The flop-eared rabbits in the television commercial take me back sixty-some years to 1958 or 1959 aboard my beloved destroyer USS Corry. A twenty-two or twenty-three-year-old Navy ensign or lieutenant j.g. at the time, I skipped the wardroom meal and went below to the crew's mess for dinner for a change, went through the serving line, and sat down at a table with my tray. Seeing me there eating, the CPO in charge came over and sat down with me.  "Good fried chicken, Chief," I told him.  "Sir," he said, "that's rabbit." "Rabbit?" "Yes sir, the Navy serves a lot of rabbit. We fry it up same as fried chicken." Well, WTH, it was fine. Same as rattlesnake: tastes like chicken.  Linda has the tv on channel 13 right now, and, glancing up, I see they're talking about Uvalde. Still and again. Got to get up and leave the room, can't watch any more of it, it's crushing mentally, physically, emotionally debilitating, bringing ...

Seek the Truth, Come Whence it May, Cost What It Will. I Seek, I do Seek. Truth told, I have not found, I do not find, I never find, never get there. But it's not frustrating, because I do not Expect to get there: Truth keeps moving, stays ahead of me. The more I Seek, the more I see, perceive, realize, discover, that I don't understand. I know nothing. From NASA: Hubble finds the Universe is expanding faster than expected.  Hubble reveals an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, but the number is likely to increase to 200 billion as telescope technology in space improves. 200 billion? Could it be infinite billion? Does it matter? It does matter.  Does anything else matter? In a Pantokrator's vision of Creation, does Earth matter? Thomas Hardy: I towered far, and lo! I stood within     The presence of the Lord Most High,  Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win     Some answer to their cry.     --"The...

Thursday, a rainy morning, my cellphone just flashed that we're under a Tornado Watch until 2:00 pm. That could change, of course.  My haircut appointment is 1:00 pm.  This is our, it must be, third rainy day. Woke up this morning to distant lightning's filling the room with a burst of light, then not suddenly gone, but dying away like one of the new lightbulbs that instead of leaving instant darkness, fades away. Or, as Scandinavian poet Tomas Transtromer has it in "The Couple" They turn the light off, and its white globe glows an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Even lightning floods back meomories. But  DRIP silence DRIP silence DRIP silence DRIP, and sure enough, water is leaking into 7H again, coming in from above.  But you know what? earth, ha-adamah, has problems, and water dripping into 7H is not one of them. civilization, a nation divided by hatred where the problem is certainty, selfishness, rights without responsibilities, ...

  We wake up to Uvalde this morning: it's obscene to think or speak of anything else. But the emotional weight of it, the grief, is physically unbearable. Children again. What are we?    It is enraging. Mea culpa, our fault, our own grievous fault and we do nothing: your God may be different; my God spits contemptuously on our prayers. Broken and mendable but unmended, life continues for some of us, Earth turns, the Universe expands. Torn and breaking, my mind has to go somewhere, anywhere else for a moment, or I keep going down. So this. I have a new curiosity. At least, it's new to me, and I've filled two days exploring it. It's what I was concentrating on when the news broke yesterday afternoon. As with "Secret Mark" or "Infancy Thomas", most of us Bible enthusiasts, non-academic but serious, never heard of it. It may even be a sort of wing-nut fringe sensationalism: the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. Suggestions by popular scholars that Matthew wrote ...

  At least 19 children and two adults are killed when a gunman opens fire at an elementary school in Texas. The shooter is also dead, and is believed to have been killed by responding law enforcement officers. +++++++++++++ Our nation is insane. Obsessed with rights, oblivious that with rights come responsibilities. All these years of this unspeakably evil insanity could so easily and sensibly have been so different by respected leadership, especially the NRA, taking initiative to minimize the possession of firearms by unstable people. But everyone does the opposite of responsibility and caring and putting people's safety first. For a metaphor, it is as if vehicle registration authorities were fighting to keep people from having to be tested for a driver license to keep dangerous drivers off the streets. It makes no sense.  And human beings have changed. When I was a boy, everyone had firearms, and before you were mature enough for a real firearm, you had an air rifl...

  The best part of Sunday is the nap. Not the High Priestly Nap that happens after church, martini, and noon Sunday dinner, but the early nap, the deluxe nap.  Sundays I arise at three o'clock in the morning, begin sipping the first of two mugs of freshly brewed hot and black, letting a square of dark chocolate melt on my tongue along with the coffee sips. For the next two hours, until five o'clock, I brush up on what I'll be doing at church that morning - - Sunday School lesson plan or handout, and/or finish up prep of my sermon if I'm on schedule to preach the sermon today. Every seminary homiletics class and professor is different, mine required us to prepare a complete manuscript, two copies, one to preach from, and hand one to the professor as we stepped into the pulpit. So that's my practice these forty years, and the two hour Sunday morning quiet space is mostly for contemplating, changing, and marking up my sermon. Linda cooks breakfast for us, calls me to t...

  “Oh God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding” - begins our Collect for today. So then, What? What “good things”? Hopeful, promising theology, the Collect dates to the third century, has been prayed in Christian worship since the two-hundreds AD : what did early Christians have in mind? Well, standing on the promises of God: the bishop nailed it when he was here two Sundays ago and again last Wednesday evening: Heaven, the promise of Eternal Life. Making us, as the closing prayer in Rite One Holy Communion has it, “heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom”.  Why is this Timely? ONE, because it’s Easter Season, Christ has died, Christ is risen glorified and comes straight back to us because God loves us no matter how we treat God; and TWO because this coming Thursday commemorates the Ascension of Christ. Ascension: where does He go? A favorite psalm for the Ascension says “God has gone with a shout!” I love that accla...

  Breakfast this morning, a cup of collards with thick Italian Modena vinegar poured on. And a mug of hot black. I love collards. Cauliflower is close, otherwise a challenge to find a vegetable I like as much as collards. Well okay, okra. Carrots cooked with pot roast.  Mama wouldn't cook collards, because she couldn't stand the aroma that filled the house, but I love the aroma, which tells me there's collards for dinner. So my first memory of collards is summer 1954: I was working seven days a week at Edgewater Gulf Beach Apartments, different from today (I've recalled this here before), several dozen brick houses, some duplex, some triplex, stretching back three or four blocks, a complete community of full kitchen two or three bedroom vacation apartments across HighWay 98 from the Gulf of Mexico. I was 18, just finished my freshman year at Florida, now classified a sophomore. First day of summer vacation I drove out to the Beach to search for a summer job and the f...