speck

A joy of the season, nor even Advent much less Xmas, is to not be slammed in face, mind, body and soul with a wall of hot air on first sliding open the door mornings. Cool enough to cover with a blanket Tass made for me some Christmases ago. That may happen all week as autumn sets in, Father Nature having wakened long enough to realize October has begun. But for Halloween, as a boy I dreaded all summer, then hated upon arrival, this time of year because not only was barefoot season ended, moreover school had been in session a month and October offered no respite until Thanksgiving the end of November. Student was never my vocation until graduate school decades later, then naval war college, finally seminary as I passed through midlife, crisis and all. 

Beyond StAndrewsBay, there's downtown Panama City, a light from Tyndall, my green navigation light, Χάρων still coming for me, Sirius beneath Orion in the nearest part of Heaven. 

No, even graduate school, actually, recalling that upon finishing the MBA at the University of Michigan I was invited by the college to continue there in a doctoral program but declined, couldn't wait to get out of school and back into the Navy. For hating school, that other Tom, the Sawyer boy, had nothing on me.

Yet here I am, again relishing the season, autumn’s first blush. 

Why am I here, I was contemplating yesterday, not why am I still here, I fairly know the answers to that; but why am I, we, here at all, and leaving out the question mark, how is it that in this of possibly infinite universes (if that's not possible, Your God is Too Small), conditions became perfect for Creation’s experiment with a sort of life so arrogant as to consider itself the image, which is to say equal, of its Creator -- and still leaving out the question mark. Essentially a procreating creature like all around us from amoeba to ants to apes, we think we are special until we get our first telescope and start looking out beyond ourselves beyond Orion, and then the case is not so clear: I am, as I heard Canon Bryan Green preach in 1980 when he was younger than I am this morning, but a speck on a speck. 

Specks that seem bent on self-destruction. What a shame. 

From Anu Garg’s daily emails, A Thought For Today has bothered me all week: “The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief ... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart” - Walter Lippmann, journalist (23 Sep 1889-1974). Remembering Lippmann, I never thought of him as a theologian, but there you go, a notion for developing in any number of directions. 

DThos+ BarSpeckson