A bad words football game starting with the missed field goal. I would say UFla FSU could have gone either way, but I did not have that good feeling from start to finish, not even when it was 9 to 0. Next year in Jerusalem.  South Carolina game no picnic either.  Nor MGoBlue, OMG, Bo, where are you when we need you, the golden age is over, Holy Christmas, I’m going home.  This is my morning to preach and celebrate at St. Thomas by the Sea, then we’re coming home and taking whoever is left here of family to Po Folks for Sunday dinner before Kristen heads back to university.  With her on the road it won’t be Papa’s most relaxing Sunday afternoon. Maybe fried green tomatoes will help the mental turmoil. The crow is excellent well done and the feet crispy.  Alabama? Auburn fans could have been happy if Jesus had come and the Rapture started during Half Time. Missouri next week.   W  

If I can sneak back into myself and be who I really am, the most interesting article in the New York Times this morning is a man in New Jersey who, for want of a Ferrari, has a Fiero.  Two actually, one red with a T-top which he keeps in perfect stock condition, the other one he fools with, changes engines and such.  A certified technician at a local Mercedes-Benz dealership, his home garage is a shop for working on those two sports cars, and his daily driver is an Oldsmobile Intrigue.  The Olds Intrigue sounds a note because, remember I’m hiding inside myself this morning, one of my relaxations is browsing my car dealer’s website for creampuffs. In fact, I did it earlier -- browsing online is faster, more complete and in some ways better than wandering around their used car lot, where inevitably a salesman comes charging hopefully out whether it’s late evening or even Sunday morning. Sometimes there are no creampuffs, but this morning they have a...

Count on it: settled comfortably, chair leaned just right, warm lap blanket spread, laptop ready, strong black coffee perfect temp for sipping, reach for a bite of traditional Thanksgiving Friday breakfast turkey white meat sandwich, furosemide kicks in. Let the reader understand. Or look it up. Still and all, the moment, the coffee and the sandwich are as good as life gets. So is Betty's homemade mayonnaise. Preaching and celebrating at St. Thomas by the Sea, Laguna Beach this week, First Sunday of Advent. Notice, it’s Sundays of Advent unlike Sunday’s in Lent when the season is penitential, no Gloria in excelsis , no alleluias, you’d better have given up something that you shouldn’t have been indulging in the first place, and the Sundays don’t count either in the Forty Days or in the Fast. No, this is Advent, long become far less penitential than Lent. Advent’s history is interesting for those who are interested, a total bore for those who are not. There was a time when ...

Don’t buy nothin’ at least not for me, I don’t need nothin’ and I think but do not know -- because I’m not affected, and I’m not going out shopping, and I’m retired, and I don’t depend on the extra hours’ work and pay for Black Friday -- but I think everybody who wants to should be able to stay home and love being with family this unique national holiday of the American year.  Especially thinking of Frank, who is far away while Christian is getting older. BTDT, on a warship at sea Thanksgiving and Christmas one year more than half my lifetime ago. It was a bummer, believe me. Thankful for Frank. Thankful for all who are away from home and family in the service of the country and of others. As it has been since our coming to this land in our nation’s beginning, we are America because of them; and because of us,  for all of us who have served. American: I would not be other to save my soul. Where love is not a feeling but all that others do for me, I am thankful for t...

Thanksgiving Tuesday every year we come to Tallahassee to Grandpeoples Day at Holy Comforter Episcopal School, first for Caroline, now for Charlotte. While here we go to Trader Joe’s for a few things we enjoy. One is 100% Kona coffee beans, another the box of Australian shiraz. They have good frozen green beans for a third the price at Publix. A small but interesting selection of Indian frozen dinners: a lamb dish I saw last time and bought yesterday. For lunch, Linda and I will share it and the go-box of spaghetti from my chicken florentine and her eggplant florentine at Village Pizza that Charlotte chose for supper last evening.  Interesting inflation at TJ: a key attraction of the shiraz was it’s decent wine at $2.50 a bottle, but instead of exactly $10 as I’ve paid recently, a new price, $12.95. Maybe supply responding to demand, shipping costs have gone up not that much. I bought two boxes but may not again, don’t like a sense of being caught. But it’s still cheap. ...

e pluribus non unum Writing on Monday evening an hour before the Grand Jury announcement in Ferguson, Missouri, I see that for all our progress over the past sixty years, we're as racially divided as ever, people no less susceptible to being whipped into mob frenzy, media more untrustworthy and ever more unbalanced in presenting biased. CNN, which for years I’ve relied on as a primary news source, has so sickened and disgusted me with the slant of their reporting on this case that from now on I will be wary of everything they say. I've changed the television channel this evening as a sane alternative to throwing a brick through the screen.  Deeper than I knew, more utter than I realized, our racial divide is no mere point of view, but tectonic plates that grind and snap, erupt. Both sides are certain. One knows the system works, other knows the system aligned against them. On both sides, people who know nothing whatsoever have the strongest feelings in the world about ...

Sixty-eight reads the redline thermometer on my back porch at the moment. 68F and the trees are dripping, I couldn’t tell whether it’s light rain still, and didn’t want to know enough to walk out into the yard and get my socks wet. The thermostat in the family room is set on 67 but nothing is running because it’s 70 in here. Whether to go out on the back porch to let the fingers dance, or the front porch, or just sit here and sip coffee? I had a nice sleep, eight to two, six hours, decent for an old man, eh? some hours to go before meeting Robert for our walk. A nap later?   A friend died last evening, her death makes me sad and wonder “what now?” for her and for all of us, self included, or is there then a now -- now being a facet of the human construct of Time -- and, again, what of all the awarenesses and memories that make each of us individuals, who and what we are and have been, does it go out with the lights? Is no more crying and pain and sorrow a passionless being o...

Well, never begin a conversation with "so" or “well” so I hope catholic Boston College wasn’t surprised that the Lord wasn't on their side, that even with Hail Marys right up to the end, the game was predestined and foreordained. Still, it was the most exciting FSU game of the season though the Seminoles remain undefeated. Everybody's gotta hate somebody though, and as a Gator, I think I'd rather love to hate them than see them lose, because if they start losing I'll just have to revert to the Dawgs. Jimbo didn't pull his Rally Strategy that bounced him out of first place, and he had to fight for the win, which was good: I detest those lopsided debacles, this was a stomp down good 'un right up until the final seconds and fourth down when FSU got in field goal range.  What I’d like most of all is to be able to whine about Jameis for some reason, but it’s sour grapes, if he " would have been a Gator" I would have chuckled at his antics. He ...

seascape: smell of gray They are visible, completely outlined by their lights, two ships anchored offshore overnight. On the horizon. Couple miles out? it's hard to judge distances at sea. Merchant ships. They were there when I went to bed and they are there now. The sunsets are beautiful, sometimes magnificent, but what I like best about being here and so high up and able to see so far may be the sea, its sound in the dark with the sliding door cracked, and its ships. Even the best Navy years were the ships.  A warship not only is but feels very different from a cruise ship. It’s no nonsense. Gray. And the smell. The smell: a Navy ship has a smell that comes back to me in this darkness. What was it? Paint? I don’t remember, paint? oil? the oil in the paint? steel, does steel have a smell? It’s not the salt sea, what then, I don’t remember, but passageways, storerooms, when you go inside, below decks, every space, every void has that smell. Best was the destroyer, fifty-...

From A to V Oh my, it’s so true. Anu Garg’s Thought For Today, “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do” (Voltaire 1694-1778). Yet at this point in life what can one say or do but press on. The thought is not all that different to my recall of our discussion at seminary thirty-five or so years ago, of Anselm’s thoughts on atonement. (a) In that one’s obligation, one’s debt to God is to live a perfectly sinless life, (b) even one sin cannot be made up for by doing good, because good is one’s obligation anyway; but (c) in God’s perfect justice, sin debt must be paid; and in that because of (a) such payment is beyond human doing, (d) only God’s own self is able to pay the debt, which (e) was paid once for all by Christ on cross. If that’s not quite accurate, I’m not about to dig back into Anselm this morning, and I don’t buy Anselm anyway; but Voltaire’s quotation has it right. I could have done other, different, better. I could have taken another bus, boarded a differen...

Like everything except Halley’s Comet, comes round every year the Feast of Christ the King.  It was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to keep us mindful that humans are not supreme, in response to the rise of fascism and its personality cult in Europe and especially Italy. Christ the King Sunday has subsequently been taken up throughout the Christian church, including the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism generally, because we love to celebrate. Also, if the pope says it, we scoff that we're not under the pope and do it anyway because it's such a great idea. Why we don't just go home to Rome I've never been quite certain. Anyway, what happens? Denominations that don’t follow the church calendar miss it, but we sing a couple of great, rousing hymns and think ahead to Advent.  To some the idea of a king is offensive and don’t like it even associated with God, both because of the authoritarian flavor of monarchy, the idea of beings ranked qualitatively when all bl...

it’s a long way to go It's a long way to Tipperary and the sweetest girl I know ... Interesting earliness this morning, of nostalgia. Scrolling FB, there’s William’s name, William England. One of my super-smart students those years at HNES, he’s now a senior at UFla, which I knew because he and Kristen were in the same class at HNES. He’s a sideline photographer for the Gators and apparently plays basketball there. William I expected to go his father’s path to medical school, if only because his dad used to let him scrub and watch heart surgery, but FB wandering I see he’s going to Navy OCS on graduation, then to Pensacola for flight training. Happy days in the air, William, enjoy landing a jet fighter on a postage stamp at sea! Life Is Good. See, the mind does this traveling, to Fall 1956, my own senior year at UFla, excitement at my acceptance for Navy OCS, a mind’s quick trip to Newport, Rhode Island, the green 1948 Dodge sedan that mama and I chose between it and t...

Glass Darkly Driving away from the church office o ne pleasant summer afternoon some months ago, I honored the Stop sign at the intersection of 3rd Street and Bonita Avenue. Intending a left turn onto Bonita, I found myself unintentionally but nevertheless almost a foot into the left lane, but no matter, as there was no traffic, so I didn't back up. As I paused momentarily, however, a beat up red Ford Crown Victoria rolled up to the intersection from my right and turned left in front of me, into the 3rd Street lane that I was slightly violating. The driver of the Ford, a rough-looking man perhaps in his thirties and whose personal elegance suited that of his car, glared, shook his fist and swore viciously at me, a rage of obscenities that I could hear, because both our driver windows were open.   It was an unsettling experience of personal violation. Emotional assault, rape of sorts. An elderly white-haired man, I probably looked to him, nearly two generations younger,...

It’s late. DayDate in the upper right corner reads Mon 3:58 AM. A decent sleep after a decent day and before another. Day follows day. And night, night. Also dawn, dawn, eh. Actually dawn, dusk, and there was evening and there was morning, another second day. Still a month before the shortest day of the year. In two weeks Hurricane Season is over and we can relax another six months, but, hey! spray in the face so avoiding the concrete steps because the sprinkler is going and walking down the side street to get the PCNH, almost hurricane weather. No breeze, that’s a stiff wet wind coming up Calhoun in my face. Flash of lightning over the Gulf. Green channel marker across the darkness: that you, Daisy?  A sharp tornado hook looking at Greensboro. It’s what to write? isn’t it. No, it isn’t what to write, it’s what not to write. A friend reading my post gets my temperature, another reads between my lines. Some get me well enough to give, not caution, but maybe pause? What wou...

It never having been my wont to play First Clown, my plan for this morning is adjusted slightly. Our Adult Sunday School class will go as usual, with Mike and me leading a visit to the OT book Judges , from which our First Reading is taken. Judges is not just one more OT tale of horror after Joshua with Achen at Ai, it has a circular scheme of salvation as the nation Israel matures from Moses’ Exodus and Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to the doubtful prestige of having their own king. As well as raising up legendary heroes like Samson, Judges is full of great stories of swords spilling guts, mallets and tent pegs, and pulling down pillars to crush Philistines, so that Boys‘ Sunday School classes will have wonderful grotesquerie to chortle over in later millennia Bible stories.  Anyway, my intent is to help teach Sunday School but not be the sanctuary clown, anyone who wants to laugh at the clown has to come to Sunday School.  CFB? Poor Miami, they must not have had scout...

Once upon a time, somewhere long ago, I heard someone assert “Conservatives care about themselves, Liberals care about others.” The professor in C-42, my freshman logistics course at the University of Florida, would have junked it as a “hasty generalization” invalid for our reasoning process, and I know that is so; but it has stayed in my mind as a warning lest my political views clash with my knowledge and love of God and of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Contemning, despising no one but the certitudinous and condemning nothing but certainty, certitude, I abide self-consciously certain that nothing is certain but death, especially not my own certainties, least of all my political and religious certainties. Politically saluting the Red, White and Blue, I can sing the songs and hymns that I have loved throughout this lifetime, more into the tunes than the poetry, into the stirred memories than the theology. Politically trying to listen and understand more than to rant. I can stand o...

It was earlier predawn than I thought upon arising an hour ago, had gotten up once to speak to Father Nature, back down and beautifully to sleep. Waking an hour or two later, I knew “this is it” so gave up the warm snuggle against and got up. Clock on Linda’s side of the bed: 1:38. What? This is what I get for going along with changing between CDT and CST twice a year. The one time I truly appreciated it was that extra hour in my cot Sunday morning, October 27, 1957 at Navy OCS, Newport, Rhode Island. That was the first morning of the rest of my life, and for years I loved being in the Navy.  Lucy Peters, Linda’s mother, was a gifted artist who worked in many media, including portrait painting. She painted this portrait of me at age 22, which she titled “The New Ensign.”  Lucy displayed it for years in art shows all over the South, and it gained her many portrait-painting commissions until she finally gave it to me. At 2308 I kept it modestly upstairs but there ...