right sock first & PTL

Concluding from this morning's A.Word.A.Day,

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves. -Robert Neelly Bellah, sociologist and author (23 Feb 1927-2013)

whose book grabbed my attention in the mid to late 1980s. Although it was not a can't-put-downer, sometimes as boring as my Sociology-101 textbook at UF,

Bellah helped me in a number of ways, transitioning as I was from having been full-time naval officer to full-time parish priest. They are different enough, but the same in ways that are helpful in the new vocation, where for a while some of my parishioners referred to me as the field marshal. I had retired from the Navy in 1978 and, having pushed it aside for more than twenty years so firmly that I thought I had finally shed it, started theological seminary on my birthday in 1980.

Bellah is correct, and I'm appreciating the chain of thought he ignited for me this morning. Leaving home is indeed like a new birth. I had done it unwittingly my teen-years summers in high school, going off to church camp for the summers, loved the sense it gave me of owning myself. In fact, one of many strains in our relationship my growing up years occurred May 1953 when my father insisted I get a job for the summer to earn money for college instead of going to camp. My mother may have taken my side, I don't recall, but I was going regardless, and went, albeit my last and final time.

After that, I took up with Linda for serious.

Couldn't wait to go off to college on my eighteenth birthday, which gave me the greatest sense of finally being out from under and on my own. Far better than enlisting in the Army, which would only have shifted my subordination and may never have given me the Time to become a real person. It was not total though until I graduated UF and never again lived under my parents' roof, a real second birth.

So, Bellah has me contemplating his metaphor.

Those Navy years it recurred somewhat with every PCS to a new duty station, a rotation habit that became so ingrained that after three years in Apalachicola I sensed a strong itch to move, that it was Time for orders. It was a Time when I was extremely happy, and didn't understand the "itch", and had to dig into myself to sort out why I was suddenly so restless, and put it down.

The second birth metaphor, which really had not occurred to me until reading Anu Garb's blog this morning, actually happens with every life change that is really jolting, a complete departure from life as it was. So, I'm counting them in my mind and seeing them in a new way:

+ looking around that first day at Cove School and seeing that my mother was gone,

+ coming home from school that day and being told that my grandmother had died,

+ leaving those June mornings to go to camp for the entire summer,

+ leaving home for college, cancelling my seminary intentions,

+ graduating UF to begin my real life, totally undecided and not at all concerned about my future. Getting married and drifting into a Navy career,

+ retiring USN with its odd, unexpected sense of Now I have to depend on myself, more urgent than graduating college,

+ exhilarating first day and week at theological seminary, sense of freedom and "home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty, I'm home at last"

My life has been a progression, a phasing evolution. Maybe next to the years of my forties, old age has been so much my best Time of life that I might wish to have done this part first and made it last longer.

Outside my Bay window this morning, dense fog, sitting here typing, feet cold so I got nice, soft socks,

right sock first and praise the Lord.