his chains and roams the graveyard under the full moon, terrorizing the townsfolk, who themselves are shepherds of swine. A strange tale of demons and pigs, it is not a pretty scene.  Miss it at your peril. TW+ PostScript. For readers who normally access +Time through a CaringBridge email notification, the CB staff regret that problems updating their website continue to plague. I am unable e...

Truthfully, a Southerner, this one at least (and "least" is what this one is), doesn't know what to say-to or do-about Paula Deen . Which, as the italics show, is not herself the person, but the topic. The topic, the unspeakable topic. And the spread between unspeakable and unthinkable. It isn't about political correctness, which is as thin skin deep for sincerity as high-church pomp is for theology. It isn't about a -- word -- either. It's about the distance between seeming and be-ing ; what is seen v. what is . Many people have a "focus." For example, my teaching focus those years in Holy Nativity Episcopal School was the N.T. Greek word agape' , which is a kind of love, love that is not a feeling but how you treat people; it's vital for Christians -- for anyone -- to be mindful of that. In the Paula Deen cavitation this morning, I remember the focus of an admiral I once knew. He's probably long dead now, but during a Navy tour in ...

First day back from the first adventure of my Summer of Silent Retreats. It was an exceptional experience, my first such in thirty years. Last time in Boston, an Episcopal monastery overlapping with Harvard, my room looking across a highway upon the Charles River. Now in a Jesuit place I was the only non-Catholic, and most of the women there were nuns doing their annual spiritual retreat. Next adventure starts in just over a week. (What, going away again for more goofy religious stuff?) Yes, three this summer for the purpose of being open to whatever God has in mind for me next for ministry. Next as in starting this fall, this coming September. Turning 78 and needing a new slate, minor change or major, and wanting to go into it, whatever it may be, feeling the same Divine summons that got me into this Holy Mess nearly forty years ago in the first place.  Far out on an old farm in the boondocks of Georgia, the next place has no WiFi, but the maps show 3G coverage. It will be my ...

In this picture, a Christian spirituality abides, a Christian theology is seen, far different to what most Episcopalians know, whether we regard ourselves as so-called "High Church" or "Low Church."  Things have changed in the Episcopal Church over my three-generation spread of life, with “churchmanship” as we understand it coming to “the Center” for the most part; but i t was not that long ago -- my own growing up years -- that our terms High Church and Low Church had specific meaning to us. The Diocese of South Florida was scandalously High Church: their bishop wore cope and mitre! We were staunchly Low Church: no making the Sign of the Cross, no sanctuary lights, no reserved Sacrament, Misters no Fathers , no sanctus bells, no thurible; cassock and surplice but no chasuble. The sight of our bishop in cope and mitre would have been -- the sky is falling, we’ve gone to Rome!  Some dioceses and parishes were High Church, they preferred “Anglo-Catholi...

Meeting with the retreatant each day, the Spiritual Director may suggest a topic as the basis of prayer over the next 24 hours. These are not assignments, but truly “suggestions” which one may go with, or may go one’s own way, as I may wish or feel led. All of these are being helpful to me, variously, including seeming somehow to open prayer as a two-way street in which I am receptive to whatever comes my way instead of just trying to hear answers to my concerns. It reminds me of Jesus’ “trick” in which a hostile person asks Him a question only to have His response be a rejoinder shifting the focus from what they want answered to what He wants heard.  “Trick” is the wrong word, maybe the word will come to mind before this morning’s +Time nonsense is signed, maybe not. Anyway, it’s a rhetorical technique, isn’t it. If what I mean isn’t clear, such a case might be the gospel exchange that begins, “Shall we pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” You may get an answer to your own quest...

Coffee is not for gourmet delight in a college dorm room diverted to silent retreat accommodation for five days, six nights: Winn-Dixie instant coffee made with three forkfuls because there’s no spoon, hot water from the washbasin tap. Yuck doesn’t say it. Nasty ? No matter, serves for wakeup.   Sudden burst of rain. iTitan on the iPad spread out for detail shows a rainstorm moving through Mobile, green over us, yellow approaching, light orange spot may come over momentarily, but the two darker orange spots will move one to the west of us and one to the east. iTitan is so perfect that one can tell whether a rain squall (or tornado) will hit this  block or the next block. I absolutely love modern electronics, have been enjoying their advance for the past thirty-five years. It’s worth living into the early 21st century instead of the late 19th century with my grandfathers, just for weather apps. Otherwise I prefer their day and age of trains instead of planes, windows op...