Posts

it's about me after all

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No doubt it’ll require pausing now and then for thought, but maybe this’ll be the FYI List blogpost I’ve been thinking to write. Or maybe the mind will wander off again as usual, IDK. Probably wander, eh? Don’t send me messages on Facebook Messenger: it’s all locked up because of spamming I’ve encountered, so if you write to me on FB Messenger I don’t receive it.  A cloudy day and a pitch black dark predawn are as beautiful as a sunshiny day. Especially here in 7H. True to my favorite proverb, my life’s work as a nonagenarian is seeking the truth and loving the search. The proverb challenges “seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will” - - I’ve found it very costly indeed, but I prefer the cost, disillusionment, to living with illusions and nonsense. I live with the realization that I know nothing. It’s very freeing. I find AI online to be a good source of personal medical information: when I Google medical questions AI gives me straight answers instead of “oh, we don’t ...
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God has gone up with a shout

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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 ...
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What is God?

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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...
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X-Mas is a comin'

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Below, scroll down, is a NYT column that catches me this morning at 5:21 and still pitch black dark outside. I’m afraid there are children who board the school bus in the predawn and are delivered home after dark, what misery. But today’s Saturday, isn’t it, a reprieve.  Looking across the room I see the sofa we bought at a Southern California furniture store that fall 1969 just before my ship deployed for WestPac and whatever contribution we made to the Vietnam War. The elegant new sofa in our living room on the moss green carpet of our house in Chula Vista, San Diego. The house was our first purchase, brand new, the builder had done a good job, except that the outside walls were not insulated, so the hot western wall could make our bedroom unbearably hot on summer and fall afternoons. No air conditioning either, didn’t need it most of the year. That was Southern California sixty years ago. One evening - - Linda, Malinda and Joe must have been in Arizona visiting Linda’s parents -...
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Life is Good

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  Life seems to be getting fuzzier somehow, and all the humor about doctor appointments for old people is coming home to roost, nomesane?  Forty years ago I came over from Apalachicola and drove my parents up to Dothan for cataract surgery, that was the start of my real awareness of it. Now, between us, we have one or two or three doctor appointments every week, we have to take the calendar everywhere because for sure another one will be scheduled before we get home and we need to avoid conflicting appointment Times.  This morning after hitting two grocery stores, Bill's and Publix, we arrived way early for a dermatologist appointment and were taken in half an hour early: clean the surgery sites, dab salve on, new bandages and come back in two weeks to have stitches removed at both sites, nose and behind the ear. Meantime, ear vacuuming, eyelid surgery, and leg veins.  Are you sure you want to live into your own nonagenarianism?! It's sort of fence-walking: On one si...
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Colossians

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  Late Wednesday night, early Thursday morning, the Time is 12:03 AM and I don't often do this, but I'm up late enjoying being alive.  Life is short, and we haven't much Time. These days I spend too much of it napping because of the One Thing Rule (we can do one thing, and then we have to have a sit-down (Linda in the blue riser chair) or outright lie down (me), pull up the covers, and go to sleep, usually an hour or two, sometimes three hours.  At this, my post-midnight moment, I'm thinking about being ninety, which I never expected, so now and then I do something, like now, to be in life itself, enjoyment of, and  gratitude for,   shehechehyanu, who gives us life - - and sustains us, and has brought us to this Time, blessed are You. ++++++ Looking at the Colossians reading for the upcoming Sunday: it's loaded with heavy theology, and it doesn't matter, but like many, I cannot see Paul having written this. Greek readers can dig into Colossians and report back s...
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cost what it will

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Fr Richard's meditation for this morning (scroll down) is, for me, one of the best. For one, ironically yea unto humorously, it confirms my own experience of life as priest, pastor, preacher, teacher. For two, it speaks my mind to everyone I've known and know who has reacted negatively to my efforts to convey Truth as I've explored and found Truth that strains boundaries beyond and outside my own tradition.  Maybe for three, it parallels my "life verse" picked up in that proverb inscribed in the lintel over the library door at the Episcopal theological seminary I attended, SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL; and the yardstick-slamming shout of Bill Weeks, my most competent high school teacher, "DON'T BE A SHEEP, BE A GOAT."   The integrity of one's search for Truth rests entirely in whether one is searching with an open mind or fooling oneself and simply, obtusely "proof-texting." It's called "apologetics,...
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