check engine

Having left 7H just after six o'clock yesterday morning, our son Joe arrived safely home in Louisville, KY about five or six o'clock last evening. What with the extreme weather for everyone between Panama City, Panama City Beach, Tallahassee, and Louisville, its effect on driving and flights, and driving our high anxiety, Joe's phone call closed our most stressful Holiday Season in memory.

TJCC home safe. PCB contingent home safe. Joe home safe:

apparently the seventeen-year old car did fine for him, although he told me the check engine light came on part way through his drive home, and of course it glowed threateningly at him the rest of his trip.

A check engine light is nowhere near as startling and blood-pressure-skyrocketing as when the car suddenly belches a loud-ringing chime and the Low Fuel warning comes on miles from nowhere. Or the Low Tire Pressure light. But it's good for a bad word anyway. Cursing, profanity, has been shown to reduce stress; while panicked prayer has been known to produce a gas station over the next hill (I'll tell my true story again one of these days).

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Which conveniently brings me to religion, theology, prayer, confession, absolution.

Our BCP and supplemental liturgical resources offer us several prayers of general confession for use in common worship. I don't know why, but the most commonly prayed one in the Church seems to be this:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

although we do have others, and as we pray my mind inevitably asks me What sins, and Am I truly sorry, and Do I humbly repent?, and I seldom pass the test. So there's a spiritual challenge there.

Liturgical worship has been my way all my life, the words and phrases and expressions, the music when we sang Anglican Chant; including that, for me, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer was such a spiritual center of my Being that its revision and discontinuation with the 1979 BCP caused me, and many, untold anguish and indescribable stress for years, and even led me to affiliate with a breakaway denomination for a while.

But over those years the change proved good for me, in part because it forced me to examine my values and priorities, in part because with "the new prayerbook" the variety it offers and the opportunity to choose my new prayers from among several options, challenged me to examine what I had been praying, where lex orandi lex credendi "the law of praying is the law of believing" and on examination I saw that some of what I had been praying was harsh sixteenth century theology that, even though the words flowed smoothly off the tongue, no longer made sense for a thinking person. Sort of a spiritual check engine light? So, forty-some years on, I'm grateful for the changes and the opportunities that General Convention offers us for variety in worship, over against mindless rote.

For example, a rubric says "On occasion the Confession may be omitted" and some dioceses and parishes omit the Confession and Absolution throughout the Easter Season on the theology that Confession to receive Absolution is redundant to, and even diminishes, the faith power of the Cross and Resurrection.

Some substitute the Baptismal Covenant for the Nicene Creed throughout the Easter Season, and on other Feast Days where baptism is designated as especially appropriate such as Pentecost, All Saints, and The Baptism of the Lord, a point being that Liturgy is Art for designing around events of worship. I do admit that during my know-all sophomoric phase in college I often thought that we didn't really need to go to church and worship, that as liturgical Christians all we needed to do was leave a note in the sanctuary telling God what page, and that if it was the same service all the Time it wasn't even necessary for anyone to go put out a new note every week before Sunday mornings.

Why am I writing all this? A Calvin and Hobbes strip this week stirred it up.

Calvin and Hobbes is a favorite and the theology is always sound! My special favorite strip may be one in which Calvin and Hobbes are in bed at night. Alarmed by a noise, Calvin asks if there are monsters under the bed and the answer comes back, "No."

In that or another strip same subject, Calvin and Hobbes listen wide-eyed terrified as a fight breaks out under the bed. One says, "Dibs on the soft parts, you can gnaw the bones." Another shouts, "No fair. You got the soft parts last time."

There is a Time projection of the strip in which Calvin is grown up and married to Susie, and Hobbes, as worn and forgotten as Puff the Magic Dragon, is taken up by their little boy. Some things are especially poignant if you have been a little boy, and loved being there as your little boy grow up, and loved again watching his little boy grow up. ...

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Looks like I wandered off my path yet one more time again. Es tut mir leid.

One thing, though. With life at this new bus stop, I'm blogging or not as I DWP, and at whatever Time of day I DWP.