Monday nonsense
Do you think we'll have rain?
IDK, I'm not the meteorologist, the weather icon on my phone said 100% chance of rain today, Monday; and a weather alert dinged saying rain will start in 13 minutes, lasting about 19 minutes, so maybe. Early I went out and saw a couple clouds high, but I didn't go out again to see if it had rained or was raining because I don't like getting my socks wet, and that's what happens.
Bubba usually sleeps with socks on because his feet get cold, and his ankles and legs.
Reading early: couple of articles in The New Yorker dated today, March 24, 2025. And the cartoons on those pages, but not all of them. Later the fiction piece, maybe later today, more likely later this week as I have other reading to enjoy as well.
Wiman. If you get "Zero At The Bone," read it slowly, pick up, read a section and put down style. This morning I re-read his Bronk section yet one more Time again, then a couple of new sections. He's like taking a Lifetime Learning course at seminary after all these years - - this guy is actually a professor at Yale Divinity, somewhat affirming what I've "known" for years, that it's no run-of-the-mill theological college, but a psychiatric ward to challenge the imaginations of agnostic half-atheists who are testing the notion of being ordained ministers. If you survive it with your sense of the ridiculous intact, you're in.
The lawyers wouldn't accept my POV though, because it's hearsay, not witness. Some videos on Wiman's web page are on the scene, though, Prof Wiman with real students. I like that if you're a graduate student in your twenties, as I was for a while more than sixty years ago, it's okay to realize that you know everything and grownups know nothing until you come across a professor like Christian Wiman. I had a couple of those at the Univ of Michigan, one for Ethics whom I got an A for disagreeing with him almost violently on almost everything.
The other professor was a woman in a writing course that was itself almost poetry: after I graduated and we PCS'd to Japan I wrote her a letter thanking her for the course, and I had a letter from her. She was on sabbatical spending her Time in Ireland with Eamon de Valera, interviewing him a couple of hours daily for a biography she was writing. She told me how fascinating were her visits with President de Valera as he talked about the depths of his life history.
As an undergraduate at the Univ of Florida years earlier I'd also had two such professors, one my German professor, the other my Business Law professor, who peppered his lectures with "If only you'd come to me before you got yourself into this mess" and talk about an imagined future, "when I get my Cadillac Eldorado."
Anyway, this morning I appreciated Wiman writing, after he read Etheridge Knight's poem "A Wasp Woman Visits A Black Junkie In Prison" to us, that "Identity can be liberating and it can be oppressive. It can be liberating to discover and claim who you truly are. It can be oppressive to feel yourself trapped in identities that other people define." My liberated identity almost no one knows but I myself, and that I find my life in Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" hearing him read, "I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— "
While you identify me as some hokey old preacher way past his prime: have at it! Here inside me, free with my own Identity, I'm not even playing in that ballgame.
It's good finding oneself in a poem where no one else can find you; and staying there.
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Here's our Second Reading for the upcoming Fourth Sunday in Lent, which in our church has been Laetare Sunday after the Latin introit,
Laetare Jerusalem et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam; gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis, ut exsultetis et satiemini ab uberibus consolationis vestrae.
My intent was to write something about our reading from 2nd Corinthians, but I'll leave that for another Time.
RSF&PTL
T89&c
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
From now on, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Pic: me drifting off after early morning reading, hat to shield from lamp brightness, leaning against a Tuffy pillow.