Sudden Autumn

I had to get up Monday night and put on sweat pants and shirt because I was cold. Autumn suddenly showed up.

This morning was so glorious I almost broke into "Holy, Holy, Holy. Lord God of Power and Might, heaven and earth are full of your Glory...."

Then I remembered something Karen Armstrong wrote about the Sanctus in her book, A History of God. The Hebrew word that translates into Latin as 'sanctus' and English as "Holy" is kaddosh.

Ms. Armstrong writes: (I looked it up) "When we use the word 'holy' today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew 'kaddosh', however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means 'otherness', a radical separation. The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulp that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: 'Yahweh is other! other! other!'"


I second that emotion....For me God's 'otherness' is constantly looming out far ahead of me. There is a mystery inexpressible in what I experience as 'God'. God is, to me, both 'the Holy Other' and 'the wholly Other'. What does the pot know of the Potter or the painting of its Artist?

Which is why the sort of informal, friendly, collegial way some Christians talk about God makes me uneasy. A parody of a hymn goes, "What a friend we have in Jesus, Christ Almighty, what a pal....'

A rather fundamentalist Episcopalian once asked me if I had "accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior". I told him I was still working on accepting Jesus as my 'formal' Lord and Savior. Jesus as the Savior next-door, the friendly God from down the street, 'my buddy, Jesus', just isn't part of my Theology.

I upset quite a few people back when the WWJD stuff was going on. People looking at the next moment of their lives wondering What Would Jesus Do? seemed rather vain and self-centered. I told some of them I was like Lloyd Benson to their Dan Quail: "I know Jesus, and you're not Jesus...."

Besides, the answer to the inquiry of "What Would Jesus Do?" is pretty easy to answer: Die so that we might have life...it seems to me....

A better question for me is "What the hell am I going to do?" when faced with life. I am convinced that God is always present to me, but it is usually as a silent partner. When push comes to shove, I have to make decisions that may be blessed or may be disasters....

I knew a woman in Charleston West Virginia who told me she let the Crucified One pick out her clothes each morning. "OK, Lord," she would say, staring into her closet, "what should I wear to give you glory today...?"

I swear she told me that. I simply thought the Logus, the Creator of All, might have something more pressing than being her fashion consultant. But then, she did have a lot of very nice clothes and most likely needed such guidance.

So, for this breathlessly lovely early Autumn day, just let me say thanks to the mysterium terribile et fascinans that is God. (Thanks also to Rudolf Otto for the words to 'name' the Otherness....

vacation

We spent 10 days with John and Sherrie and Mimi and Tim. I've known John since WVU days and Sherrie has been our friend since we moved to CT in 1980. Jack, Sherrie's husband couldn't go but she came anyway.

What I noticed about such old friends is that we share 'stories' from over the years. We needn't even tell them--there are key words and hints that make us think of them. Stories are the glue that holds community together, stories are the context for the content of life, stories are the web of relationships.

Of course our daughter knows most of the stories, even the ones she wasn't around for and Tim, her boyfriend, is a quick study and picks up on the narratives, becomes a part of the web easily.

Tim and Mimi have been together long enough that I should call him her 'partner', I suppose. Tim and Mimi stories are part of the context of our shared lives.

It is such a joyful thing to be around people who 'know your stories' so well they become their stories as well.

And we laughed about 90 % of the time we were awake and probably in our sleep as well. Laughter can be fraught with remembered pain or with the memory of great joy. Laughter is a web of relationship as well. Sometimes, with some people, most every thing makes you laugh....

Heinrich Ibsen said once, "there is no pain that cannot be borne if you put it in a story and tell a story about it.' That's one of the wisest and most profound things I know.

Somewhere in here about stories is a paradigm for the community of the church. Maybe someday I'll get around to making the analogy.....

big ol' tree

There is a huge horse chestnut tree in our front yard. Actually, it's on the property line between us and Bernie, who spends most of the year in Boca Raton. When it falls, as it surely will someday, it will most likely hit Bernie's house rather than ours. Most likely it should be cut down before it falls down in a storm, for everyone's sake. But it would cost a mint--Bernie could do it out of pocket change but we'd have to mortgage the dog.

Besides, it is a noble old tree and still gets leaves and still drops chestnuts--which, if you could eat them would be neat....but you can't. I've tried and rue the day....

There is something haunted house about it when it finishes dropping nuts and loses its leaves. It is about 100 feet high, I estimate, and, like chestnut trees are want, very spread out.

The nuts make Bern's hand push mower crazy and drop on cars going down Cornwall. But there you are. I really like it....besides, if my estimates are right, it is tilted toward Bernie's house and he's gone a lot and has insurance....That's not a nice attitude, I think, but so it goes....

another day in paradise

So, here I am on Oak Island, North Carolina. It is a south facing beach and staring out at the Atlantic, the sun is setting brilliantly on my right. It is high tide and the beach is only about 10 yards wide. At low tide it is about 40 yards and you can walk about another 100 yards and not be in water higher than your waist.

The wind is blowing hard off the water. I'm in a house with some of the people I love most in the world. What could be the problem?

Nothing really.

Yesterday was our 40th Anniversary--Bern and me--and we went to a great restaurant in Southport--Mr B's Bistro. Astonishingly good sea food. Mimi and Tim and Sherrie paid. John drove. It is a wonderful quartet for us to share that round number anniversary with.

We eat like fools. Drink a bit. Sit on the breeze way, out of the sun, or on the deck or on the rooftop deck and read and read and read. Consuming syllables like nectar of the gods....which words are.

Pelicans sweep by in formation, crashing into the ocean for food. Way out a container ship has sat all day, waiting, I suppose, for news from Wilmington that the berth is ready. Who knows....

How soft and lovely it all is.....

Into the eye of the storm

Last year we left the beach on Oak Island a day early since a hurricane was coming. It chased us up I-95 for hundreds of miles.

This year, It looks like we'll be driving through Earl (what a dumb name for a hurricane--of course, naming hurricanes is dumb in and of itself) to get there.

You really can't mess with Mother Nature, you know....

more than you want to know...really....

Someone emailed and asked why I've been neglecting my web.

The truth is, the last week has been a blur of pain, discomfort and narcotic relief.

The faint of heart should stop reading now!!!

Last Wed, unbeknownst to me, the urinary tract infection I didn't know I had blocked my (how to put this politely?) well...urinary tract.

Bern took me to the hospital where they discovered the infection and put in a Foley tube to relieve me. The tube didn't work and by the time we drove back home I told Bern I needed to go back.

It was on the second visit that I heard six of the most terrifying words I've ever heard: "You need a larger tube...." After misadventures galore, it was finally in place and we came home about 2 am.

By 5:30 I called an ambulance. I wasn't coming home this time until they fixed it. After about 35 minutes of savagery, they finally gave me an IV and a shot of some of the nicest stuff I've ever met and decided to wait for the urologist on call.

I got another IV hit of that wonderful stuff (I'm glad I don't remember what it was since I would probably be tempted to steal some) before the urologist arrived. He looked for all the world like Kurt Vonnegut and put in a tube with three separate openings in the end with a simple twist. I told him he was good at it and he said, "I do this for a living, afterall."

He sent me to the floor and they hung two bags about 3 liters each above my bed and started them running inwards to where liquid usually doesn't come from in that direction. So the rest of Thursday and Thursday night I absorbed enough saline to flood the lowlands and got several pills that we're as good as the injected stuff but good enough. The nurses on the floor were amazing--Florence Nightengales on each shift--but the urologist who came to check me out Friday afternoon (Kurt Vonnegut having left for the weekend) decided not to remove the tubes until after the weekend to give the antibiotics time to do their wonders.

I tried to protest but all he had to say is, "If I take it out now and you don't do well you have to come back through the ER."

Come Monday the infernal internal plumbing was removed and after nearly blacking out the first time two times I did what the tube had been doing, it settled down a bit. They had given me Oxycontin to take home. (I call it "hillbilly heroine" since people in Appalachia crush their grandmother's prescription up and inject it--a real problem in the mountains.)

All was almost well.

(I once visited a sometimes member of the parish in the hospital after surgery and asked when he could go home. "As soon as Mr. Poopy comes" he told me.

An elderly, distinguished man, waiting for 'Mr. Poopy". Which I had to do until today....)

Well, I warned you to stop but there you have it--why I haven't been writing on my blog....Just in case you wondered....

Rainmaker

Here's something I've noticed this week--any time I start to take the dog out, it starts raining, sometimes violently. So, I've been thinking, maybe I could hire myself out in drought plagued places and Bela and I could make it rain. I told Bern, thinking it was a good idea.

Bern told me it was ready to rain almost at any moment this week and the dog and I had nothing to do with it.

Another idea was to get advertisers to hire me to tell them if their commercials were a. lame,
b. misleading or c. trying to sell something people don't really need.

I shared this idea with Bern but she allowed that advertisers are, in no particular order, a. trying to distract you with something lame b. misleading or c. sell you something you don't really need.

So two ideas for my next career bottomed out in the same day.

There's always tomorrow.