DTS begins at 2 a.m. Of course, it is not necessary to get up at 2 a.m. to set your clocks ahead. You set them ahead before you go to sleep and sleep on false time until 2 a.m.
Having been a priest for lo these many years (38 sometime this year) two of my favorite Sundays are the two when the time changes.
You notice they always change the time on Sunday whether it's to 'spring forward' or 'fall back'. There is a reason for that. If you changed the time on a Monday or any week day, people would be either late or early for work and businesses would be outraged (well, probably not in the fall when they got an extra hour of work out of people!) And if they did it on Saturdays the star player might miss the youth soccer game. No way time change is going to ruin the suburban obsession with children playing sports and parents yelling at officials.
So they do it on Sunday because the only people it is going to disrupt are Christians who go to church.
(I once told the person being ordained in the ordination sermon I preached for him, "Michael, in a few minutes you will be an irrelevant functionary in an irrelevant institution." I went on to talk about how relevancy is not the venue of faith, but the surprising times of life that mean not a jot or tittle to the world but are times of great pain or great joy for the individuals he will serve. I also told him the church was not called to be 'relevant' but 'dangerous'. But the bishop who was there to ordain him ripped into me in the vesting room later for calling the church 'irrelevant'.
"The church is called to be disruptive and dangerous," I said, quoting myself, "not relevant."
He disagreed that the church wasn't disruptive and dangerous. To which I replied, "if we were truly disruptive and dangerous do you think we'd have all this prime real estate in the middle of every town? We'd be hiding and worshipping in secret...."
Suffice it to say, I agreed to disagree but he didn't, not really. So I headed for the reception and several glasses of wine.)
Even though they change the time two times a year on Sundays because the church is not as relevant as industry or soccer and even though the dangerous element I'd like to see in the church doesn't exist, we do have some wonderful stained glass and pipe organs, I still love those two Sundays.
On the one coming tomorrow, I've known people to show up at 8:50 a.m.for the 8 a.m. Eucharist or at 7 a.m. in the fall. And people arriving for the 10 a.m. service during the recessional hymn is simply priceless. This spring change causes cognitive dissonance because you were coming to church, not coffee hour. In the fall, an hour early, the cognitive dissonance involves, once you realize your mistake, do you hang around for an hour you didn't know you had and still come to church.
Cognitive dissonance is always a good thing because it can tip us over from being relevant to being disruptive and dangerous....Which is the direction I want to go....
As awful as it is for a priest to get joy from someone's confusion, I really hope someone shows up 50 minutes late and I can see the look on their face....
Saturday, March 9, 2013
untitled post
This post is not only untitled, it doesn't exist, until now of course.
I hit a wrong button and posted a blank but when I saw the title 'untitled post' I saw a chance to edit it and make it a post...if an unintended one...
and, still untitled....
I hit a wrong button and posted a blank but when I saw the title 'untitled post' I saw a chance to edit it and make it a post...if an unintended one...
and, still untitled....
What I had in my pocket
What I had in my pocket
wasn't what I thought I had.
I thought it was an insert
with the reading for Lent III.
But when my dog wandered
off into the snow
in front of the bank
and pooped,
I reached into my pocket
for the insert
and found instead
some poems a friend wrote.
Losing all credibility
as a good citizen
and dog owner,
I used my boot
to push some snow
on top of the poop.
And took the poems
home to read
again.
wasn't what I thought I had.
I thought it was an insert
with the reading for Lent III.
But when my dog wandered
off into the snow
in front of the bank
and pooped,
I reached into my pocket
for the insert
and found instead
some poems a friend wrote.
Losing all credibility
as a good citizen
and dog owner,
I used my boot
to push some snow
on top of the poop.
And took the poems
home to read
again.
Friday, March 8, 2013
OK, I blew it...
I was so cavalier about the snow last night--I was wrong. I woke up this morning to almost a foot of the stuff. Where I sit to write, there is a window just behind my computer screen. And all day I watched the snow fall from the trees.
It's a West Virginia thing that until the snow is off the trees, it will keep snowing. That was certainly true today. Until about 3 p.m., the snow was all over the trees in amounts I don't remember seeing in trees. Our next door neighbor, Naomi, was out around noon with a broom knocking snow off some of their young trees because the weight of the stuff was about to break the branches.
It almost made me wish I had a smart phone with a camera so I could take pictures of the amazing volume of snow on the trees and bushes around our house. Almost....
Then I was sending an email to a friend when I noticed the tips of several of my fingers were blue. For an instant I was terrified, then I remembered, it was the blueberries.
We, much of the time, make the food we add to Bela, the Puli's, dry food. Today was my turn and I took carrots, celery, and sweet potato all chopped small and boiled them for 10 minutes or so before adding chopped apple and frozen peas. Then I turned down the stove, covered the pan and steamed it all for a while. I then poured out that mixture and put olive oil in the pan with 4 cloves of diced garlic and a pound or more of ground turkey. When it was browned I put the rest back in. In the meantime I had taken half a cup or so of frozen blueberries and put them out to thaw.
When the turkey mixture was done, I added back the vegetables and took it off the heat.
Blueberries are the best antioxidants but I don't add them until the mixture is cooled since they would turn the whole thing blue if it was still warm. I'm sure the dog wouldn't mind, but it would offend my sense of food. Don't eat blue food unless it is berries, is my motto.
So, when the food was cool, I scooped the berries out with my hand and mixed it in. Hence, the blue finger tips.
I even, for the first time, tasted the food I'd made my dog. Truth was, with a little seasoning, it would be great over rice....
It's a West Virginia thing that until the snow is off the trees, it will keep snowing. That was certainly true today. Until about 3 p.m., the snow was all over the trees in amounts I don't remember seeing in trees. Our next door neighbor, Naomi, was out around noon with a broom knocking snow off some of their young trees because the weight of the stuff was about to break the branches.
It almost made me wish I had a smart phone with a camera so I could take pictures of the amazing volume of snow on the trees and bushes around our house. Almost....
Then I was sending an email to a friend when I noticed the tips of several of my fingers were blue. For an instant I was terrified, then I remembered, it was the blueberries.
We, much of the time, make the food we add to Bela, the Puli's, dry food. Today was my turn and I took carrots, celery, and sweet potato all chopped small and boiled them for 10 minutes or so before adding chopped apple and frozen peas. Then I turned down the stove, covered the pan and steamed it all for a while. I then poured out that mixture and put olive oil in the pan with 4 cloves of diced garlic and a pound or more of ground turkey. When it was browned I put the rest back in. In the meantime I had taken half a cup or so of frozen blueberries and put them out to thaw.
When the turkey mixture was done, I added back the vegetables and took it off the heat.
Blueberries are the best antioxidants but I don't add them until the mixture is cooled since they would turn the whole thing blue if it was still warm. I'm sure the dog wouldn't mind, but it would offend my sense of food. Don't eat blue food unless it is berries, is my motto.
So, when the food was cool, I scooped the berries out with my hand and mixed it in. Hence, the blue finger tips.
I even, for the first time, tasted the food I'd made my dog. Truth was, with a little seasoning, it would be great over rice....
Thursday, March 7, 2013
dashing through the snow
I drove back from Higganum tonight after the Cluster book group through the snow.
In the book group, we are reading chapters from the stuff I've been writing about my ministry and memories. It's been great. I talk to much, I think, but it is wonderful to hear others react to my writing. It's inspiring me to get back to it (instead of playing 20 games of Hearts a day) and finishing it, if 'finish' is something I would ever get too with memories of 38 years of being a priest. My title for the whole mess is "Farther Along" from an old hymn. (One of the lines is "Farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why. Cheer up my brother, walk in the sunlight, we'll understand it all by and by." To sing that like I remember it you must make 'it' come out 'hit' and make 'why' into two syllables.) But Ann Overton, who has read the whole mess and agreed to help me edit it if I ever get to a stopping place, wants to call it: "Tend the Fire, Tell the Story and Pass the Wine"--which is a metaphor from the chapter we read tonight called "Job Description" where I try to distinguish that being a priest is much more about 'being' than 'doing'.
The weather forecast was grim, but I needed to see a man in the hospital in Middletown, which is only 6 or 7 miles from Higganum so I made the journey. Those hearty souls that showed up and I discussed what we all agreed was a rather odd attitude in Connecticut about snow, considering that Connecticut has always been in New England and in New England, snow happens. I'm constantly amazed at how a few inches of snow closes schools and causes an endless crawl line at the bottom of the TV about all the events that are cancelled. It's New England. It snows here. Get used to it.
Perhaps it is the fact that CT is the southernmost state in New England so we think a bit like people in Baltimore and DC and Richmond where 2 inches of snow shuts down the city's. I remember when I was going to Virginia Seminary, Alexandria didn't even own snow plow trucks, they rented them from other towns. So, snow in Alexandria had to stay put until other towns had cleared their roads.
At any rate, people in Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine and Massachusetts do much better wit snow than folks in the Nutmeg state. They seem to relish it--like Minnesota does, according to Prairie Home Companion.
Where I grew up, in the mountains of southern West Virginia, it snowed like crazy. And nothing much stopped. People put on chains and drove across Peel Chestnut Mountain or Elkhorn Mountain to get to Bluefield to go shopping or see a movie. I learned to drive with chains on. So I think nothing of driving in snow. I remember lots of 8 a.m. services at St. John's in Waterbury when I invited the congregation up into the chancel to sit in the choir stalls and their wasn't more than an inch or so on the roads. Most winters when I was a high school student, there would be a couple dozen days when the school bus that took me 9 miles from Anawalt to Gary around really steep and sharp curves, would go with chains on all 8 wheels. I know my memory isn't what it used to be, but I can't recall the concept "snow days" from my childhood.
Rt. 9, I-91 and I-691 were all snow covered and mostly only one lane--the one the previous vehicles had driven in. But what is usually a 35 minute drive was only 45 or 50 minutes, and though I could hardly see from time to time, you just follow the taillights ahead of you and they'll lead you home.
I bet Cheshire's schools will either be cancelled or delayed tomorrow and it's mostly flat here and the snow plows will have the main roads cleared by 6 am or so.
Now, a decade or so ago, I was driving on a Sunday afternoon, through snow to New Haven on I-91 to do a service at the Episcopal Church at Yale and had a wreck. But it was because I got off the steep exit that had cold air beneath it and was solid ice. I broke the two bones in my left arm--is it the radius and the ulna?--in a whole bunch of places and now have two titanium bars in my forearm where solid bone used to be (and, yes, my life flashed before me as I slid....)
(By the way, my car would start after I crashed and I drove to the Yale campus, parked and walked to the chapel, but when I got inside I realized my left had was rotated about 100 degrees and I couldn't make it come back and asked someone to take me to the hospital!)
Ice is a totally different animal from snow. It is important for people in New England to get that distinction and realize that if you drive 15 miles slower in snow than on dry road and press your break like there was an egg between your foot and the pedal, you'll be just fine.
It's why we live in New England--we have seasons--and one of them involves snow....
In the book group, we are reading chapters from the stuff I've been writing about my ministry and memories. It's been great. I talk to much, I think, but it is wonderful to hear others react to my writing. It's inspiring me to get back to it (instead of playing 20 games of Hearts a day) and finishing it, if 'finish' is something I would ever get too with memories of 38 years of being a priest. My title for the whole mess is "Farther Along" from an old hymn. (One of the lines is "Farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why. Cheer up my brother, walk in the sunlight, we'll understand it all by and by." To sing that like I remember it you must make 'it' come out 'hit' and make 'why' into two syllables.) But Ann Overton, who has read the whole mess and agreed to help me edit it if I ever get to a stopping place, wants to call it: "Tend the Fire, Tell the Story and Pass the Wine"--which is a metaphor from the chapter we read tonight called "Job Description" where I try to distinguish that being a priest is much more about 'being' than 'doing'.
The weather forecast was grim, but I needed to see a man in the hospital in Middletown, which is only 6 or 7 miles from Higganum so I made the journey. Those hearty souls that showed up and I discussed what we all agreed was a rather odd attitude in Connecticut about snow, considering that Connecticut has always been in New England and in New England, snow happens. I'm constantly amazed at how a few inches of snow closes schools and causes an endless crawl line at the bottom of the TV about all the events that are cancelled. It's New England. It snows here. Get used to it.
Perhaps it is the fact that CT is the southernmost state in New England so we think a bit like people in Baltimore and DC and Richmond where 2 inches of snow shuts down the city's. I remember when I was going to Virginia Seminary, Alexandria didn't even own snow plow trucks, they rented them from other towns. So, snow in Alexandria had to stay put until other towns had cleared their roads.
At any rate, people in Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine and Massachusetts do much better wit snow than folks in the Nutmeg state. They seem to relish it--like Minnesota does, according to Prairie Home Companion.
Where I grew up, in the mountains of southern West Virginia, it snowed like crazy. And nothing much stopped. People put on chains and drove across Peel Chestnut Mountain or Elkhorn Mountain to get to Bluefield to go shopping or see a movie. I learned to drive with chains on. So I think nothing of driving in snow. I remember lots of 8 a.m. services at St. John's in Waterbury when I invited the congregation up into the chancel to sit in the choir stalls and their wasn't more than an inch or so on the roads. Most winters when I was a high school student, there would be a couple dozen days when the school bus that took me 9 miles from Anawalt to Gary around really steep and sharp curves, would go with chains on all 8 wheels. I know my memory isn't what it used to be, but I can't recall the concept "snow days" from my childhood.
Rt. 9, I-91 and I-691 were all snow covered and mostly only one lane--the one the previous vehicles had driven in. But what is usually a 35 minute drive was only 45 or 50 minutes, and though I could hardly see from time to time, you just follow the taillights ahead of you and they'll lead you home.
I bet Cheshire's schools will either be cancelled or delayed tomorrow and it's mostly flat here and the snow plows will have the main roads cleared by 6 am or so.
Now, a decade or so ago, I was driving on a Sunday afternoon, through snow to New Haven on I-91 to do a service at the Episcopal Church at Yale and had a wreck. But it was because I got off the steep exit that had cold air beneath it and was solid ice. I broke the two bones in my left arm--is it the radius and the ulna?--in a whole bunch of places and now have two titanium bars in my forearm where solid bone used to be (and, yes, my life flashed before me as I slid....)
(By the way, my car would start after I crashed and I drove to the Yale campus, parked and walked to the chapel, but when I got inside I realized my left had was rotated about 100 degrees and I couldn't make it come back and asked someone to take me to the hospital!)
Ice is a totally different animal from snow. It is important for people in New England to get that distinction and realize that if you drive 15 miles slower in snow than on dry road and press your break like there was an egg between your foot and the pedal, you'll be just fine.
It's why we live in New England--we have seasons--and one of them involves snow....
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Missing poem found....
In April I will have been retired from full time ministry for 3 years. How the time flies. But back then, before I retired, I had printouts of several dozen poems on a shelf of a window in the chapel of St. John's. That was because at daily noon day prayers--attended by two or three and sometimes more--we had given up on reading from the daily lectionary and read poems instead. Sometimes from well-known poets--Billy Collins was the favorite--and sometimes from obscure, unknown poets, like me.
When I left, I thought I got them all, but I believe I must have loaned some to people who never brought them back or left some there. For reasons beyond my ken, they all aren't on my computer, so for almost three years, I've been looking for a poem called "The Trouble with Finitude" without success. But then I discovered that I had included it in something else I'd written. I just discovered that today. So, I share it with you with the African saying, "these are my words, if they are a blessing to you, keep them well; and, if not, send them back to me with your blessing please...."
The Trouble with Finitude
I try, from time to time,
usually late at night or after one too many glasses of wind,
to consider my mortality.
(I have been led to believe
that such consideration is valuable
in a spiritual way.
God knows where I got that...
well, of course God knows,
I'm just not sure.)
But try as I might, I'm not adroit at such thoughts.
It seems to me that I have always been alive,
I don't remember not being alive.
I have no personal recollections
of when most of North America was covered by ice
or of the Bronze Age
or of the French Revolution
or the Black Sox scandal.
But I do know about all that through things I've read
and musicals I've see
and the History Channel.
I know intellectually that I';ve not always been alive,
but I don't know it, as they say
"in my gut'.
(What a strange phrase that is,
since I am sure that my 'gut'
is a totally dark part of my body,
awash with digestive fluids
and whatever remains of the chicken and peas
I had for dinner and strange compounds
moving inexorably--I hope--through my large
and small intestines.)
My problem is this:
I have no emotional connection to finitude.
All I know and feel is tangled up with being alive.
Dwelling on the certainty of my own death
is beyond my ken, outside my imagination,
much like trying to imagine
the vast expanse of interstellar space
when I live in Connecticut.
So, whenever someone suggests that
I consider my mortality,
I screw up my face and breathe deeply
pretending I am imagining the world
without me alive in it.
What I'm actually doing is remembering
things I seldom remember...
my father's smell, an old lover's face,
the feel of sand beneath my feet,
the taste of watermelon,
the sound of thunder rolling toward me
from miles away.
Perhaps when I come to die
(perish the thought!)
there will be a moment, an instant,
some flash of knowledge
or a stunning realization:
"Ah," I will say to myself,
just before oblivion sets in,
"this is finitude...."
Just something to ponder as we todder along toward that Mysterious Door that leads to whatever comes next....
When I left, I thought I got them all, but I believe I must have loaned some to people who never brought them back or left some there. For reasons beyond my ken, they all aren't on my computer, so for almost three years, I've been looking for a poem called "The Trouble with Finitude" without success. But then I discovered that I had included it in something else I'd written. I just discovered that today. So, I share it with you with the African saying, "these are my words, if they are a blessing to you, keep them well; and, if not, send them back to me with your blessing please...."
The Trouble with Finitude
I try, from time to time,
usually late at night or after one too many glasses of wind,
to consider my mortality.
(I have been led to believe
that such consideration is valuable
in a spiritual way.
God knows where I got that...
well, of course God knows,
I'm just not sure.)
But try as I might, I'm not adroit at such thoughts.
It seems to me that I have always been alive,
I don't remember not being alive.
I have no personal recollections
of when most of North America was covered by ice
or of the Bronze Age
or of the French Revolution
or the Black Sox scandal.
But I do know about all that through things I've read
and musicals I've see
and the History Channel.
I know intellectually that I';ve not always been alive,
but I don't know it, as they say
"in my gut'.
(What a strange phrase that is,
since I am sure that my 'gut'
is a totally dark part of my body,
awash with digestive fluids
and whatever remains of the chicken and peas
I had for dinner and strange compounds
moving inexorably--I hope--through my large
and small intestines.)
My problem is this:
I have no emotional connection to finitude.
All I know and feel is tangled up with being alive.
Dwelling on the certainty of my own death
is beyond my ken, outside my imagination,
much like trying to imagine
the vast expanse of interstellar space
when I live in Connecticut.
So, whenever someone suggests that
I consider my mortality,
I screw up my face and breathe deeply
pretending I am imagining the world
without me alive in it.
What I'm actually doing is remembering
things I seldom remember...
my father's smell, an old lover's face,
the feel of sand beneath my feet,
the taste of watermelon,
the sound of thunder rolling toward me
from miles away.
Perhaps when I come to die
(perish the thought!)
there will be a moment, an instant,
some flash of knowledge
or a stunning realization:
"Ah," I will say to myself,
just before oblivion sets in,
"this is finitude...."
Just something to ponder as we todder along toward that Mysterious Door that leads to whatever comes next....
Monday, March 4, 2013
She never ceases to surprise me....
I've been married to Bern since 1970. Jesus, that's 43 years!!!
We met when I was 17 and she was 14, if you can believe it, and have pretty much been an item of one kind or another since then. That makes it almost 49 years. What were we thinking? This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen any more....
But there is this: she never ceases to surprise me.
I've often told people I've had 5 or 6 marriages, they've just all been to the same woman. And we have carved out different eras, like geological strata, one covering the one before, but you can dig down through them and excavate pieces of previous marriages.
For example, about the surprises me part: she came home from the grocery store today with a bag of dry food for our Cat, Luke. It is, like the food our dog eats, very healthy. Luke has dry food always available and wet food of one kind or another twice a day. He can be finicky about food, but he weighs about 20 pounds, so he's not starving.
I stated the obvious. "Luke won't eat this stuff."
And Bern said, unpacking bags and putting things away, "well, if he doesn't want to eat, it's just as well that he doesn't eat something that's good for him...."
I've been thinking about that ever since. There is a kind of logic to her thinking....and then, well, the logic implodes.
She's the practical one and I'm the one wandering through life as if there must be a point to it all if I could only find it.
"If he doesn't eat, it's best he doesn't eat what's good for him" is something I've been unable, in the several hours since she said it, to get my head around.
Then SURPRISE and confusion and serendipity might just be what causes people to hang out together fro nearly half a century.
I'm pondering that for a bit....
We met when I was 17 and she was 14, if you can believe it, and have pretty much been an item of one kind or another since then. That makes it almost 49 years. What were we thinking? This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen any more....
But there is this: she never ceases to surprise me.
I've often told people I've had 5 or 6 marriages, they've just all been to the same woman. And we have carved out different eras, like geological strata, one covering the one before, but you can dig down through them and excavate pieces of previous marriages.
For example, about the surprises me part: she came home from the grocery store today with a bag of dry food for our Cat, Luke. It is, like the food our dog eats, very healthy. Luke has dry food always available and wet food of one kind or another twice a day. He can be finicky about food, but he weighs about 20 pounds, so he's not starving.
I stated the obvious. "Luke won't eat this stuff."
And Bern said, unpacking bags and putting things away, "well, if he doesn't want to eat, it's just as well that he doesn't eat something that's good for him...."
I've been thinking about that ever since. There is a kind of logic to her thinking....and then, well, the logic implodes.
She's the practical one and I'm the one wandering through life as if there must be a point to it all if I could only find it.
"If he doesn't eat, it's best he doesn't eat what's good for him" is something I've been unable, in the several hours since she said it, to get my head around.
Then SURPRISE and confusion and serendipity might just be what causes people to hang out together fro nearly half a century.
I'm pondering that for a bit....
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