Orion the Hunter was up there when I looked thirty minutes ago, and Sirius, maybe hunting with them. Why, is Sirius a retriever? IDK. 3:44, too dark and early to see clouds, but they are there, because Venus is straight in front of me, now not, now there, now gone again. Below Venus, the line of lights that is downtown Panama City, behind them papermill smoke illuminated by surrounding lights. In three hours the mill whistle will sound, at exactly seven o’clock, sometimes off a few seconds, two or three.   Opposite direction, looking west beyond Magnolia Beach and Thomas Drive Thirty days hath September, April, June and November, so tomorrow is December 1st, we’ve owned this condo a year then. Took a month casually to paint the main room, replace bedroom carpets, change the living room floor from carpet that had earned its rest to wood flooring (well, it looks like wood), replace the kitchen appliances, and the following month we moved in. We’re not finished: late fal...

When my Kristen was small and first started playing youth soccer with a competitive local league, probably U6, she loved the game and even though her team never won. The team may have been Wendy’s Wildcats, I still sometimes drink my coffee from the mug with her picture on one side and the team photograph on the other. All her friends were playing. At long last the day and game did come when the Wildcats won, and I well remember her exhilaration as we drove home after, “I never knew how good it feels to win!!” Of course it did, and of course it does. I know how it feels to win. But mainly I know and remember how it feels to lose, how terribly it hurts to lose. Losing once long ago made my decisions for me more than once later into my life. Nothing in life is so “it’s just a game” that it doesn’t hurt to lose. Someone said, and it’s been repeated until it was so trite that we probably quit saying it, “Winning isn’t the main thing, it’s the Only thing.” If your team loses, it doesn’...

We have an interesting, not to say frightening, mix of Bible readings for tomorrow, the First Sunday of Advent. I have some comments, and then some of the lectionary (Advent1C) and other related text is quoted below in English.  Through Advent we are dealing with old stories, traditions, beliefs and expectations. Advent One is our apocalyptic Sunday that, using those old traditions, looks toward the eschaton, the End of Time. Paul, in 1st Thessalonians, his first extant writing (maybe about 45 CE?) anticipates the eschaton coming very soon and encourages his audience in their acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ and his God; as Jesus, Paul teaches, will be the One returning from heaven to earth to rule for God. Ancient Jewish tradition, at least from about the second century BCE through the first century CE, seems to have been that God would apocalyptically bring an end to life on earth as it was known, would resurrect the dead, and would call everyone, living and resurrected, ...

The first time I heard of “Black Friday” would have been November 23, 1990. Tass was a freshman at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and we were there for Thanksgiving with her. Thoughts wander, especially when they are memories, and that’s a happy one in the months I was still working through what was for me the almost unbearable grief of her going away to college.  The day before, the three of us’d had Thanksgiving Dinner at a little cafe Tass thought might be open, turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and something green, maybe peas, and doting on my beautiful girl. Pumpkin pie. Memory says we were the only customers.  In August we’d left Tass there in Lynchburg, Virginia at the same college where I’d driven to see her mother (1990 - 1955 =) thirty-five years before, and counting Parents Weekend just three weeks earlier — Parents Weekend the first weekend of November got us out of the nightmare Florida Seafood Festival in 1990, 1991 and 1993, but not 1992 because Tass w...

Sip of hot black coffee and the square of dark chocolate forest mint melting on the tongue reminds me, Wednesday was a lovely day -- speaking not for mankind, but for me [codgerly, I'm unapologetically a KJV and 1928 BCP man and if I want to say mankind instead of PC humankind, I'll damn well do it]. At any event, having gone to bed at eleven Tuesday night as an experiment to see how late I might sleep, up at seven, not bad. So Wednesday: up, tomato sandwich for breakfast. Stop at the church for prayerbooks and reserved sacrament, say the rubrical words (BCP 408) to remind B&W that they were already consecrated and transubstantiated. To the home of parishioner friends by ten o’clock. Home after, stopping at Buddy Gandy’s for oysters. Kristen came over to frost and decorate the Italian Cream Cake, part of Thanksgiving dessert she and Linda baked Monday. 20-minute nap. For lunch about one p.m. we went down the street for three tiny pizzas at Enzo’s. Thin individual pizza ...

From summer direct into winter, apparently: as we drove out 231 for Tallahassee yesterday the thermometer in Linda’s car read 34 degrees and in the fields along the highway the weeds were covered with frost shining in the rising sun. Sure enough, the electronic device that TJCC gave me for Christmas some years ago reads 52, so I guess winter is upon us early. Not quite ready yet, but as long as the temperature doesn’t drop, it’s cool, Baby. A bit chilly for sitting on the porch. Here in my blue lift chair, feet and legs covered with a light blanket, sliding glass door open to let in the Month Before Christmas. Across a calm, dark Bay, Shell Island beckoning but no takers, and Life Is Good. Retired with plenty going on to exercise mind, body and soul, lots of people to love, and I’d rather be 80 than 20 and starting my senior year of college. Well, I don’t know, what I’m thinking about right now with this weather is that it feels just like my first week at Navy OCS in Newport, Rhod...

It’s difficult for people of reason, conscience and compassion to know what to say and think about the refugee crisis that is so threatening here and so real abroad. Scrolling down news sites such as NBC, one discovers no end to pathetic pictures of people waiting to cross borders. The ones with little children touch my heart the most. Those of angry young men are frightening, perhaps they should not be so. Winter is coming on, people will be suffering, some dying, maybe many will die, most of the dead, children. This will be unconscionable, our own holocaust in history’s judgment. A global catastrophe looms that’s too big to deal with. And the fear of terrorists coming in is real, both the fear and the threat. Our government is foolish to stomp over the people's fear instead of facing it and responding. For myself, I’ve lost all confidence in government's competence to deal with the situation while also dealing with a priority of trying to keep Americans feeling safe a little...

This is now, sunrise before morning walk,  but sunrise or sunset, that brilliant streak of red orange never takes, does it, never shows up with my iPhone 4 camera. This is decent, isn’t it, the camera lies, but there’s the paper-mill against the skyline from seventh heaven. Which, 2 Corinthians 12:2, makes me wonder again what Paul was talking about when he wrote, “οἶδα ἄνθρωπον ἐν Χριστῷ πρὸ ἐτῶν δεκατεσσάρων, εἴτε ἐν σώματι οὐκ οἶδα, εἴτε ἐκτὸς τοῦ σώματος οὐκ οἶδα, ὁ θεὸς οἶδεν, ἁρπαγέντα τὸν τοιοῦτον ἕως τρίτου οὐρανοῦ.” Nicholas Poussin paints an image of it though, “Paul’s Ascent to the Third Heaven” and the discussion seems to be that Paul was talking about himself. Could it have been a dream? Or an out of body experience. Fourteen years ago I was sixty-six and it would have been, what November 23, 2001.That’s a long time for the world to have been at war. Will historians ratify Pope Francis, that this was WW3, or will someone push a red button igniting such a gl...

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. The Book of Common Prayer has a different prayer, called a “collect” to be said at the beginning of worship for each Sunday of the church year. Above is our collect for today, which with other liturgical churches of the Western tradition, we observe as the Feast of Christ the King. The observance was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as a response to growing nationalism and secularism after World War I, in particular the rise of fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini.  The construct of a collect always get my attention. Not all by any means, but the classic, usual form is three parts: an address to God that us...

inadvertently I deleted Saturday morning's blogpost that blanketed a post from Barbara Crafton, college football, the crow that I'm afraid I'll have to eat again for Thanksgiving dinner, the current political firefight over refugees, and the collect of the day for tomorrow, the Feast of Christ the King. The blogpost was so off the wall that I likely would have Reverted it to Draft anyway, but it's deleted; so if you got it you got it and if you didn't you don't.

It’s three o’clock in the morning, and four, a time of peace up here in the sky. Pelicans will arrive soon, seagulls, cormorants, egrets and others, splashing and flapping, fishing for their breakfast, but at the dark moment it’s peace, all quiet.  Birds don’t hate other birds, far as I can tell, I don’t know that different species understand each other, but where a few gather, others circle and splash down. They may steal fish from each other’s mouths, but I’ve never seen one sea bird attack another with vicious intent.  Why do we hate? Next time, if I get to choose, I’m being a pelican. An osprey. Not a human, never again. Five o'clock in the morning, soon six, a place and time of peace. Six o'clock, and seven.

This is what we see this morning, overnight brought blowing rain as shown by water sitting on the table and my wet socks, 70F or so, 97%, slightest soft, cool breeze. Haircut later at Tyndall, browse commissary and BX. Leaving about nine o’clock. Usually we have Philly cheesesteak there for lunch. BX card, 10% discount. And my only coke of the month. Religious nor spiritual nor political but sometimes pugnacious, my blogs aren’t sequential, fact is I make a point of today’s not following such as answering yesterday’s question, “What does our scripture require of us?” But. If there’s a clean slate to write on, the gospel answer may be clear, but the slate’s not clean, is it, chalk smudged on the slate dates back a hundred years and more, doesn't it, and our problems, as Dalai Lama says are of our own doing, are beyond undoing; so the answer’s hazy, isn’t it. Eighty and aging, I can pick my own verses. If Jesus is the answer, we might angrily rail at the Darkness while t...

201511180642. Pleasant enough outside, balmy 74F 89% but quite a stiff breeze. Up here on the seventh floor right on the Bay and coming straight off the Gulf it must be above 20 mph and gusting forty. I like “forty” because religiously it means “a lot”. Israelites forty years in the wilderness. Moses forty days on the mountaintop. Jesus forty days in the wilderness. Forty days of Lent. The realtime weather map on my iPad shows the storm stretching from down in the Gulf all the way up to Thunder Bay, passing through New Orleans moving slowly east. Channel 13 says 90% prob of rain, but the storm’s southern tip seems to be moving north faster than east. Rain by two o’clock this afternoon, he says. We'll see. At eighty, I’m loving a morning with nothing on the calendar. Well, examen, there’s that, prayerful self-examination, self-reflection, self-recrimination. One of my checks on myself, political, social, religious (not spiritual, I give myself F-minus, a failing grade in Sp...

Life changes second by second, and even when it doesn’t the sky as we see it from here does, does change. The sun’s play on clouds and Bay makes each moment as different as though we were taking fingerprints instead of snapping pics. Coming out to look at the sunrise, I was so astonished that I ran in to where my iPhone was still charging after going dead yesterday, but rushing out to the balcony rail twenty seconds later it was gone. Jiminy Christmas, there comes another one. Naanh, I’ll just show last night after sunset, moon over the Gulf and from Courtney Point west beyond Thomas Drive. Earlier, just after four a.m. the sky appeared cloudless, two brilliant planets in the high east and Sirius announcing Orion high in the black western sky. Last night, Linda saw a shooting-star from the porch rail.  Anyway, "it’s almost tomorrow, and here comes the sun". Our freshman year at UFla the university radio station went off the air every evening with the DreamWeavers...

As any fool can see As ever throughout our history, America is a country from which no one seeks to escape and people from other nations are always wanting to get in by all means possible, legal or illegal, documented or undocumented. That truth about America marked the difference between us and all others during the years of the Cold War, when people behind the Iron Curtain were seeking to escape, and after the Vietnam War, when Vietnamese refugees were welcomed into the United States and resettled peacefully across our land. The Syrian refugee crisis is altogether different, driven by religious insanity. Last Friday rendered it moot that the nations of western Europe are making a fatal mistake for which the horrendous Paris atrocity is, as yesterday’s gospel from Mark 13 phrased it, "but the beginning of the birth pangs." And now, the United States, the ultimate target, the most hated nation for many, many reasons but nevertheless, bringing in Syrian refugees. Fede...