Opening Up!!

 

Monday, 7 Feb 2022, and lots of things come to mind, including the Bible texts for our upcoming Sunday, 13 Feb, which will be 6EpiphanyC, and personal stuff related to one of my Life Chapters that I started on a week or so ago, and various news items that the media are featuring, and one or two other things including the weather.

Of the weather, the temp here at 7H is 47°F and overcast, hazy at the moment. I can see the white sand at Shell "Island" where it goes into The Jetties, but cannot see clearly into the Gulf as I can some days. The weather link on my phone says 90% chance of rain, and sure enough the Storm Radar map shows this big green blob moving up across our way from the Gulf, from southwest. Maybe it won't rain before we go to the delicatessen this morning, we're scheduling our outing after their breakfast crowd dissipates and before the lunch crowd gathers. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the deli, but at age eighty-six there's lots of things that slip the mind at the moment I'm about to speak them, and I forgive myself for that. Oh, WTH, it's Cahall's: they have the best of lots of things. In my dreams they have fried mullet too. 

See, this morning whoever reads my nonsense is being treated to a ride-along inside the brain of what is sometimes classified as extreme old age. I'll tell you What, though: it's worth it, and life is still fun, even fun and games. 

Freedom, too. At least here in America where one is constitutionally guaranteed the right of free speech. That is, unless one values one's job and speaks out as what's 'er name did - - wait, I'll think of it, it'll come to mind. Whoopi, Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi's been suspended for a week or two from what I thought was a tv show where people could argue - - suspended because her alphabet moron boss, who must be White and is inarguably in CYA mode, thinks Whoopi, who is Black, ought, should, must, is required to have the same frame of reference and point of view as any White person. So strike ABC off my list, as just one more correct-think imbecilic media outlet. If the women on that show had any guts or integrity, they'd all call in sick every alphabet morning until Whoopi's suspension is over.

But I ramble as my mind wanders unapologetically.

Oh, my life chapters. I've done Chapter One and am not going to develop Chapter Two this morning, I'll do it when I DWP, but I am thinking of some things that happened during my thirties (Chapter Two covers my twenties and thirties) that made me really happy, that were Good News, and I'm just of a mind to look back on a couple of them:

> the main one is that Tass was born when I was thirty-six, March of that year. I was a Navy commander, we were living in Columbus, Ohio. Linda's water broke, we called a "sorry, can't come" to the hosts of an officers' party we were about to leave for, and drove to the hospital in our Ford Thunderbird four-door sedan. The roads were slick glare ice, the car swiveled and slid this way and that. The baby was breech birth, the doctor had me watch the heart monitor, and I still have the tape, marked "Cathy's heartbeat". Sie heißt Cathlyn, we started out calling her Cathy, which when still very little and learning to speak she picked up as Tassy, and so it is soon fifty years later. The daughter has given me half a century of happiness. The next day, Malinda, Joe and I went to a local drive-in for hamburgers, and when we were ready to leave the TBird would not start - - an electrical problem. We took a taxi home, and the next day I drove to the airport in my ancient VW beetle to pick up my mother, who came up to help out for a week or so.

> When I was thirty, we moved back to CONUS from a three-year tour of duty in Japan.

> When I was thirty-two and a promising mid-grade naval officer, the Navy sent me to the U S Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. It was our second tour of duty in Newport, and we found out what that loud scraping sound was that woke us up in the wee hours: the snowplow. While in Newport, we used our travel trailer to go weekend camping a few times, then sold it and the Dodge station wagon that hauled it, for one because (1) we were getting PCS orders to drive across country to San Diego, California for my second tour of duty at sea, and pulling the travel trailer with the Dodge we got four miles to the gallon, which was prohibitively expensive in that gas on the West Coast was 40¢ a gallon; and (2) the Newport Ford dealer had this gorgeous, elegant white Ford Thunderbird sedan with a dark blue vinyl roof, that we had fallen in love with. Unfortunately, in towing the VW across country, I ruined the TBird's engine and had to have it rebuilt at a Ford dealership in San Diego.

> I'm going to conclude with the limited confession that the Naval War College was the last tour of duty that I really enjoyed the Navy. My life mentor Fr Tom Byrne was gone, my new mentor Fr David Damon had said he didn't think I should go to seminary at least not yet. So, a Navy career, but whereas I'd loved my destroyer duty so much that it moved me to become Regular Navy and commit to a Navy career, I despised my second sea duty, during the Vietnam War; in fact, the evening of 1 November 1969, the first night at sea on our deployment to WestPac, with my family back in San Diego, I swore to myself, "I'm getting out of this C.S. outfit as soon as I can." My inclination that night was to jump overboard and swim back to San Diego, but I worked and waited until twenty-years active duty appeared on the horizon, and submitted my retirement papers. As I said last week, I've now been retired forty-four years. 

That isn't Chapter Two, it's just some of the great things that happened during the second half of Chapter Two. 

Oh, about next Sunday. Here's what Paul writes that we're going to be reading:

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ--whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

++++++++

It's not my Sunday to preach the sermon, but this posting is for anticipating Sunday School contemplation. Paul has his own POV about death, and I have mine. Paul's testimony is based on his confrontation with the Risen Lord. And what Paul says elsewhere does not necessarily confirm what Christians have evolved to currently believe, i.e., that the "Saved" go directly to Heaven when we die. Or, in the case of RCatholics, to purgatory to be purged and cleansed of sins before going to heaven - - see our Articles of Religion:

XXII. Of Purgatory.

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

with which I agree.

Anyway, what Paul says is that the faithful shall sleep in Jesus until the Last Day, when the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised and, together with all the living, meet Jesus in the air for judgment. Those who make it will be saved into the new kingdom of God on earth, over which Jesus will reign.

I don't know about the trumpet and all that. See, I in my Time with my own worldview can think and experience and see and observe and conclude fully as well as Paul did in his own Time with his own worldview &c. As for a heaven of spiritual existence versus a new kingdom of God on earth, I leave that to the mind of God, it's not my worry. I've spent so many hours with my eye glued to a telescope eyepiece lens gazing into the distant Universe that I can't visualize Earth and Heaven as Paul did. 

Nor am I worried about being "saved" in this life to qualify me for life to come. I recognize all that as exclusively the domain of Pantokrator, as my seminary theology professor had it "whoever or whatever" God says s/he may be, eh-YEH, I AM, yeh-VAH, Adonai. All of that plane of being is beyond human control. 

As it is, my only personal experience with my own death, coming as close to death as reportedly is medically possible in the deep anesthesia of my open heart surgery: whereas I'd organized my dreams to have a good Time while I was "away", I dreamed nothing. Reading, I found out that we do not/cannot dream when deepest anesthetized, that we are oblivious, that it is as close to death as it is medically possible for us to be. So, I'm moving around the flanks of the Church position about going directly to heaven and taking sides with Paul: asleep in Jesus until the Last Day. And what then? I'm trying my best not to mind God's business.

Finally. I remember once, when I was forty-something - - yes, this is in Chapter Three so should not be reported today, but WTH, it's my blog - - I'd graduated seminary and was ordained deacon and priest and working my internship "field work" with my rector at our Pennsylvania parish. For many reasons, we had quite a tense relationship and this day we were arguing about something. I spoke to him rather sharply, and he demanded, "What gives you the right to speak to me like that?" Pushing past him and out the door, I spat out, "I'm an American". 

Our relationship was one of many, many reasons that, as soon as possible, I started looking for a pulpit back home in Florida. But I'm sticking with being an American above almost anything else in my Being.

Of course, as I say, that was in Chapter Three, so never mind.

RSF&PTL

T