Ray and Britany are away on a business trip in the Bahamas (no, really), Lilly staying with her grandmother Mimi, so we three are minding the lovely new house this workweek. Exhausted and early to bed, I was roused by Father Nature in the wee hours and stayed up. Checked email then tried to slumber on the family room couch but, sleep apparently escaping me, I made a cup of hot, black coffee and sipped it on the back screen porch along with admiring the total silence and reading Fox and BBC news on computer screen.  Ray has some kind of wi-fi boosters all over the house so that service is perfect everywhere, I'm not used to wi-fi this good and will ask his help to replicate it once Linda and I are back in 7H.  Little too chilly for me after nearly an hour outside and the hot coffee gone, so back inside and made predawn breakfast of toasted extra thin ww bread, lightly buttered; with half a chicken breast covered in hot sauce, necessitating a tall glass of ice water to ex...

Comes round on the three-year cycle every Sunday throughout the Easter Season of Lectionary Year C, our Second Reading is from Ἀποκάλυψις, Apocalypsis, the Book of Revelation. And though I’ve never preached on Revelation, I try to include it in whatever teaching I may be doing that year, Midweek Bible Study the years I did that, or the Adult Sunday School class here, and at the beach and other parishes I served over the years. If you have not, instead of television, take an evening to read Revelation as your Easter offering of praise & thanksgiving. Revelation is fun! And it is not the ravings of a madman. Clearly, the author, John of Patmos, did not intend it so, but it’s fun to read his entire vision together over several class sessions, start to finish, discussing the Seven Lampstands, and the Beast, and the Seven Seals, and the Number 666, and the horses that sting like scorpions, and other horrifying deadly creatures as we go along!  One thing that makes Revelation ...

Last night after everyone left (Lilly's birthday party), we watched on NetFlix the last bit of the show "Hitler's Dark Charisma" and then I got ready for bed. Before though, I thought to refresh childhood memories of Grand Ridge, Florida, where I used to go with Mom and Pop and my cousin Ann several times a year. It was before January 1947, when Mom died. Mom had two sisters living there, Aunt Nell and Aunt Alice, who had married brothers in the King family. The one day visits, Saturday or Sunday, we'd drive up, the four of us, in Pop's car, a 1937 Chevrolet Master "coach touring" (two door sedan with a built in trunk instead of spare tire on the back). I've written about the trip and visits here once or twice before in the nearly nine years I've been writing posts for this almost daily blog. The reed organ at Aunt Nell's house, and the house, barn, barnyard and fields and especially the indescribable dining room table spread of food...

Friday morning is starting to show up, the sky is getting lighter, the garbage truck just rolled by, stopping out front for our garbage can. Rainstorm last night, lots of lightning and thunder. But we hardly heard a sound, these modern houses, besides the roofline being strapped to the concrete pad against hurricanes, are built for silence from the outside world. Again, as I've mentioned here recently, quite unlike the last two houses we lived in, my 1912 Old Place and the 1900 rectory in Apalachicola. The quiet gives a feeling of apartness from the world that I think I like but am not sure; anyone who grew up in my lifetime might prefer to hear the milk man's truck clinking by and the roosters crowing all over town at this awakening Time of day. The waiting for our own condo 7H to be finished is long, and the progress slow. Yesterday we were inside for a few minutes, the air handler for the new HVAC system is in place and installed, and other things were going on, not...

This flexible poem can rise and fall with the sea. Its poet says (scroll down)  it has varied in length from three pages back down to six lines. More lines now, I wonder if she rules it done and as closed as the biblical canons for Otey and Enty. Or, as with Revelation and James, Luther can banish them to the end of his Bible, any inclined reader can add to Novey's poem but not delete her lines? A so inclined reader voting yes, I'm adding a few, and her assignment is to accept them like it or not, tuck them in wherever she chooses in each's rightful place: While Greenland melts. As Miami sinks. Before Michael made landfall. Nearly Idra Novey When we slid out of the lane. When my sleeve caught fire. While we fought in the snow. While the oncologist spoke. Before the oil spilled. Before your retina bled. Beyond the kids at the curb. Beyond the turn to the forest. After the forest turned to ashes. After you escorted m...

No broken bones; pulled muscles and jarred knee, trip to doctor, x-rays and shot for pain put Linda back in walking shape, and thanks to all who inquired!  We are up early this morning, me because I kept waking up imagining things crawling on me in my sleep and waking up with terribly itching fingers, thumbs, hands and wrists, thinking I had hives and had eaten something, to discover hands and fingers swollen, bed and mattress under pillow crawling with ants of two sizes, a new adventure. We don't eat in the bed, so what's up? IDK. Easter 2, Doubting Thomas Sunday coming up as always the Sunday after Easter Day, why do I strongly identify with this guy, it's more than our shared name.  The Sundays of this Easter Season we'll be reading Acts, a responsive Psalm, Revelation and John, an opportunity to stir bad dreams by exploring Revelation a bit, ἀποκάλυψις unveiling, revelation, apocalypse, visions with vivid images of nightmarish creatures and events, bad news fo...

From the musical "South Pacific" a song - - "You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a different shade, You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!" https://www.timesofisrael.com/polish-crowd-beats-burns-judas-effigy-featuring-anti-semitic-tropes/ - - which highlights, and accents all the more disturbing, the horror, shown in the video, of children gleefully beating an effigy of Judas Iscariot on Good Friday in a town in Poland, a nation that shamefully has legally and officially denied their total complicity in the antisemitism of t...

Life is real, life is earnest, and ... . Some years ago I read that in this present for us late age-range of life, as things happen, physical and mental things, there's never a return to normal, whatever normal was; that instead of "getting back to normal" we temporarily stabilize at a new, lower normal until the next event, then down another bit; not in steps, more like a ramp, as in handicap ramp; the greatest threats to us being falls, strokes, heart issues; at eight to ten years something happens. So, I guess we're there, have been for a while, but now in conscious realization if not the complete acceptance that would be resignation. !! to detour round somber. !! It has been, for the most part, fun until Saturday's wakeup call. Maybe even 7H was actually a phase that didn't occur to me that way, not a step, but a life place on our ramp, downsized from a thirteen room house with huge walk-in attic storeroom to a three-room condo with underground parking ga...

christos anesti!  alithos anesti! Christ is risen! Truly risen! No one else was there when the light was turned on, when, as author and priest, the late Martin Bell wrote, "God the Father simply walked into the tomb, said, 'Get up, Son,' and they went home and colored Easter eggs." Easter again transcending Lent and Holy Week with the good spell that, crucified, dead and buried, Christ is risen. Another Episcopal priest I once knew, now deceased, got in his pulpit one Easter morning, said, "Christ is risen, what more can I say?" and stepped out of the pulpit to lead the Nicene Creed. Assuredly, it wasn't me, but I knew him, God rest his soul, an interesting character. It isn't a morning for explanations, save those for Sunday School and Bible Study, it's a morning for proclamation and acclamation,  truly risen. The local front. On the other side of the fence here is a small pond. In fact, a low area, Breakfast Point is filled with beau...

Noticing while we were in SoWalton that I like to sit and write in a quiet place apart, Ray put a chair for me here in the corner of our bedroom, beside the front window that looks out on what's happening. Small park across the street, views of construction in every direction. Who designed this development had families in mind and did a marvelous thing, a good work. Peacefulness returns:  back in Bay County is doubtless part of it, but this, living here, is a good thing and place for my now, penultimate to, hopefully, return to 7H in due course; but specifically today for Holy Saturday.  Which I've been contemplating. At Trinity, it was a day and Time for quietly anticipating the large crowd that would show up outside the church late afternoon early evening to light the high flame in the bowl on the front porch, then the candle, and process up the aisle toward the Altar that Linda had already decorated beyond splendiferously, pausing to acclaim, "the Light of Christ...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/weather/hurricane-michael-upgraded-category-5/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/04/19/hurricane-center-upgrades-michael-category-first-since-andrew/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8aafcb3bc606 https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-upgrade-hurricane-michael-to-category-5-storm-11555702227 Anyone who was here, or who came back into the traumatic shock a day or so later, knew, knew, knew. Even I, from Malinda's ICU room, once I casually opened the National Hurricane Center website the early morning of October 10th expecting a downgraded tropical storm, shouted, "Oh my God!! it's a goddamn category five hurricane!" And so it was. My home, my town, my beloved home town. Who, whom to forgive for this outrage against Alma Mater, my beloved mother, acknowledged on Good Friday? Fury, the raging anger stirs again. 

This day stirs guilt and shame at what we humans did, have done, evermore will do to Jesus who came in divine love, not a king, but an ordinary man, to show us God the Father (John 14:9 if you have seen Jesus, you have seen the Father), and to draw us back to the divine image in which we are created - - our brutal treatment of this man who was so different from all that human nature has rotted into.  We have four canonical, and several supurious, gospel accounts of Good Friday in early Christian writings, including the “Passion Gospel according to John”, that we just now read and heard; each account so different from the others that, like Pontius Pilate, we ask “What is truth?”: truth is whoever’s story you happen to be reading at the moment, Luke on Palm Sunday when I dismissed you with the word “saved”, but saved from what, or saved for what?  Today, the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John with his anti-Jewish bias of the late first or early second cent...