73F and 96%, I love this winter weather except we’ve had rain every day of Joe’s visit and he leaves tomorrow morning, which on yesterday’s line of thought stirs the unhappy side of my brain. Maybe I can change that by thinking about cars. Anyway, my chair’s right against the 7H window currently being spattered by rain, air conditioning isn’t running at the moment, but is keeping the apartment dry and cool, ceiling fan is turning a slight breeze, my right foot is cold because I took one step out onto the porch and got the sock wet, and so the sense of being cold because it's winter even though it certainly is not, has a blanket draped over my shoulder. Truth, it’s a long stole that a friend knitted for me that I’ve worn now and then in Lent, but it feels good around my neck this final morning of the year in which I turned eighty.  What happened to those last forty years, where did time go. In fact, forty years biblically means a long time , so I’ve lived twice a long time, two lo...

Six geese a-laying Christmas Day the first, this is the sixth day of Christmas. Some may’ve jumped the gun to sing Christmas carols on Thanksgiving, too impatient to relish the anticipation that Advent offers, and tiring of it all by now; but this is Christmas. For light this early, now 3:46, Christmas tree lights are on and one may light up face and mood by thinking of a Ford station wagon arriving, or a Volvo.  Mood manipulation is easy, isn’t it: there was a place to stand as those cars drove away, pressing the melancholy button to the floor. All it takes is calling to mind. Choose: sadness or happy, and which is stronger? Messing with the mind by juggling memories and watching oneself. Sitting at a picnic table on the east bank of the Susquehanna River, just north of Harrisburg, watching a groundhog watch me watching him watch me. August 1990. Still dark out, fog coming and going evidenced as lights across the Bay shine bright, fade, dim, now invisible. Direct...

Sense of closeness, gazing out the window. Sure enough, I go outside into a white dome of fog, not pea soup though, as the red and green channel marker buoys are flashing, and the line of lights of tall condos across the Bay at BayPoint and lining the Gulf shore at Panama City Beach. Cool and pleasant, 69F 96% up here in 7H.  OMG, just picked up my phone and see a call from Robert. With Joe here and thinking about a death and related appointment, yesterday morning’s walk completely left my mind. We are leaving for Tallahassee at eight o’clock so Joe and Tass can visit while he’s here, back later afternoon is the plan. Lots of about living here is perfect. One, going out on the porch feels secure and safe compared to the house where, except on the upstairs front porch, there was always at least a slight uneasiness of a prowler so don’t be completely relaxed and oblivious. Bear swimming across from Tyndall and wandering the neighborhood, happened more than once. Always an ey...

Advent of the internet has surfaced material that theretofore one would have needed an encyclopedia to find, or a trip to the library, or would never have realized existed at all. But now I can read material in the Vatican library. Publications that were in the stacks and not available to ordinary people. Essays or books that when I was in seminary would have been on a waiting list and one could check out only for two hours or for overnight, the demand was such. Today, all instantly available at the touch of the dancing fingers.  This morning I came across something strange. I enjoy reading and seeing the history of western Europe from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. Often I call up Die Deutsche Wochenschau to see what was going on, or what the folks were being told, in Germany during that period. One can watch, from the German side, situations that led up to WW2 and the course of the war from before the invasion of Poland right through Hitler's ride through Paris in 1940, to th...

Homily in HNEC, PC, Florida, Sunday, Dec 27, 2015, the Rev. Tom Weller. Text: John 1:1-18. LOGOS. TheoLogos. I shall speak of “the process” — truth, Creation, meaning, imagination, stories — doctrine. You may be seated. In the beginning was the LOGOS, and the LOGOS was with God, and the LOGOS was God. The LOGOS was in the beginning with God. All things were made through the LOGOS, and without the LOGOS was not anything made that was made. In the LOGOS was life, and that life was the light of humanity. And the LOGOS became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We have a "doctrine Sunday" today as sure as Trinity Sunday is a doctrine Sunday. I’d rather have a “story Sunday,” one of our imaginative stories about Jesus, especially Christmas stories from Luke --  John the Baptist, conceived by a withered old man and a barren old woman, to come as a prophetic herald.  An angel coming to Mary and hearing her breathless consent to conceive and bear the...

A blank slate, every morning begins with a blank slate and puzzlement: what to write? It isn’t for any reader out there who may be waiting breathless for ayaSophia, but for me alone, clinging precarious to that last drop, ounce, tittle of sanity before the plunge into the abyss. What then? Our gospel this morning is not a story, not one of our wonderful stories of Jesus, not “I love to tell the story,” but an ajar door that admits human interference with Heilsgeschichte . The storyteller is quiet, the campfire has died down. Around its embers doze a few wanderers who have not gone home to their tents. As light hints in the east, stars blink out, extinguished one by one. Intellectuals arrive to construct a concrete bunker for the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, and creeds are born to define incomprehensibly the One who, speaking from the fire, will not even tell us his Name. I AM. It may be that I prefer telling a story to preaching doctrine, but this is a do...

With my girls here, and never knowing when there'll be another, I didn't want Christmas Day to end. Ended anyway, Ray took Lilly home, Malinda and Kristen went home just down the street but will be back for Boxing Day dinner about noon. Xmas was special. It isn't necessary for me to talk or even to hear what's being said, I just need to be where they are, in the room with.  Being faithful means watching "A Christmas Story," and it doesn't matter where one tunes in, because it rolls over and over again for about twenty-four hours, and I see it through at least twice: half and whole and half. The important thing is the Oldsmobile, Ralphie's father was an Oldsmobile man. He drove a 1937 Olds Six, the six has the bold horizontal front grill, the eight has a more expensive looking mesh grill. In fact, here's Ralphie's dad's car, the touring sedan with built-in trunk, not the model with spare tire on back. Ah, the good ole days -- This ye...

At the moment the summer weather in Sydney, Australia is 69F while the winter weather here in Panama City is 71F. In Ann Arbor, 37F 96%. 57F in San Diego. 50F in Columbus, Ohio. 67F in WashingtonDC. 50F in Harrisburg, 74F at WaltDisneyWorld, 46F in Yokohama, to name a few places I've lived and loved. What now? Probably a tomato sandwich. What comes to mind on Christmas morning? Always first is walking around in the backyard, barefooted, short pants, no shirt, loving my new Gene Autry cap pistol that I showed an exact picture of here recently. What year did we get those, Walt? Mine was plain, probably because my parents knew I’d want it unmarred, Walt’s had a “W” carved into the salmon-colored handle. I'm thinking of that winter when we had a sudden 25 inch snowfall in Washington, DC and couldn't get out. I remember standing at the bottom of the steps as a child, with Gina and Walt, waiting for the signal from mama, to burst into the living room to see what Santa had le...

Christmas Eve before +Time Interesting Christmas Eve building here, 73F 99% wind 17 mph at oh two thirty, can hardly see anything because windows are thickly covered with a layer of moisture. Opening the sliding door onto the porch brings a strong breeze whipping things around the room as dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly. So it really is Christmas Eve. Our gospel at church this evening will be a wonderfully chaotic Christmas pageant of children and song, music, carols, here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the door and there’s all the people roomful of happy celebrants, parents and proud grandparents. If I have it right, the ho ho ho “liturgy” starts at four-thirty but music and singing starts at four o’clock. Pray the weather’s decent, because at Holy Nativity every event is even better than the superlative one before. The first service is packed. The second one is ten-thirty tonight I think, with music starting at ten.  What comes to mind. Two things...

“Well, Yukon ate bars of cane,” Linda said to me as I sat here waiting for square and cuppa to bring me to full conscious, staring out the sliding door into the reflection of the Bay bedroom, bathroom and closet behind me. Our Beck bedroom barely has space for one bed, a king that we brought from the house, and a floor lamp and barrel chair where I sometimes sit to read. Some inches width on either side allow one to squeeze in and climb into bed. Bay bedroom is larger, regular furniture plus we’ve made a “family room” in the Bay end of it, generous sitting space, Linda’s chair faces the television. Facing the Bay, my  chair is the blue “lift chair” we bought my mother for her 98th birthday but she never learned to use it. I have two bookshelves from the house, books and a few treasures, stingily rationed supply of chocolate, and a floor lamp on a stem, that I bought from the estate sale of an architect in Apalalchicola in 1985, his daughter said it had been her dad’s “arch...

Dream on Nobody needs a daily report of Bubba’s sleep, but 10 o’clock to 0600 was eight hours. Minus a 21 second break and straight back to sleep. To not look at the clock when I rouse for the break lets me go back to sleep. The dream may even have resumed. Tucking that one away so it doesn’t evaporate and can be recalled when next unable to fall asleep. Having a moment to retrieve from a cranial crevice, real or dream, can obliterate everything around it like a movie, fading, phasing, an old silent film, cut to the chase. “A dream itself is but a shadow.” But no less a shadow than is a memory a shadow. Cut to Hecuba. zzzzz While I slept through, Linda woke at two o’clock to what she said was the most violent thunderstorm to have passed through since we’ve been here. Donner and Blitzen. She checked to see I was breathing (wait ‘till you get here, you’ll be checking too), but I remember the first week in our dorm at UFlorida. North Hall, a fire drill at one or two o’clock in...