My agenda yesterday while Linda was in Apalachicola for lunch with P at was to go to Tyndall for a haircut. Let's face it, at this age and state of hirsuteness -- don't say bald , it's a four-letter-word and preachers don't cuss -- what's left of the head is better suited to a military skinning than to the art of a hair stylist, and to be truthful for a change, I prefer it anyway, just plain tapered. "Any off the top, Commander? har har har." The barbershop is in the mall with the Exchange and the Commissary, so it was convenient to hit those while I was there.  In the Commissary I purchased two half-gallon bottles of the Bulgarian style buttermilk I love. Mixed with one-third Kefir, it makes a tasty supper a couple evenings a week. Always in the Commissary I check the peanut butter shelf, but only once recently found natural crunchy sans sugar and they didn't have it yesterday.  My Exchange visit was more focused: computer sect...

Who do I feel sorry for? Anyone who is missing Wednesday evenings at HNEC.  In last night’s dialogue about next Sunday’s gospel -- Matthew’s story of Jesus on the mountaintop with Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John and God the Father -- we heard and had discussion about Heaven. The rector recalled the movie Field of Dreams and the lines, “Is there Heaven?” and the response “Heaven is where your dreams come true.”  This stirred my memories so powerfully that sitting there in my pew I had to close my eyes and go off alone for a few minutes, to Heaven actually. I’ve seen Field of Dreams  several times and each time, I like it more, it’s the most touching, moving film I’ve ever loved. When I see it I can hardly bear to have it end; but that, as Peter found out, is how Heaven is. Especially do I love that line, “Heaven is where your dreams come true.”  I know that there is Heaven, and that up on the mountain with Jesus, Peter doesn’t yet quite understand about Heav...

Rainy this morning. And that sound wasn’t thunder as I thought, but my neighbor cranking up his red pickup truck. Covet. If I can’t have a red convertible, maybe I’ll get a red pickup truck, both of my pickup trucks have been green. The first one was a well-used Ford V8 F-100, a model years before the popular F-150. The second one I ordered brand new about 1995 from my buddy the Ford dealer in Apalachicola, an F-150 XLT. Nice. Very, very nice. It was a six.   One evening last week, news online carried stuff about asteroid 2000M26. It was the size of three football fields and could be a near miss and you could watch it pass us on Slooh, an online telescope community. So, I did. I listened to excited chat of astronomers on, as I recall, the Canary Islands and somewhere way across in the southwestern Pacific.  George Washington would have been amazed.   But there was nothing to see, it was a dark shadow passing in black space and Slooh missed it. And it was no “ne...

Forty-one months of blogging, done for myself as a daily pseudo-intellectual exercise, started in October 2010 upon being told my stage of heart disease was inoperable and I had two to five months to live; and since I had as priest and pastor been down that road with many parishioners over the years and always wondered what it must be like to be dying and be aware of it (more precisely so than the dismissive "well, we're all dying"), I decided to pay close attention and enjoy and journal my end of life experience. "Enjoy" is a stretch, because admittedly it came as a bit of a shock, especially when a beloved daughter burst into sobs when told on the phone, but I accordingly started my journal in my BayMed hospital room the evening of Wednesday, October 20, 2010, the day the team of cardiologists and heart surgeons gave me the bad news. Within a day of starting my journal, a friend cajoled me into being public and letting people know how I was doing, so I did tha...

Eat so-many grams-or-whatever of protein within a quarter-hour of rising, Dr. Oz once advised in my hearing. He suggested peanut butter. Always doing anything makes life a dull boy same as all work and no play, therefore I have no television or eating habits and don’t always do anything ; but sometimes -- sometimes being more frequent than from time to time and certainly (there’s that most evil of all evil words) more frequent than now and then -- I have a teaspoon of peanut butter while waiting for the coffee machine to say -- well, whatever it says when it’s ready to brew. Sometimes it says “dregdrawer full” instead, or “fill water reservoir” but those aren’t the best omens for a perfect day, are they.  Publix has good peanut butter for eccentrics, make that weirdos, like me who won’t buy peanut butter that has sugar and other strange objects in the ingredients, and I always read the ingredients before usually putting the jar back on the shelf. Publix natural peanut ...

Whoa! Waking up to thunder and lightning and the clock saying 4:19 has a feeling of urgency. One, it’s Sunday morning and I’ve overslept, but at least I'm not preaching today. Two, there ‘s time to get Linda’s newspaper before it’s soaked by rain; the carrier always bags it, but the blue bag must be porous, as the paper gets wet regardless on rainy mornings. Diocesan Convention is over. I didn’t go, I could hide behind an excuse that retired priests without a charge get voice but no vote, but when I retired fifteen years ago I resolved to use my privilege not to go, and pretty much have not except the years when I did have charge of parishes. This time there were, as I understand it, issues about diocese reorganization and sides sharply drawn. Truly, I don’t know that, but I do remember our first diocesan convention, February 1985, soon after we first arrived in CGC from Central Pennsylvania. Convention was in Mobile, at Trinity as I recall. Whatever the main issue was, it wa...

RSF&PTL At church Wednesday evening we wrote something private about ourselves on a slip of paper, something personal and private, folded the paper and dropped them into a basket. Unopened, unread, at the end of the service they were taken outside and burned as an offering. Mine said “Lord, you know.” It’s just between me and Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.     Right shoe first and praise the Lord, even, no especially including, when it’s slides, slide on shoes that stay in the back closet near the door for the early morning walk out to get Linda’s PCNH. With focusing, RSF&PTL overcame the lifelong habit of LSF. It was a struggle that now and then involved taking shoes off and starting over upon realizing I'd done it wrong. Neither spiritual nor piously inclined even after last summer’s battery of silent Jesuit directed retreats, the PTL part of the exercise slips away occasionally and has to be r...

Meditation, thinking, slave labor of the mind. MacBook won't go online, iPad battery run down and charging, no sane person with adult size fingers would type an essay on an iPhone. Eyes and mind puzzle at looking on a sheet of white instead of a bright, colored, live and moving screen. But pen and ink still work, and coffee is hot, black and strong. As Linda is not into sleeping my Florida way in the damp, cool, salty breeze, I didn't bother suggesting we have the porch door open last night to enjoy the weather's arrival. However, the red yellow orange line of thunderstorms is just now leaving Pensacola, so no matter anyway. "Light off the boilers" comes to mind here in 20140221 realtime instead of electronics. Last time I heard that exciting stir about going to sea? Maybe in Subic Bay before getting underway for Danang. "Light off the brain" instead, but it isn't meditation at all, meditation is serious exercise, this is barely even thinking. Ab...

On Facebook, someone shared from a generation ago, the Carol Burnett television show episode “Wrong Number.” I still cannot get my breath.  Television I watch for news or entertainment. Not generally education or enlightenment, for example, Bible material on PBS or History Channel is often so sensationalist, literalistic, and unscholarly that it tries one’s patience. Entertainment, I want to be funny, seldom serious. Want history ? Monty Python or Blackadder. But the Carol Burnett show was the funniest program ever aired. I’d no idea complete episodes are instantly available on Youtube, punch the button for full-screen. Thanks to a Facebook friend, TV is wonderfully re-enlivened, even a generation later, with painfully breathless laughter.  For whoever posted that, thank you! I once thought “Red Skelton” was funny, but seeing an episode a few years ago was hugely disappointing. Anyway, the other all time funniest show having been “The Honeymooners,” and now havin...

Last night was the first time this year, maybe since late in the fall, we slept with the porch door open. Getting up at three-thirty I closed the door, and shut the blind in it to stop the street light from shining in Linda’s face. Upstairs porch and bedroom opening on to it is something about freedom, like living in a treehouse or on a riverboat. Last night I went out on the porch to put on my pajamas and wondered if Alfred had ever done that, put on his PJs while looking out across the Bay.  The porch is better now, screened in and with a new metal deck, but know what, I’ll bet he did, it was his bedroom and his porch. He was a teenager when he lived here, 1913 when the house was finished until January 1918, and I’ll bet he slept out there when the weather was right in those days before the house was heated and cooled, I would have. In fact, I promised Kristen we’d sleep out there sometime but we never got around to it. For the moment it’s my porch, but nothing is forever...

Monday online, CNN reported the death from snakebite of a Kentucky snake-handling preacher. These folks, whom we may visualize as mad, wild-eyed fringe, get their motivating Scripture from Mark 16:17-18, "... signs shall accompany those believing these things; in my name demons they shall cast out; with new tongues they shall speak; serpents they shall take up; and if any deadly thing they may drink, it shall not hurt them; on the ailing they shall lay hands, and they shall be well." (YLT).  These folks are not wildeyed fringe, they are a species of Bible literalists. But attributed as postresurrection appearance, to reputable scholars the words of Mark 16:9f did not come from the lips of Jesus, nor does this ending of Mark have claim to being original to the evangelist’s work. It is part of a later, likely second-century, addition that is meant to be, among other things, a threat to those who are falling away from the church in decades when the expected Parousia did ...

Melchior & the Ghostly Galleon Very early and dark, cool 44F and falling, clear sky with no fog, a welcome change. Good morning, starshine, and the moon is a bright white disk on black, what? velvet? Maybe winter is over, woodchuck meteorology wrong again. Forget Phil, astrology rules: what could Gaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior tell us by gazing at the moon?   Winter seems over this morning, not sufficiently yielded to springtime for me to gather a blanket, bundle up and start out on a screen porch with coffee and laptop, moongazing. I’m no New Ager, but one thing’s certain: the moon isn’t in the Seventh House, because love sure as aitch isn’t steering the stars. Warring greed is at the wheel, an insane crowd-controlling god of selfish immediacy is driving, and let me off at the next fork in the road.  Special in my email this morning, Carl Hiaasen’s PCNH piece from last week, “Muddying the waters.” At church yesterday, some breakfasters went for the casserol...

Everybody and his brother ... ... who was watching the Dunn trial instead of the Olympics has an opinion about the partial verdict reached by the jury last evening. More than a stupid alphabet moron was on trial. Our values. Who and what we are. Us. Our legislature. Those who elected them. Our state legal system. We aren’t coming out so well. It is clear from this and other cases, especially that similar case, that our gun law meant to let us protect ourselves without turning tail and trying to escape is being abused. People who are not worth the price of the bullets they shoot are using the law to claim they felt threatened after they kill someone then wake up and realize how stupid they were. The cost of their stupidity -- or maybe not always stupidity, maybe cunning, because sometimes they are getting away with it -- is being the lives of cocky but innocent and unarmed people who refused to be bullied. Dunn actually thought he had the right. He’s a fool. Raca, as in this mor...

Just Saturday Articles about it all over, Greg Cote has a good piece in the Miami Herald this morning about the Wells bullying report. Cote is right, Turner should be fired, yesterday. Pouncey and Jerry should follow Incognito out the door and all of them should be suspended indefinitely by the league.  And what about those who looked on? Quote from Cote: “It is the archaic locker room code of silence that let the Dolphins’ problem get to where it did. How many teammates saw and heard Incognito, Pouncey and Jerry repeatedly inflict themselves but did and said nothing? A code of conduct won’t remedy that as much as a hard look in the mirror might.” Greg Cote’s advice is good for life itself. Our commandments are love God and love neighbor , and when we do nothing while others are mistreated we seriously break our Baptismal Covenant. The best weapon against evil has always been and will always be the mirror. Word, and Glass not darkly. 4.1 earthquake between Columbia an...

Epiphany 5 - Feb 9, 2014 unpreached Text: Matthew 5:13-20. You are the salt of the earth Just a few weeks away is our “giving up for Lent” custom. Some of us, at least speaking for myself, have such a habit for Epiphany also. My habit for long years has been to look for an epiphany in every Sunday's lectionary readings. And my Epiphany Season hymn of choice is "Open my eyes that I may see"  * and  for years my Epiphany prayer has been open my eyes to see God’s hand at work in the world about me , keeping eyes and ears open for the joyful or obnoxious presence of God in light shining down from “heaven” to speak to me in some way, ready or not. With self-conscious hesitation, I’ve shared my eccentric, quirky "call story" with you before, and will not repeat the details today nor again anytime soon, that in a time of personal and emotional crisis, the year after I was first ordained and most unhappy in my first church assignment, I tried all kinds of t...