Eternity must be a matter of perspective, eh? Last evening The Weather Channel was on quietly as we had a glass of shiraz, well I had wine, Linda had a bowl of cereal, a program about asteroids and meteorites. The usual visuals of a dinosaur vapidly watching the flash of its demise as one slammed into our planet millions of years ago,  Παντοκράτωρ  tiring of lizards and deciding to change the channel. What will He watch after Anthropon and the Flood ? Glimpses into the stars and the dark beyond kept me sensible of insignificance. Eternity at the moment is the view from my hotel window: framed by a black sky, moths fluttering around a security lamp. Were moths here with the dinosaurs? If moths have collective memory what will they tell whoever or whatever comes on next about us?  Bernard of Cluny was wrong, but this poem from his profuseness failed to make the cut in the transition from our 1940 Hymnal to The Hymnal 1982. One (that’s me) thinks it wasn’t because w...

-> In the Staybridge Suites, a new hotel in the park setting of a large, scenic business park. The cheapest of all motels we've stayed in since the days of looking for Motel Six in order to avoid paying twenty dollars at the Holiday Inn, we have two rooms and a bathroom. Free breakfast and light supper with beer and wine. One room is the bedroom, of course, two queen beds and television. The other room has a complete kitchen in one end, dining counter with chairs, a livingroom with sofa and chair, desk and chair, tables and another large television. We are on the fourth floor and both rooms have a large window with pleasant outlook.   -> In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Trinity Sunday the wise rector calls in sick and it makes no difference who preaches in his stead, because nobody understands it anyway, least of all the clergy who try to explain it. Quicunque Vult , the Athanasian Creed has it right: “the Father incomprehensible, t...

Night of the Apple IIe Sometimes the most sound one can make is silence. The fingers won’t dance. Nor the mind have its magical thoughts. Nighttime in a small town. In the office next door to church and rectory, thinking, reading, a little prayer, you type a sermon on the Apple IIe. Outside a siren goes screaming by. A few minutes later screams back again. You keep thinking, typing. The office phone rings and you answer. From the rectory next door she says, “Are you sitting down? She’s fine. Tass is fine.” "What?" You are no longer sitting down. " What?" “She’s fine. Tass is fine. She called me from the hospital, she’s fine. Her face is cut and bleeding but she’s fine. They had an accident on the bridge. That was the ambulance that went by.” Shaking, you run. Run. Run. Run . Thirty seconds to the hospital in your car. Down the hospital aisle in pajamas. Grab her. Hold. She’s fine. She is fine. She says, “I told them not to call, I had to call my...

The email list just gets too long to scroll down, doesn’t it. I use gmail and keep that file cleaned down. The Knology now Wow! list grows by a hundred or so a day and I have to roll down it and press the little garbage can at least every other day to keep it from rolling over me like the crimson tide. I still have one other list that I haven't checked in a couple years: it probably has thousands waiting to be opened. But this morning even gmail has forty something, and I’ve read and responded to just one so far. Speaking of which, pray that SEC and the Tide quickly regain their rightful place. Pray harder that MGoBlue obliterates Ohio State. No, it’s too soon to be thinking of CFB. No it isn’t. Yes it is. No it isn’t. It’s four-thirty. An hour and a half ago I was out on the balcony porch enjoying the wonder of earth and life, and should still be out there. But on the bed in the Bay bedroom I have one of those wedge pillows that makes sitting up in bed so comfortable and ...

spit, swish, spit Least of all me, nobody can think all the time, much less always be thinking about things eternal and unseen. Or maybe some can, what the heck do I know; but not me. This morning I got up late, after four o’clock, acknowledged mother nature and old father time, cursed the clock and snuggled snugly back under the sheet on the bed in the Bay bedroom thinking of nothing but to doze until time to walk three hours thence. As sleep returns, suddently a buzz and a flashing light. My phone with me all night in case Tass, Malinda or Kristen calls, I leap up awake, alert, alarmed. Linda’s iPhone flashing news: in response to U.S. indictment FIFA officials have been arrested on corruption charges. My older model iPhone sleeps on. But not I. Damn the instant news anyway. Maybe this is the morning to write about bathroom habits. By late high school years it became necessary to shave every morning. Razor with doubled-edge Gillette blade that I changed every couple days...

Evenings when weather is right I'm outside on the balcony. It’s good at the moment, light breeze, sound of little kids laughing, talking, running on the boardwalk in the city park below. Linda is inside with a book and the television on, and probably her iPad, maybe scrolling Facebook but for sure checking how to have healthy hydrangeas and how to make them pink and how to make them blue. This weekend we brought two hydrangeas in pots from the house, one of each color.  About dark last eveing I went back to the house to rescue something my nephew Mike wanted: the door jam in the kitchen that my parents used for nearly forty years to mark the growth of grandchildren. I’m pretty sure everybody’s on there, including great-grandchildren. Family history that I didn't have the heart to toss it when we remodeled the kitchen in 2002, I tucked it away in a garden shed that we called "the half-house" because the front door of it was the old front door of the house and on t...

Zero dark thirty and the third day of a good three day weekend for Memorial Day. What is it? Well, Tass and family are here, and Malinda and Kristen have come, all of whom make my moments perfect. The condo is still quiet, everyone but me sleeping. I won’t allow the mind to think past noon, when remnants of the carrot cake Linda baked for Jeremy’s birthday will be packed up along with girls and stuffed animals. My girls make my life. From the balcony porch and front window we look out on the breadth and distance of St. Andrew Bay. Saturday morning early the Bay began filling up with boats zipping across to Shell Island, continuing until afternoon. I wondered if the beach scene was anything like this Mid-afternoon the boats started flowing this way like an incoming tide. As I watched them, with yet another round of dermatology zaps on my head, I hoped nobody got as sunburned as I did so many times at the beach sixty and seventy years ago. Sunburn has reared its ugly head: m...

Frightening. Scary. Over the years our other readings for this day have varied, but we always hear Luke’s story at Acts 2 of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. It must have been terribly exciting, even frightening, scary. “And suddenly there came from heaven ἦχος ὥσπερ φερομένης πνοῆς βιαίας a sound as of a rushing wind violent, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”  It isn’t as if this were the first time the wind, spirit, breath of God shows up in Bible stories. In fact, it was there from the very beginning of our history with God, before the word was spoken to bring order out of chaos; and on the day God fashioned an earthling and breathed life into us; and upon Saul and upon the Lord's beloved David. And the post-resurrection appearance on the evening of Eas...

Strip of lights to the east is downtown Panama City, due south between me and Shell Island and spread out among the channel marker lights are a few shrimp boats working St. Andrew Bay, strip of lights to the west is the east end of Panama City Beach.  Way too early to operate my magical coffee machine for a cuppa Kona, so a mug of Community coffee and a small glass of Bulgarian style buttermilk from the Tyndall commissary.  Pentecost tomorrow, on the Christian calendar the fiftieth day after Easter dawn. We celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit into the church as told in the story at Acts chapter 2, and wear red to commemorate the tongues of flame that Luke mentions dancing on the heads of the disciples. Holy Spirit is a mystery, I suppose. Doubtful eisegetic scholarship perhaps, but I like to perceive the Holy Spirit as far back as Genesis 1, “In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was chaos, and vacant, and darkness was upon t...

What do Episcopalians believe? is a question that’s lately been working on me more than I’ve been working on the question. It’s a question that may have less of an answer than it has questions. Only once in my years of wearing this goofy collar has the question been put to me in the nature of get-it-right-or-it’s-a-deal-breaker. Years ago a newcomer to Apalachicola came to Trinity a few times and was welcomed and taken in, “adopted” so to speak. Telling me that she liked the people and liked our worship, including our music and our prayers and the eucharist, she made an appointment to come talk with me. She wanted to make sure we believed the same as her church back home where she grew up, or she’d have to keep looking.  No, come to think of it, a second instance comes to mind. Same town and church. A man, lifelong resident and businessman, came a few Sundays. He was a Baptist, I knew him at Rotary, but knew him anyway because it’s a small town, 2,500 people, where nobody does...

How do you fix a cucumber sandwich? Of all the little sandwiches, they’re my favorite at an English tea or on a proper table at a dainty party, but a favorite anytime and anyway and I don’t make them delicate. Instead of crossways to get the little rounds, I cut lengthwise to cover the slice of bread. If the cuke is long I cut it in half first so the lengths fit inside the bread. Don’t waste the rounded end either.  I always eat only whole wheat bread, except so as not to detract from the cucumber taste, same with a tomato sandwich, I use Pepperidge Farm extra thin sliced white bread, 40 calories slice. The how do you fix? question is butter or mayonnaise. When I was a boy, and maybe still the classic, was a thin smear of butter; but we didn’t have mayonnaise then unless somebody made it. My preference is mayonnaise, and it has a faint lemony. Makes the perfect cucumber sandwich.  Don’t slice or scrape the green skin off either, I like it real and besides the skin ma...

that, creeping slow Yesterday morning, Wednesday our walking day, while waiting for Robert I walked from where my car was parked on Linda Avenue north to 2nd Court, saw a mom and son get out of their car and walk across the stone drive toward the lower elementary school entrance. John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “In School-days” came to mind. The little boy’s mother walked spritely ahead, he, as I would have done at his age, trailing slowly behind, head down. We never change: boys are boys from age to age, and I am glad to have been one of them with summer vacation about to start and three months to play in the dense woods around our house on Massalina Bayou. The most wonderful thing that could happen in any boy’s life is to have been an American boy growing up.  And in an American father’s life, the most wonderful thing that could have happened is to have had ten little girls like mine.    We’re walking this morning because Robert mixed days and plans yesterda...

From time to time someone asks “what time do you get up mornings?” Sunday and Tuesday I have mental work to do preparing for the morning, and if I’m not up by three it puts me behind and unprepared, but sometimes it’s as late as four anyway. Other days it varies. If two or even three, I may lie down in the other bedroom and try to resume sleep, which may come; like this morning up at three I slept until just after five. If four, I make coffee, Kona if I have the beans, in my magical machine and begin enjoying being alive. I may start writing a blog post, which is not to entertain but to help keep my mind from calcifying, which it's doing anyway. Now and then, it’s too late to blog before my exercise and the blog gets done later. Once in a while I decide, as now, I’m tired of this nonsense, besides I’m becoming Balaam (Numbers 22), I’m quitting. But at this age the mental exercise of thinking and writing is fully as important as the physical exercise, maybe even more so. I like to ...

Since Dzhokhar was sentenced to death there’s much going round and in the press about capital punishment. I keep writing about it then deleting instead of tapping Publish. To be honest, which is the idea, my view from the seventh floor isn’t worth any more than any other American’s opinion even though I think it is.  Frankly, if Dzhokhar weren’t so young and cute, and I suppose sexy with that tousled head of hair and innocent who me  look, people wouldn’t be so up tight about killing him. But that’s not the issue, is it. The creature is as evil as we get. My opinion is that there’s no space on earth nor breathing room in the atmosphere for anyone who hurts or kills a child, and my heart doesn’t bleed when executions of such monsters are botched.  Here’s my problem. Government by Administration has bred nests of slithering certitudinous mediocrities. To my chagrin, even the FBI, whom I've admired and felt essential to public safety and security, recently ...

Back from the Monday morning walk, grilled a cube steak for breakfast as an open-faced sandwich, with a mug of Kona here on my -- never sure whether to call it a porch or a balcony. It’s about square and the size of the small bedroom, a room in the building, not just a jut-out. Porch, I guess, eh. One of the great things about it is the clouds that drift from over the Gulf of Mexico and cross the Bay. When I first came outside, this was the view.  That’s Davis Point to the left, Shell Island in the distance and even if the pic isn’t that good, the early fog has cleared and I can see into the Gulf beyond Shell Island. The Pass is to the right, behind Courtney Point. Within a few minutes the main cloud changed from a wispy thing to bulky with a dark bottom like it might want to rain. On the walk this morning, we stopped at one of the benches along E. Beach Drive and watched two yellow boats darting here and there, Robert tells me they test boat motors for Mer...

Besides that I was born one why am I an Episcopalian? Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because Old Testament hospitality to strangers trumps Church rules about who can come to Supper. Because it's part of the ages of ages. Because it is okay that my pervasive doubt is the pillar and buttress of my tottering faith. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because I can pshaw the Nicene Creed even as I stand and say it. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because I don’t have to leave my brain at the door when I come to church. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because I don’t have to accept the dogma of superstitious old men from hundreds of years ago. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because it is good practice for heaven where nothing is sung but Anglican Chant. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because we can count back more than five thousand years. Because it’s part of the ages of ages. Because it's okay to see that a story is just a story. Because i...

With a shout O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son  Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:  Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to  strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior  Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and  the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. This collect for the  Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day,  was prepared for the 1549 prayer book by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, based on an antiphon sung to Christ at vespers on Ascension Day. Better than most of our collects, it suits the collect’s purpose of collecting the congregation’s focus on the tone of worship that follows. The specified readings for the day are a bit distanced from the theme though; and while I love Psalm 1, which my mother helped me memorize as a child, I do regret that the new lectionary removes the option of experiencing Psalm 47 with it...

This is what it was all about, then, wasn’t it: the Rev. Canon Bryan Green preaching persuasively and movingly about “a speck on a speck” and the speck was the planet earth and the speck was me. I find it so easy, from gazing at the stars before dawn, to glancing down at this artist’s image circling a tiny section of our Milky Way galaxy  to see perfectly clearly that we are out of our minds. Not J, who was not writing theology but poetic irony, someone said perhaps even a children’s bedtime tale, always entertaining, mischievous, sometimes capricious, at points frightening, even leave the light on scary. But P, especially P to trounce the mythologies of Babylon and the nature gods that those left behind picked up from their Canaanite and Palestinian friends and neighbors during the Exile. Nevermind and not to mention E and D, all merged and meshed into an alphabet guidebook for normative Judaism by R the Redactor and the rabbis. So I think P had it right with the Speaker, t...

Interesting and affirming to find the J writer’s Yahweh whom I finally met in Harold Bloom’s The Story of J has indeed been with me all my life. Nearly eight decades have I known this storied companion with whom I am, as Bloom says, incommensurate. He likes that word, incommensurate , Bloom does; and its what, corollary?,  commensurate. And normative , Bloom likes that word also. That is to say, he likes the word he uses to speak of religion as humans have evolved it; religion beginning with J and ultimately delivered to us in scripture by R: faith of our fathers, holy faith of Jesus under which umbrella St. Paul summons us to huddle as we await the imminent coming of God’s reign on earth. Earthy and ironic, playing in the mud he finds on the surface of this world, J’s Yahweh fashions, for no apparent reason, perhaps coincidentally, a mud doll. Blowing into it, he fills it with being; including somewhat  regrettably  a mind and will of its own. Nevertheless, befriends...

Daddy's girl Last evening on the Historic Vehicle Association News I watched a delightful video in which an elderly woman showed a 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan and reminisced about it, the car and the trips her family took in it, including the time they pulled a large travel trailer across country and over a high mountain pass, and a picture of that memory. Original and immaculate, the Chrysler had been her daddy’s car. In a photo of the car with her standing in front of it with her family, I reckon she was six years old at most, so if the car was new she would be 87 now. As she finished narrating the little video she added, “I was daddy’s girl.” She was daddy’s girl, I reckon. I reckon she was , and I know how that is, “daddy’s girl.” And I was thinking what a blessing she was to him, and he to her, filled his life with love, and it seemed pretty clear that the love went both ways such that if one laughed the other was happy, if one hurt or was afraid the other wept, if on...