Below is the opening and essence of our gospel reading from Luke 14 for the upcoming Sunday. The preacher can wrestle it out as the harsh saying it is, or can focus on more pleasant verses that follow, or can preach on something else altogether. Luke 14:26 "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." As shown above and below, this stunning confrontation appears only in Luke, Matthew, and Thomas. Bible scholars like to say the canonical evangelists lifted it from Q (which likely would have been the Luke version). Matthew regards it as too harsh and so softens it a bit by making it comparative instead of absolute:   Matthew 10:37 “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does n...

  Dear Diary so to speak, happy Monday to you.  Clear sky this early morning, two planets and a geostationary satellite visible. A ship, Waalborg 351x60, that was in port for layup, on her way out, anchored across the way overnight, in the far channel, her lights shining brightly, still there this morning, now suddenly she's gone.  Bright flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder Sunday evening, appeared to be out over the Gulf. It's all natural activity of creation, but as I've said, my fascination with close electrical storms dried up the day in 2018 when Joseph was struck. He's a miracle and a blessing.  Supper last evening, not that this is a food blog, but - - two slices dark German style bread toasted crisp, limburger cheese, braunschweiger. Mayonnaise with minced Vidalia onion mixed up in. Toast cut into strips. Smear of onionMayo on as holder, bite size of cheese or liver sausage on strip of toast. Ice cold Japanese barley tea. Our so-called "Prope...

From today's collect: “increase in us True Religion."  Poking fun at the absurdity of human nature, self-certain and dead serious that we and only we have it right and everyone else is going to Hell, in Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon", a little group of half a dozen or so people gather for worship every Sunday morning, at the leader's house, a little circle of dining room chairs set up in the living room. After splitting and splitting and splitting, over one bit of doctrine and scripture after another, schism after schism unto the ridiculous, they are the "The Last Surviving Remnant of the One True Church."  In your bulletin, take another look at The Collect of the Day, on page __ / 3. Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works - - It's a lovely and lyrical ancient praye...

  No particular reason for failing to blog this earlier, but no matter, here it is now anyway. Yesterday was an exciting day for us. We  went to Bayou Joes's for a late lunch of fried grouper sandwiches, and  brought home a go-box fried oyster basket with sweet potato fries. Soon as we arrived home, Ray, Britany, Malinda and Lilly came over with  exciting news about their future plans,  including opting to downsize from the large house they had built at Breakfast Point PCB after Hurricane Michael destroyed Malinda's house on  Calhoun Avenue in St Andrews. Turns out to be a highly desirable floor plan helping for possible fast sale, and they may elect to rent an apartment for a while to get their bearings on what comes next for them. When they left, we drove out to Sam's to pick up a prescription and couple OTC meds, then headed home as the sky blackened and rain pelted the car. Sitting here at my Bay desk, at 6:15 I glanced out the window at the h...

  A rainy morning, punctuated in early darkness with brilliant flashes of lightning and rumbles of distant thunder in clouds coming our way. From this same weather system, we hope the calamitous flooding experienced in Texas will miss us, but no fair praying bad weather off on others. I've told this before: the day in 1995 before Hurricane Opal, I was in Pensacola at a commission meeting, which Bishop Duvall opened with a prayer that Hurricane Opal would go ashore in Texas or Mexico: the next day we barely got out of town before it roared violently ashore here, washing two docks up into my front yard and leaving major destruction in its wake.  Take care what you wish on other people!  Our POD for Thursday was to have a fried grouper sandwich at Bayou Joe's near Tarpon Dock Bridge on Massalina Bayou, but we may defer that for a clear, sunny day. Sitting right smack dab on the water and open to out of doors, Bayou Joe's is fun except on stormy days or bitter cold days,...

Honestly, I do not know what to say about this article, except that I somehow identified with it. As a person of the same generation, though seven or eight years younger than Cynthia Ozick, and though not Jewish, I lived into and with the history. Including as a child being drenched in what our government had to say to us about the Germans and Japanese during the war. And as the war ended, seeing the newsreels coming back from Europe, that showed the staggeringly shocking, incomprehensibly evil, unspeakable German atrocities against human beings that in Time came to be called The Holocaust.  Ozick's noting that German prisoners of war were welcomed, on an honor system, to facilities, restaurants in local towns, that were forbidden to Black American soldiers stationed nearby.  I have confessed here any number of Times, the revulsion, hatred and contempt, created in my child's mind, imbedded in the very center of my being, that to this day I am not able to shake, against the nat...

   Monday 6:22 AM from 7H, looking across StAndrewsBay toward Davis Point, and on to Shell Island, and over Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico and its horizon. Some sunrises are brilliant, some subdued, but it's all good and every day is a beautiful day. We went to Tanya's Garden the other day for tomatoes, and, remembering from seventy-five or eighty years ago that my father liked hoop cheese and enjoyed cutting off a hunk and eating it, I bought a wedge. But I like sharp cheese, and it's not, which I had forgotten even though it looks like sharp cheddar. With hoop cheese, even the black-wax one, I have to savor it on the tongue to get any flavor at all. It's so mild in fact, that for sharpness, it might compete with American "cheese", the slices of yellow-orange plastic that Americans like on a hamburger. However, I paid for it, so I'll eat it.  What I'm missing for cheese is an extra sharp favorite that so far comes only from Trader Joe's. Ald...