Best

The Old Ways Are Best

The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow, so soon passeth it away, and we are gone. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

There are a few of us left. More to the point, there are few of us left. With our ancient prejudices and preferences, that is to say, for Thomas Cranmer and the BCP he gave us, and the Coverdale Psalter we grew up with, from the Coverdale Bible that, 1535, predates the 1611 King James Version by nearly a century. Thus, the above citation from Psalm 90.

Preaching this morning, and in a hurry now because it’s almost time to stop everything and mark my sermon notes, and there’s something offensive that I’ve got to get out of there before stepping into the pulpit with it, but I do have a few minutes to write my blog post. Preaching and then immediately leaving, driving off straight from church to my third and final Jesuit retreat for Summer 2013. 

We don’t mind that some things run out, life itself for instance, because the time comes, and it comes for every damn one of us like it or not. What I do mind is a book running out, and this is where I started out to go, not some maudlin journey into the end of life. Roger Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir is so exquisite to me that I’ve been allowing myself only a chapter at a time lest it run out on me, which inevitably, like life itself, it will anyway. It’s on Kindle, which means it’s not convenient to flip back and forth even to see how much is left. At bedtime last night I finished chapter 19, in which he talks about places he loved being alone in different cities of the world, especially London, but also Cannes, Venice, many places. He had places that he loved to be, and he had a litany, though he didn’t call it that, more a liturgy, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” A place to sit at a table and read or write or sketch or just be. Most preferably it was off in a corner, because a corner offers protection and privacy: and in that, he was a man after my own heart. I’m reading slowly because, as I said, it being on Kindle, I can’t look back to the table of contents or ahead to the end to see how much is left. And I don’t want it to end.

Which thought and thinking carried me to Psalm 90, quite normally and logically for me but likely eccentrically even weirdly to most people. Along with Psalm 139 (go look 139 up yourself but don’t read the last six verses, which are rather nasty), Psalm 90 has long been my favorite psalm for reading and hearing at funerals of people my age and older. Not that I love funerals, but having officiated dozens, maybe scores of them, the liturgy for Burial of the Dead is as familiar and comfortable as Morning Prayer from the 1928 BCP -- which was almost straight off of Archbishop Cranmer’s mouth and pen, and incomparably dearest and best.

Here’s a photo of me and Linda at our back porch, taken by Navy buddy Captain Norm, who this week appeared from the mists of time after forty years. We are standing on the ramp that was built for my mother three years ago. But mama's ramp may come in handy now that we, at least I -- with my 78th birthday next month, am looking Psalm 90 squarely and defiantly in the face.

BTW, as well as taking the photo, and appearing again after the biblical forty years, it was Cap'n Norm who told me about Ebert's book.

TW+