honestly

 

Honestly, there are mornings, days, this Time early afternoons, when I think I'll never again feel moved to journal, much less blog and post (their word is Publish, which sounds higher than it is for the nonsense I release). 

But it's a lovely, clear day with shrieks from below as little children run about in the Bay edge and on the narrow strip of beach seven levels down from 7H porch. Which is where I am, comfortable for me out here, too cool inside.

Plus an azalea is flashing two blossoms, beautiful pink flowers that remind me of The Old Place and My Laughing Place 

and especially of growing up in the Cove, where instead of staying to play sports after school I was always expected home to work in the yard. It was good actually, dirt smell as I'd dig a hole, mix leaves and dirt and peat moss and fertilizer and water into a slush, lift the azalea into the hole and shovel back in to fill around the root ball, up to a slight mound rising to the plant's trunk. 

Me, I was always the most awkward, uncoordinated sort of athlete anyway, to the laughingstock point! I directed skills development elsewhere. Gardening, piano, books; Saturdays and summers working at my father's fish house from age 9 right through 17 and off to college. 

At 7H I'm in the center of my world, the place I love most in life. Just the two of us now, other people, loved ones growing up around me did that and are having their own Beings now. Someone wrote, which I've always appreciated, that a child does not belong to you, a child is a person who moves through your life on the way to becoming an adult. They've all done that, and I'm finding extreme old age to be the most easygoing Time of life. If you sat out here on 7H porch with me on a day like today, you'd understand! Life is Good.

Then the guilt sets in. Today's wars show us humans for what we really are. "Who or What is God?" my theology professor liked to ask, in class and on the final exam. God is Whoever or Whatever said "yeh-HEE" and here we are in the divine image, in God's likeness - - heavens to Betsy, God is like this? St Paul used to write, μὴ γένοιτο, KJV translates "God forbid!" - - it's an expression of strongest negation meaning sort of Not Let it Be! So, the Genesis One creation story - - does it work out that we are created to be like God? Or, μὴ γένοιτο, May it Not be So, is it actually the reverse, God is like us, what some would call a human construct?

What is a saint like? Is a saint like our image of God, enshrined in the NT Greek word ἀγάπη, which is lovingkindness, an unconditional sort of self-sacrificial love that Christians find in the Cross? Is that a saint that we sing "I mean to be one too"? We are not like that, we are concerned with our rights, which is as far from Calvary as a human can get.

All Saints Day coming up, November 1, we'll observe it liturgically the following Sunday morning, and read the assigned lectionary readings. At the moment, sort of prepping for that day, I'm reading a book again, yet one more Time again, C S Lewis' book "The Great Divorce". 

In chilly drizzling rain, wandering the endless abandoned streets of a dreary city in eternal half-light that might be dawn or dusk but is neither, a narrator strolls for miles past boarded up warehouses and unlighted tobacco shops, and, he notices, bookshops that only carry titles like "The Life of Aristotle." He comes upon a queue, a line of scrappy, disagreeable people waiting at a bus station, and, for nothing else to do, he gets in line. It turns out they are waiting to board an overnight coach that will take them to Heaven, from the Hell that they exist in. 

Exiting the bus into what seems like eternal morning, they are told that they don't have to get back on the bus, they can stay if they want to, decide to. 

Most of them are too fond of their certainties and resentments to stay, of course. Their anger, bitterness, hatreds, their rights. That's the way we are. We get back on the bus.

The war in Ukraine was and is bad enough; what happened and is happening in the Middle East is beyond sickening, most especially for anyone who loves a child.

But it's peaceful here. Beautiful beyond lovely. Birds squawking, children shrieking with laughter. A small boat zips by. A small sailboat is moving along across by Davis Point. The sky is blue and the Bay is almost flat. There's a gentle breeze. An autumn day to be alive. How long, Lord?

T88&c