At 3:26 the coffee and bit of chocolate that seem like lifesavers may not in fact be, but seeming is most of life. What seems.  A freighter arrived early yesterday evening, one with superstructure and bridge at the bow, why? Seems odd My study of ship design would rank after the writing of Nikolay Andreitch with the violent temper whose dissertation topic is the past and future of the dog license. Every morning after coffee he sits out on the balcony with a clean, blank sheet of paper and writes the title at the top before being distracted. Life seems Good because Blue Bell ice cream returned to grocery store shelves this week. It’s all good, but our flavor is homemade vanilla because it seems like what perfected a summer day when, as children, we opened the hand cranked ice cream freezer. To my children looking back on midlife, it seems like what we made with sweetened condensed milk the first day of a heavy snow —“snow cream” — a highlight of living in Rhode Island, ...

1 Corinthians 13 (RSV) 1  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4  Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5  it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6  it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8  Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9  For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; 10  but when the perfec...

Some people, I was one, whose politics floated back and forth and back again in the course of my life. Not unlike my theology or theologies, in fact I remember a question on the General Ordination Exam the year I took it, I think it was December 1982 but it may have been January 1983, asking whether my theology was settled and fixed, or still forming. Until the moment, it hadn’t especially occurred, but I answered truthfully that it was still forming. And as I look round inside my slowly liquifying brain I realize that “still forming” is still the answer. My only rule, and like all rules I consider even it violable, is that I’m absolutely certain of nothing. But then, what Lewis calls The Tao, which is about common human decency. And I appreciated a quote for the day that appeared, I think it was this week and could easily check but am too lazy to look it up, in Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, from Somerset Maugham asserting the weakness of any man who is proud of never changing his mind. So...

Putting Up an Impressive Front or Son of a Verse “Watch his face! - - Hello, Suckerrrrr!!!!” he shouts at his neighbor, waving out the driver’s window as he rides his family around the block in the sparkling AMC Ambassador sedan the salesman has brought out for them to see, drive, ride. Everyone in the car laughs at the neighbor as his mouth drops open and his eyes pop wide at the elegant, obviously very expensive new car. Staring after them, stunned, the neighbor doesn’t know that it’s a dealer demo, or that, as the commercial will make clear though we do not want the neighbor to know, the price is actually very reasonable. But also, it hasn’t yet occurred to the driver that now he has to buy the car or the whole neighborhood will know he's a blowhard. Someone wrote about this not long ago, which was when I realized what’s going on with social media. The need to hustle about, post only beaming faces, and make sure everybody else sees that one is doing super-excelle...

Wednesday morning, life seems to be flying by. Never to be morbid, but at this age one is well aware that …  But for now, fine and loving most every minute. Most? Yes, I’m noticing that there are fewer Cove School classmates than when we were there together.  A Monday or Friday morning some weeks ago, as we were walking down the Bay-side sidewalk on East Beach Drive, the stretch between Cherry Street and Tarpon Dock Bridge, Robert mentioned that he has a picture that shows himself dancing with a girl at The Hangout. We stopped while he tried to find it on his iPhone, but it didn’t immediately appear, so he promised to find it and post it on Facebook. That happened yesterday, along with more than a hundred other memorable shots. I dragged several of them off, pics that stirred the most for me. People talk about the stress and strain of being a teenager, but I seem to have shunted aside the bad parts and clung only to the good memories. All but the time we were in Tallahass...

Jerry Doesn’t Get the Girl This is our Old Testament reading for Sunday, January 31, 2016, Epiphany 4C.  Jeremiah 1:4-10 (NRSV)  4 Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” 6 Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”  7 But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. 8  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.” 9 Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth. 10 See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” The b...

COLLECT for Epiphany 3 Give us grace, O Lord, to listen, hear and answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation.  You may be seated. As in the early wee hours of Friday morning I sit at my bayside window contemplating my sermon time, there are flashes of lightning beyond Shell Island out in the Gulf of Mexico south of me. Violent flashes to the west toward Destin and Fort Walton. On my computer laptop I open the weather radar map to see a long red weather system stretching from south out in the Gulf and north up into Kentucky and West Virginia: it is part of the storm that will dump a blizzard in the Washington DC area before the weekend is very old.  From my window, in the shoreline lights of Oaks by the Bay Park next door, I see that the Bay is quite rough, waves rushing angrily ashore onto the beach at my feet seven stories below. And there are whitecaps across the surface of St. Andrews Bay that ...

into The Absence Yes, it was January 24, 2011, but mainly it was Monday. And by this time I had been up over an hour, showered, lathering from head to toe in antiseptic body-wash I'd been told was highly toxic and not to get in eyes, nose or mouth. Our little company, which by now had grown, besides me, Linda and Rayford, to Joe, Tass, Nicholas, Father Steve … waited in the lobby for the trolley, the little bus, to collect us on the bitter cold morning way up north, and ride us from the hotel to the front entrance of the heart institute. I do not remember being nervous or anxious, I had been approved for open heart surgery to do this, that, and the other thing, scheduled first on the list, and this was my one, single chance. If it went well, tomorrow would be Extraordinary Time; otherwise no matter, I’d never know!  Early I’d been up to write my final Stoppage Time piece for CaringBridge, predecessor to my +Time blog that started a week or so later. Anticipating dreams...