Saturday before Sunday

After checking out my favorite bird nest, the ospreys at Boulder County Fairgrounds, Longmont, Colorado, they seem to be doing well, I took a detour of other osprey nests here and there. One can look at them all over the world. Found one in Montana where the ospreys weren't home but someone had filmed a Bullock's Oriole pausing there.

Beautiful. Don't recall having seen one live. 

Surely the most striking birds ever were the indigo buntings we watched around the bird feeder early one morning sometime in the 1990s while we were staying at the Magnolia Bluffs, Eastpoint, Florida home of Lynn Heyward. A beloved parishioner, Lynn is long dead, but throughout our Apalachicola years she liked us to keep her house while she was away visiting her daughter back home in Mississippi. Lynn's late husband, Frank, an architect, had designed their unimaginably wonderful home, sitting right there facing out on East Bay of Apalachicola Bay. Someone else's now, had the house been on the market when we retired from Trinity Church, or later when we sold the Old Place, we no doubt would be living there this morning, maybe even watching the indigo buntings. At this age never happen now, but the thought of living in Apalachicola, on the Bay or River, has never been far from my heart.

Tomorrow is Sunday, but today is Saturday and our outing plan is to see about farmers' markets around here. Don't know if the one here in StAndrews, Beck Avenue, is open. There may be one downtown Panama City. We are looking for crookneck squash. Split, buttered and baked in the oven. Sliced and starring in squash casserole. Another favorite always has been lady cream peas: blanch and freeze until the mouth starts watering for them.

Something religious - - - here's the gospel reading for tomorrow. Reading it aloud, I may slightly correct some of the NRSV words back to KJV, or to the RSV that I heard read in church most of my life, and that was our study bible in seminary:

John 14:15-21

Jesus said, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.


”I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

This continues what scholars call Jesus' Farewell Discourse. Quite long, it's offered verbatim, and if we were meeting, the logical question in Sunday School would be "Writing a couple of generations later, maybe about 90 AD to 125 AD or so, how could the evangelist possibly have had Jesus' words verbatim?" 

Well, we are a class of grown up adults for whom no questions may not be asked and possibilities are endless, including wondering and contemplating aloud whether maybe what Jesus said is whatever the gospel writer said he said. From Plato writing about Socrates, to the P Writer of Genesis One, to Mark Twain's tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn rafting down the river, every character says what the author says he says, and every author has an agenda, and part of the fun of study is working out what all that may have been, and when, and why, and what must have been going on in the world at the time. And who or what may have inspired the writer and his writings.

T+