a day in August
Three o'clock in the morning, three-oh-seven exactly, and not a blast but a blanket of oppressive heat covers over me as I slide open the door to 7H porch. Counter to custom, I'm not going out there even to stand at the rail and gaze into Infinity.
Headachy out, so
inside with my mug of hot & black, and settle into this wingback chair with threadbare arms. I appreciate family used shabby but not "shabby chic" - - except for the sofa bed we bought for when Joe's here, everything in the living room is part of the family, some of it dating back half a century, some more than a century into prior generations. Home is wherever our shabby stuff is.
This is not my Club Coffee, which I forgot to prepare last evening. it's Community coffee from my Keurig in the pantry, where I seldom go since the day Linda spied and sprayed a spider in there. I'm not a spider person. If spiders migrate beyond the pantry I'll move into my car in the garage below and only come up to shower. However,
while waiting for the coffee, I noticed more cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup than we'll need before eternity comes, so brought one out to make a bowl for breakfast. Condensed, can of soup and a can of milk, eh?
Maybe heat the milk first and mince raw oysters into it before blending with the mushroom soup. While I was
at Buddy Gandy's yesterday, along with the shrimp, I bought a carton of oysters, which I don't usually buy there because, unlike Tarpon Dock Seafood so far, Buddy Gandy's new improved pint is 12 ounces instead of 16 ounces. I don't notice that they've raised the price, though, for the new smaller is better. Have you noticed a fashionable counter depth refrigerator costing more than a regular refrigerator? Less is more. War is peace.
Everything is improving. Try buying a pound of bacon. Or a pound of coffee - - two legs good, four legs bad - - two legs good, four legs better - - the new, improved pound is twelve ounces. We might as well go to metric. You can get a 500 g package of German coffee, which is more than a pound of American coffee for about the same price, eh?
Speaking of German coffee. My project for Lent 2023 was to read a dozen or so books about our strategic bombing during WW2, in Japan but especially in Europe (which I uneasily challenged as racist in myself, then instead of getting bogged down struggling with that, moved on to live with me just as I am the way I am), carpet bombing German cities, planned and purposely firebombing Hamburg and Dresden. Early in one book, a Hamburg resident wrote of fortunately being away when the bombing happened, because they had rented a vacation cottage in a rural setting outside the city, for a quarter-pound of coffee.
Why did I read that project? In my business ethics course at the University of Michigan in 1963, the professor had railed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and against the firebombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, and especially Dresden, and he angered me so I argued against him in my term paper and got an A on the paper and for the semester. For some reason or other it came up again in my contemplations sixty years later, and these days instead of certainty that I'm right, I suspect that I'm wrong.
But I'm not.
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What's up for Sunday?
Here's our collect (prayer) of the day:
Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In our world where we are certain that our Christian certainties are right and the Christian certainties of others are wrong, how are we to know? How to know "thy will"? We don't know, we just think, we believe, we are certain of our opinion as opposed to their opinion. There's a great deal of self-certainty. I have it myself. How to struggle with it? Maybe by the daily Examen that is part of Jesuit spirituality?
https://www.jesuits.org/spirituality/the-ignatian-examen/
Certainly, I don't do so well on my own.
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Here's the gospel reading for Sunday, still reading from the bread of life discourse in John chapter 6:
John 6:35, 41-51
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Then the Judeans began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
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What? "Jesus the son of Joseph?" My spiritual advisor at an Ignatian retreat that I did years ago told me that Mary's husband was the Holy Spirit. I said Mary's husband was Joseph, but he said, No, that would be adultery, Mary's husband was the Holy Spirit. I guess it's whatever we believe, or are instructed and decide to believe. Gospel John doesn't know or say anything about Mary and the Virgin Birth (nor does Gospel Mark), but it doesn't matter, does it, and I'm pretty much okay with whatever.
Thursday, Thursday morning and still dark out.
RSF&PTL
T88&c
pic snapped by Amy Moody, August 28, 2010, the summer I supervised contractor work on the Holy Nativity Episcopal School building. That's me sitting on the roof of what is now named Beverly McDaniel Hall, the auditorium, dining hall, waiting for my angina to calm down. It was an interesting summer when I was trying to get the building looking presentable before announcing that it was being named the Bill Lloyd Building for my hero William Pitts Lloyd. I wanted Bill to know and enjoy it before he died of the brain tumor that was killing him.