four-oh-eight

Four-oh-eight, thunder out here. Drizzle. Was already raining lightly when I came out with hot & black at three-thirty-something to warm up in the muggy. Thunder just starting. I have three possible places to settle these early mornings: at my bayside window table in the livingroom, out here on 7H porch, or at the Beck-side window table desk in my office/study/den. Four, there's the dining room table, but I generally only end up there very early on the Sunday mornings when I have sermon notes to work over before eight o'clock pulpit time.

My office/study/den would seem best, and is quite comfortable except that it's too cold in there, requires my heavy dark green bathrobe with hood pulled up. So, 7H porch mornings when there's the Universe to enjoy out here.

More thunder, a bit sharper now. And the sound of the drizzle seems to be fading. A lovely light breeze from the south stirring Linda's plants and cooling my head and feet. Life is Good.

In fact, on the scale Good, Better, Best, Life is Best. Looking over my computer screen out into the darkness - - of the night, the Universe, eternity, Life is Best. And its plan of salvation is good in that when life is over, it's over, there'll be no sorrow and sighing and missing it.

If you think of that, you can't: the notion of one's own personal nonexistence is beyond mind-boggling. Unimaginable. Even going there, the mind still visualizes being there in the blackness imagining. I guess you have to have been there and come back, deep anesthesia, an NDE.

"Oh, we don't want to think about that," say friends who go off uncomfortable if you say that's on your mind. As a priest and pastor, I noticed that most people, all of them well-meaning, when with a person who has lost a loved one, avoid talking about the grief and loss of the one who is bereaved - - they tell themselves that they don't want to make you think about it, when, indeed, that's all that's on your mind, all you Can think about, and you Need to talk about it.

I guess that's what pastors are for, eh?

People who were dying wondered and asked me, "What's dying like, what's it like to die, what's it going to be like for me?"

Well, you slip away, and are no longer. You may or may not be in pain, but dying itself is going to sleep and not dreaming. A line in "Der gute Kamerad" sings, "Bleib du im ew'gen Leben" - - "you stay in eternal life." It's where they are, from Time into eternity, all of them, all of Us, each one of us. It's all good. Thank you, God.

Four-fifty-two Fri Jul 14 4:52

"Lightning alert: lightning struck within 14 miles of your location." That's why the thunder is so faint.

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Friday, no sermon to prepare. I'm reading the annual midsummer issue of The New Yorker, which has three fiction stories. "The Kitchen God" by a Japanese author. "P's Parties" in an Italian setting. "Colorin Colorado" by a French writer. They're quite good this Time, their fiction is always unusual, more or less eccentric. Sometimes weird. WTH, I'll just say it: most of them are weird. Considering that it's The New Yorker, it would be a simpleton cliche to observe that they are really well chosen, but they are. I'm reading the third one now.