One of the seven major celebrations of the church year, The Ascension story is on our lectionary calendar for this coming Sunday. Visualized elegantly in the above painting by Salvador Dali, it's told at the end of Luke's gospel, then more extravagantly at the beginning of Acts, which is our lectionary reading.  Over the ages of the Christian church, the Ascension story has been the object of many works of art, much of which features what is whimsically called "the disappearing feet" with disciples standing or kneeling to watch Jesus' feet vanish into a low cloud. Some of the art includes Jesus' mother Mary, the woman clothed in her traditional blue.  "Why is it necessary for Jesus to ascend bodily into the sky?" is a great discussion question for an adult Sunday school class or small group Bible study to explore. Often coming out in those discussions is the inspired suggestion that, like the stories of Jesus raising children from the dead as Elijah ...

Sean Dietrich and his wife are on their second pilgrimage walking the Camino de Santiago, and he's keeping his readers informed, posting about it every day.  If I read him correctly, it only takes one such walk to capture the soul, to make the pilgrim obsessed with it. Sean makes it a compelling spiritual journey. As nonagenarians (she will become a member of the club exactly two months from today, knock knock, God willing, wishing you long years), Linda and I don't want to walk it, but we might if we were twenty years younger. I'd like to be out where the night sky is free enough of ambient light for me to contemplate Earth's view of our Milky Way Galaxy, which is the starting point for where I myself grasp the Creating God who told Moses, "I AM that I AM, I WILL BE whatever I WILL BE." In other words, "don't mess." But anyway, heck, if we were half a century younger we might make an avocation of it. In fact, Sean wrote that he's met a pilgr...

  May 7, 1912 to May 7, 2026, my mother was born 114 years ago today, at the Gentry  family home in Century, Florida, all the way north out Palafox to the Alabama line. Mama died in July 2011, two months past her 99th birthday. Her birthday always nearly coincided with Mothers Day, and a fact of life while we shared it was that I always tried to make sure I had both a birthday gift for her and a Mothers Day gift as well.   Born second child and first daughter, Mama was named Hazel Louise Gentry. Called "Weesie" in her family, she tried to make sure nobody knew about the "Hazel."  My memories right now are of phoning her when I was away from home on her birthday, including on her fiftieth birthday, during our Navy years, when we were living in Ann Arbor while I was in the MBA program at The University of Michigan. May 7, 1962 it was. After graduation the following year, the Navy PCS'd us to Japan and there were letters and audio tapes back and forth, but no phone...