Happy Birthday to you!
Imagine. The imagination of Pantokrator, the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, whose, theologically speaking, Will is the same as Word. eh-YEH, BE, thought or spoken, imagined. Innumerable photographs are snapped and published, and it is such a pleasure to experience in person, God's magnificence when we look up at stars and the moon in a velvet night; look out and marvel at the beauty of the setting sun and its reflection on the water as slowly it sinks into the sea. For me, from 7H, though rarely, to look out and watch a waterspout moving in the Gulf of Mexico the other side of Shell Island. Or enormous, rumbling, rolling black storm clouds moving in to cover St Andrews Bay in front of me and darken my world as I stand on my porch. Always stirs again a verse of that Trinity hymn that I print here too often,
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray;
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea around the old eternal rocks.
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And sometimes also comes to mind my visit with my father's oldest sister, Evalyn (yes, it was spelled with an a, not an e), whom we called EG, after she returned from her Alaska cruise; EG describing how, standing at the deck rail of the cruise ship and looking out at the glaciers, the sea, the clear atmosphere and blue sky, she was so overwhelmed with the magnificence of it all that she sang the Venite, a praise hymn in Morning Prayer that was our beloved familiar standard for opening Sunday worship all our growing up years, her generation and mine:
Venite, exultemus Domino.
O COME, let us sing unto the LORD; * let us heartily re- joice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving; * and show ourselves glad in him with psalms.
For the LORD is a great God; * and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are all the corners of the earth; * and the strength of the hills is his also.
The sea is his, and he made it; * and his hands prepared the dry land.
O come, let us worship and fall down, * and kneel before the LORD our Maker.
For he is the Lord our God; * and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; * let the whole earth stand in awe of him.
For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth; * and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth.
And there was a favorite Anglican Chant tune. I guess you had to be there, to have been there in our Time. We thought it was from everlasting and would never end. Sort of the Gloria Patri, our worship refrain, As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
God moves in mysterious ways, eh? Really, I guess you had to be there.
It was all on my mind yesterday as I spent quite some time watching live, my osprey nests in Colorado. One, at Grand Lake, I checked in to see the mother osprey sitting on her nest, and read that she was still incubating one egg yet to hatch, minding the other, a tiny hatchling; and that the father bird was keeping his family well supplied with fish.
Just a few minutes there, as nothing was happening, then signing in to the Osprey Cam at Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont. Their nest high overlooking a lake or stream or pond (I keep forgetting which, even though I've been watching them for maybe ten years, since before moving to 7H from The Old Place).
For long minutes and longer, I watched as the father bird arrived with a flapping fish, and #3, obviously, seeing it's the smallest, was fed all the fish because it was closest to the action and its siblings seemed to be napping on the other rim of the nest.
In the scene above, which I watched for a few minutes before taking a screen shot, the mother or father bird to the right is tearing into a meal of fish, perhaps sharing with the closest baby bird.
The Longmont nest is a perfectly lovely scene, looking out on the water, just below the nest lush greenery moves in the breeze, like a sea wave.
Actually, backing up the live scene to earlier in the day, I watched twice as #3 got his/her fill, that Time fed by the father, another time, hours later, fed by mom osprey, again, apparently the whole fish.
The Fairgrounds camera is more fun, because you can back it up twelve hours or so and click to watch all day (or all night) right up to the present moment, while the AngelCam at Grand Lake is fixed, observers can't back it up.
Anyway, the Boulder County Fairgrounds Osprey Cam is currently aimed down so we can close up watch what's happening with the osprey family, but when it's aimed up and out, we look across the pond at the fairground, beyond to a highway in the distance, cars and trucks passing, which makes it seem even more magical, to watch live something so far from 7H; and the mountain range in the far distance, some peaks always, I guess, snow-covered. It's more of that glory of God, isn't it, that we experience and sing about.
What I had in mind, though, as I watched the fish jumping and flapping as pieces were ripped from it, was Charles Darwin again, that what he had grown up hearing about the lovingkindness of God was toppled when he contemplated one of nature's developments, one animal's young growing toward maturity by eating away at the living but paralyzed body of another animal. Darwin felt that what is in Nature could not possibly demonstrate the Will of God, a god of love, that one animal suffers excruciating pain as another animal rips it apart and eats chunks of it.
For Darwin, I think it was one bug eating another. For me it's a screaming antelope or other animal as lions tear into it.
For me also, watching a fish writhe and flap as an osprey feeds it to its young, bit by bit.
How long, Lord?
What have I read recently? That lobsters feel pain, and I've been reading about a active movement to stop our harvesting and eating them. Or at least to anesthetize them somehow; someone is doing that. That fish feel pain. That shrimp, although their brain mechanism is dim, feel pain of sorts. Vegetarians, Vegans who won't eat animals or animal products. Scripturally, in the Beginning, early Genesis, we creatures are to eat vegetables, vegetation, green things that grow. But later, after Noah's Great Flood, God sanctifies our eating everything, whatever lives on the earth ->
Genesis 9: God’s Covenant With Noah
1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.
4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.
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It wanders off from dinner into moral expectations about how we treat creation and each other, but there's our godly permission to eat mullet and oysters, rib eye steak, fried chicken, roast pork, and leg of lamb.
IDK, what about the pain and suffering that we and other creatures bring to those we eat? I read a story once about an invasion of Aliens from another world, who conquered Earth but left us to live peaceably, only coming back from Time to Time as they found necessary, for hunting or harvesting expeditions to capture a few humans and take us to their world for food. Earth was their ranch for raising humans.
And in C S Lewis' Narnia volume "The Silver Chair" - - the wicked witch sends our travelers, Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle, to the Giants of Ettinsmoor, telling them to tell the sentry that they've come for the Autumn Feast. There, waiting in the kitchen as Cook naps, they happen to read from her cookbook
―Excerpt from giants' cookbook
Kind but of limited intelligence, Puddleglum is greatly offended when he reads on another page that, while Man's flesh is a delicacy, Marsh-wiggle flesh is stringy and tough.
Anyway, Sunday. June 25, Malinda's. 65th birthday. Early afternoon after church, we're going out to Pruitt with ice cream and cake and a few gifts. She asked for carrot cake, so Linda baked one.
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Now passing 7H: Wonderful World, 590x98 departing West Terminal with wood pellets for Tagonoura, Japan.
RSF&PTL
T