Lord have mercy! Why in the world would anybody belong to any church but Holy Nativity! I’m not talking about the hamburgers this time either, it’s the music, we have a fantasticalistical music program. As well as every Sunday morning and special music series events some Sunday afternoons, there’s Wednesday evenings, which is what ignites this post. Last night was a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Inside, Tracey Holliday at the piano for fun songs in worship, I’m talking fun . After worship we had hamburgers and hotdogs, then -- repaired may be the old word -- outside to the lawn for music on the green. Weather, the perfect evening, cool and pleasant, clear sky with the crescent moon over the church, sinking in the west. Sharon Carroll with her supercombo, singing and Mia singing a song or two with her mom. Sara Nicole Dick sang two songs, accompanying herself at the keyboard as she does at The Little Village in St. Andrews some evenings. Everyone with their own lawn chair an...

Hornet Why? His last post was February 7, 2013. Why? What happened? Kit Foster’s CarPort is a favorite site that is becoming the final 1957 Hudson on his frontpage, rusted out, tires flat, disintegrating into the earth.  My morningly temptation is to join him.    The WWW is Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, abandoned blogs, websites and unfinished business. I understand Kit Foster: retiring from St. Thomas by the Sea I walked away from a blog set up in May 2005 and posted weekly with parish events, last post 2008, still sitting there in cyberspace. How long? ‘til the stars wink out, I reckon. Or Hell freezes over. The Hudson Hornet was the hottest car on the racing circuit for a while in the early 1950s, I’m saying Hudson, alone before American Motors, didn’t have the capital in 1951 for a new body, or for a new V8 engine to replace their tame pre-war flathead sixes and eights, so they gave us the Hornet flathead six.  My mother’s brother h...

I love this summer of Bible stories, it just keeps getting better and better. In our story for this coming Sunday, Genesis 32:22-31, Jacob struggles all night long with a being who is alluded to be God, or at least an angel of God, representing God. At the end of the night,  as dawn is breaking, Jacob’s wrestling partner asks him his name, and when he says “Jacob” the being tells him that his name will be “Israel” from now on, because he has struggled with God and man and not been defeated.  Any number of threads may be pulled out of the story for discussion. One I especially like is the Hebrew tradition that naming something symbolizes your power over it. The next day after this happens in the story, Jacob meets up with Esau. Jacob has been avoiding his brother for years because he is afraid Esau will kill him in revenge for all the wrongs he did to Esau while they were growing up. But Esau loves his brother and instead of fighting, they have an affectionate reun...

Who and what are we, or specifically, what and who am I; or was I? It has been clear to me for as long as I’ve been aware of being an Episcopalian, an Anglican Christian, which predates my consciousness. There was a time when to me Anglicanism was a sound, a sound in worship, precisely and uniquely the sound of Anglican Chant, the four-part harmony we raised in worship every Sunday morning in the years of my life.  Anglican Chant was lost to parish worship life in the liturgical reform of the second half of the twentieth century when the Roman Church sank into banal liturgy, and we morphed into plain vanilla. Anglican Chant has been forgotten and lost, and we seem incapable of recovering it. Or not interested. I tried at more than one church that I served and the musicians, not raised with it, could never “get it” or hear the magical wonder of it. Even if they could muster the SATB choir voices to lead it, they couldn’t grasp not observing standard metronomic counting, whic...

The Silence Sent to me yesterday afternoon by a dear and special old Navy friend who may know the inside of me better than any other human does. Else how and why would he have known to send it. Or maybe he had no idea -- About six miles from Maastricht, in the Netherlands, lie buried 8,301 American soldiers who died in the battles to liberate Holland in the Fall and Winter of 1944/45.   Each grave in the cemetery, as well as those in the Canadian and British military cemeteries, has been adopted by a Dutch family who mind it, decorate it, and keep alive the memory of an allied soldier they have adopted.  Annually, on "Liberation Day," memorial services are held for "the men who died to liberate Holland." The day concludes with a concert.  The final piece is always "Il Silenzio," a memorial piece commissioned by the Dutch and first played in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of Holland's liberation. It has been the concluding piece of the memorial conc...

Genesis 29:15-28 The Voice (VOICE) 15 ... Laban spoke one day to Jacob. Laban: Just because you are my relative, that doesn’t mean you should be working for me for nothing! Tell me what I can pay you. 16 Now Laban had two daughters. The older was Leah, and her younger sister was Rachel. 17 There was no brightness to Leah’s eyes, but Rachel had a beautiful shape and was lovely to look at. 18 Jacob truly loved Rachel. Since Jacob has no money to pay a bride-price, he offers a creative solution to the problem. Jacob: I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll serve you for seven years in exchange for the hand of your younger daughter Rachel in marriage. Laban: 19 Agreed. I’d rather you have her than any other man I know. You may stay here and work. 20 So Jacob served Laban for seven years in exchange for Rachel. The years went by quickly and seemed to him to be only a few days because of the immense love he had for her. 21 When the ...

Those of us clustered around the television watching the Twin Towers fall that morning knew that everything was changed forever. At least for our lifetimes. As I stood there staring in horror, came to mind Friday, December 7, 1962, our professor lecturing his American government course at UMichigan reminiscing about his thoughts on the peaceful Sunday twenty-one years earlier as he listened to the radio thinking, “How different it will all be tomorrow.” It was. Comes round. We had a pax interregnum of sorts, didn’t we, after the Vietnam War until 9/11, what, thirty-five years? Even paxier those twenty years from the end of the Cold War until 9/11. Peace and prosperity. Wary trust. Buicks in China. What a mess. Soviet Union sneaking back under the tent. Romney was right, it is Russia? Barry’s chance to be as stupid a war criminal as Dubya: dust off those silos and make sure the hot phones work. Fingers itch to press red buttons. War is triggered by the itchy trigger finger of...

“What are you doing in my dream?” is not a thought that I recall ever having before. I don’t remember ever realizing during a dream that it was a dream. Dreams are a sleeping reality as real as an awake reality when the instant passes, as every instant does, and both become simply memory.  But there it was, a black International Harvester woody wagon, bright, shiny, new and clear as the 1940s day in which we both were being .  That’s it. That's it exactly except that it did not have the wsw tires, but that’s it exactly. I was standing on the corner as it drove past and turned the corner right in front of me. The longest view I had of it was rearview and taillight. It drove on beyond and away as I shouted or dreamed “wait, I want to go.” Come back.  What was that all about? Who knows! You just don't never know. Spring 2008 I attended Credo, an 8-day retreat for Episcopal clergy, and while there, it was at an Episcopal diocesan camp and conference ...

At least in their beginnings there was rivalry of sorts between St. Andrews and Panama City (Harrison as it originally was called), physical separation with rivalry. I might visualize it like the sense of rivalry we had in sporting events between Cove School and Millville School in the 1940s, or between Panama Grammar and St. Andrews Elementary, when all the schools went through eighth grade, before the early 1950s when the junior high schools (grades 7, 8, 9) were established and Bay High changed from grades 9-12 to 10-12. That started Fall 1950 actually, my Bay High class of 1953 having two consecutive years as the lowest grade. That break may have been what stopped the tradition of the “frosh cap” when freshman had to wear the little red and white beanie cap and were subjected to some mild degree of hazing, taunting.  The school system has been changed again since then to the middle school system (6, 7, 8) and the high schools back to grades 9-12, and there is strong rival...

Not Bubba, not Tom, not Carroll Junior It’s difficult to take anything seriously in life, myself especially; how could I read the news and still take myself seriously. A long-retired Episcopal priest with a Lutheran education, I have no idea WTH I’m talking about, nor does anybody else have any idea what I’m talking about, including sometimes I climb into the pulpit figuring nobody will get it, self included. My idea of a good time anymore is not to paint the town red but a glass and a box of red wine facetiously marked “shiraz” and “Australia” and a package of delicioso cheddar cheese that my Belovedy brought me from Trader Joe’s. Oh, and a clock that says it’s five o’clock somewhere, anywhere. Speak, clock, ve haf vays to make you tock, say "five," say it . Night out on the town? Couldn’t care less about it. Why? When you live in paradise, why --- what I've got in mind ... One glass, one only. Preferable to a box of it would be an unopened bottle of Australian...

What a happy thing to have been working down in the lower part of my front yard the day Dr. & Mrs. Michael McKenzie happened to drive by, and we exchanged our family histories with this old house! It’s long distance yet, but I feel I’ve found a new friend -- or a new friend has found me! Mike has corresponded by mail and email, sending me parts of the St. Andrews Bay News , the local newspaper here in the early part of the twentieth century, with its news about the loss of my father’s brother Alfred in the wreck of the fishing smack, a twin-masted schooner, the Annie & Jennie. More news arrived yesterday, which is published below. We look forward to having Dr. & Mrs. McKenzie visit us their next trip to Panama City, so he can look around this old house that his family owned and where he lived for awhile as a boy. At church Sunday morning a friend commented to me that my blog has been sad lately. I can see that, but it has not been meant so, as I’ve gratefully received ...