first thing

The first thing I opened this morning, thinking that was it, was an AmTrak timetable from last spring, showing how I was going to travel to Maine this summer to visit BroadBay the home of my German ancestor Andreas Wäller; a trip I keep imagining hopefully from my bucket-list. But that adventure wasn't what I was looking for this morning. Somewhere in all this mess, on the desktop of this or my other main computer, but elusive, I can’t find it, is an eccentric amateur analysis I was doing involving this Sunday’s gospel, Matthew 14:22-33, the First Gospel’s account of Jesus walking on water, walking out over the surface of the sea. Each significantly different, the story appears in Mark, Matthew and John but not Luke. I might say it began in Mark, which is where Matthew got his, but nobody knows John’s sources for his much later writing, which many scholars think did not come from Mark, and which sources may in fact predate Mark’s traditions; but both of which, Mark and John, may even come from a common eyewitness memory. Even perhaps a bedtime story that Simon Peter told his grandson ages later but before. 

In my so-called “analysis,” I was showing, just myself because I’m not preaching Sunday and owing to our major parish celebration I’m not having my adult Sunday school class this week, both how the synoptic accounts differ because of Mark’s and Matthew’s different agenda, and how Mark and John differ and explore possible reasons for that. And I’d thought to maybe run it as a blogpost before Matthew’s story is read to the congregation on Sunday. But I give up: crushingly distracting tragedies and threats of calamities in Life & Time & Space have rudely overtaken and overshadowed, as so in fact have octogenarian mental processes, I’m done with it. 

It's an interesting week such that, somehow, between local and world news and what I know that you don't know, Life & Time & Space seem more real and significant at the moment than Contemplation, even though my heart and mind know that’s not the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. As perhaps witness Plato's most famous story of the cave, the fire, and the flickering shadows: who do we mortals think we are, and what the hell do we know?  

Actually, this all may be some Martian's nightmare entitled "The Life & Time & Loves, Hates, Hopes and Fears of Uncle Bubba." It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World with an all star cast and still and anyway a blessing, and mostly a joy to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us.

DThos+ rushing along somewhere downstream in +Time+ and no longer recognizing the rocks, and villages, and faces of natives peering at me from behind the trees along the banks on either side.

Moonset On a World Ablaze, or was my hand unsteady?