home

It's 3:12 out here on 7H porch, the moon is gone, set, I snapped that picture of the moon with a humidity halo circling it at 1:07 and've been out here ever since. Quiet except for the fan rotating and stirring the air with a little breeze. To bed at eight, or maybe it was nine, IDK, and up at midnight, couldn't go back to sleep, so a mug of hot black coffee and a 12 ounce mug of ice cold milk to sip along with it out here on 7H porch. 

This seems to be MLP anymore, My Laughing Place, everybody's got a laughing place, a laughing place, to go ho ho. Take a frown, turn it upside down, and you'll find yours, I know ho ho. MLP has as well been a place to cry from Time to Time, a Time for weeping.

What's bothering me that I can't sleep tonight. Well, I did sleep, from eight or nine until 12M. Twenty-four-hundred hours if you prefer. But then thinking and finally up and about.

Nothing stands still, surely not life and me at sixteen and seventeen looking at eighty-three and wondering why I didn't much find myself in Holden Caulfield whose narrative I finished a few minutes ago while the moon went down and shrimpboats cruised back and forth east and west on StAndrewsBay right in front of me - - but that's not what's bothering, worrying. What's stirring around is that I lived at the end, into and through the end, of what I grew up experiencing as Christianity, and its church, especially my church, and its clergy. I knew from age ten that I'd be here for my real life, not a student then naval officer trying to avoid being in a pulpit every Sunday, which I did four years after Bay High, then twenty years in the Navy, then what, three years adrift until I said "Oh what the hell, I give up," and started theological seminary on my 45th birthday, September 14th, 1980 and knew I was home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty, home at last. 

When I came back into TEC close to where I'd started from, at Trinity, Apalachicola, the church was the same as ever, even Morning Prayer with exquisite Anglican Chant and I was even in a town I had known and loved my growing up years, maybe especially as a teenager and that summer right before going off to university. Same old church, thank God Almighty, home ...

But it has changed, something has changed, TEC or me, or both really. Growing up in TEC, not just Sundays but especially summers at church camp totally surrounded by clergy, priests I admired and boys and young men destined for seminary and feeling myself one of them, I had a sense of our clergy as a life apart, something different and other, not above but beyond, other, with expectations to live into. It was that way too, in the Navy. But now looking back at both, was it real or was it me, just me thinking so. No, there was that thing and understanding about "conduct becoming a naval officer." And among clergy the examination and promises at ordination that required one to set one's life aside and live another way altogether, what long ago I heard a Navy vice admiral describe as a life of "love and sacrifice." No longer by rights, entitlement and for self, but WWJD. Across thirty, thirty-five, forty years, I've watched all that fade in TEC as we've become an extension of the culture around us, and expecting to live mindful of our rights and for the pursuit of happiness like every other American instead of in the Way. I think the notion of sacrifice is gone, we are just like everyone else, everyone around us. Am I discouraged, no, but I realize that along with computers and satellites and moonwalks and cellphones and self-driving cars, I've lived into another world. It's not as nice here. I want to go home again.

T