For the use and benefit of those who would "keep a holy Lent" by daily Mass, our lectionary https://www.lectionarypage.net/CalndrsIndexes/Calendar2024.html  has Propers for every day of Lent.  You could also read and contemplate the Lenten daily propers personally, at home, as your Lenten discipline: the "bodily self-denial" mentioned in The Collect need not be giving up chocolate, or tobacco, or some other obsession (the idea of that "giving up" is not to punish yourself through Lent and then ravenously return to your habit on Easter, but to develop in yourself the ability and practice to shed the obsession altogether). You do what fits, but myself, though I'm a day late, I think I may do just that and read the daily propers as part of my Lenten observance. I'll see if it lasts longer than my New Years Resolutions ever do. The Isaiah reading is choice! primarily an oracle, the prophet speaking God's words as though Adonai himself were bodily p...

  As best I recall, rising early has been my longTime habit, at least from closing Navy days in Pennsylvania. And then, nobody could sleep through the antebellum predawn crowing of roosters all over Apalachicola that 1984 summer we moved there. Built in 1900, rectory's d ouble-hung windows w ere original thin, wavy glass and those that opened hung loosely, not meant to dampen sounds from outside. Our upstairs bedroom bordered US98 through town, right where eighteen-wheelers shifted gears either after or downshifting to gear-down for the turn onto Market Street. Magical, it was an active place where sleeping late was never part of the deal, always fine by me.  We love our years there, and early to rise was part of it. Thinking Time, study Time, reading Time, some days sermonizing. Timewise, those years were a highlight of life; and later when we sold The Old Place and started looking around, returning to Apalachicola was a possibility for me. Actively considered, a strong possi...

  Growing up at St Andrew's Episcopal Church, Panama City, I never heard of Ash Wednesday except that one girl in our class at Cove School, her name was Margaret as I recall, was Roman Catholic and always came to school on this one day with a dirty smudge on her forehead. Turned out it was a mark of ashes smeared there by her priest, probably Father McGovern at St Dominic. Those years, St Dominic was an old fashioned wooden church on the northeast corner of Harrison Avenue and 6th Street, facing First Baptist Church directly across Harrison.  St Dominic moved twice since then, first to the southeast corner of Harrison at 11th Street, then to where it is today out on 15th Street, Tyndall Parkway. Robert may correct me, but there were two Catholics in our class, Margaret (whose last name I do not recall, pretty sure she didn't graduate with us in Cove School Class of 1949) and Warren Middlemas. I was the one Episcopalian, and the rest were Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian. ...

Tuesday begins with hot & black modified with two of those little peel-off cups of half&half and a teaspoon of honey with cinnamon, an Xmas gift (keep the Xpistos in Xmas), for a change and maybe a little spurt of wakeup energy.  Weather is high 40s, Wind NW 12mph, "feels like" 45° and humidity 73%. Back to TAFB this morning to get the prescription reading glasses repaired, as last week we didn't realize the main gate is closed (the USAF goes crazy building and tearing down and rebuilding and tearing down and rebuilding and tearing down gates), and the traffic was too heavy to keep fooling with, so we gave it up and made a morning of shopping at Bill's Grocery Outlet stores in Calloway and St Andrews. This morning we'll know to enter the base at the gate just the other side of the bridge.  Yesterday I had a lesson in human nature: taking my first pair of prescription reading glasses back to the Eye Center where I bought them, to ask what might be done abou...

  "The Israeli military’s attack on Rafah 'and its horrific massacres against defenseless civilians and displaced children, women, and the elderly… is considered a continuation of the genocidal war and the forced displacement attempts it is waging against our Palestinian people,' Hamas said." That the entire war is the result of Hamas' unspeakable 7 Oct atrocities causes the outrageous irony and hypocrisy of the Hamas statement to offend any decent human being  (except possibly  a self-righteous American college student; BTDT myself, such that I try to understand their radicalism - - which was instrumental in bringing down our government during the Vietnam War - - "hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today?").   The news also reports IDF's rescue of two elderly hostages who had been held captive in a Palestinian home; like other reports from earlier, suggesting that ordinary Palestinian families are willingly and fully complicit with Hamas in hatr...

"Rain possible after 1 pm" reads our weather forecast for the moment. Okay, we should be home by then, when, a glass of red and eggplant parmesan for Sunday dinner. The red is a California petite sirah that I found on my wine rack and opened to enjoy a glass with the prime rib we cooked Thursday afternoon when Kris came over for supper.  Reading, I've got how to cook a standing rib roast (this was a small one that I'd bought for Christmas, then realized it'd be too small for the company arriving, so stuck it in the freezer until this past week. Anyway. Thaw the roast. Let it sit out for a couple hours and come to room temp. (You have to start your calc from the Time that you want to sit down to eat, and back up from there). Let it sit. Smear it with olive oil and coat it heavily with large grain sea salt. Four hours and about ten minutes before your planned meal Time, put it in the freezer for two hours, so the cap freezes (this keeps the cap from cooking gray, so...

Recently, a clergy colleague asked for my help in locating a family who were members of that church a generation ago when I was the priest there. Searching for them high and low, I finally found them way out west where I never expected.   Following a "trail," I came across and read old Facebook and other posts online, watching as they moved from place to place over the years, and reading about the children as they grew. I baptized at least one of them in our years in the parish together. They were a close and loving single parent family. We hadn't been in touch in probably ten years or more. One of the reports, from several years back, shocked me with news of a devastating health diagnosis for her, the head of the family, a single mom with several children. She reported the crisis, quoting her kids reaction to being told, their screaming and anger and outcries including "F - God" and curses at Heaven, and weeping. I wish I could have been there for them, and I h...