Palm Sunday

I don't preach on Palm Sunday since the Passion is read and what is there to say about the Passion.

But if I did, this year, this might be what I would have said.

PALM SUNDAY 2013

We make it to be much more of a spectacle than it most likely was.

For us, nearly 2000 years later, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is a time of triumph and celebration. Yet, at the time, it was a parade most likely hardly noticed.

It certainly wasn’t like the kind of parades we know—nothing like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or local 4^th of July parades, or the parades last month for St. Patrick, never mind the Rose Bowl Parade. It was most likely a tiny band of marchers—made up of those disciples who had been following him for months or years and the people who lived outside the city walls who had heard of this strange, charismatic teacher from Galilee.

Most of the people weren’t expecting him and most of the populace of Jerusalem never saw the procession of palms and cloaks and the country rabbi on a colt or a donkey—we’re not even sure which. No dignitaries came to greet him—none of the Pharisees or Sadducee's or occupying Romans. In fact, the whole thing was probably over so quickly that even if people inside the city walls heard of the rag-tag parade, they wouldn’t have had time to rush to the Gate of the City he entered to see him.

We don’t even know which of the Gates of the walled city he entered. The Jerusalem that Jesus knew is buried under a half-dozen destructions and rebuildings now. Jerusalem’s gates in the 1^st century are not the ones in today’s city walls.

Most likely, since he was coming from Bethany, he came up from the Kiddron Valley to whatever gate was on the south side of the city. But we don’t know.

All we know about the event is what we have in the gospel stories—and even they are not consistent.

So, why is Palm Sunday such an important day in our lives as Christians?

Maybe it is important, not because what happened as Jesus approached the city of Jerusalem—which direction he came from, which gate he entered, how many people greeted him as the Messiah with Palms and Alleluias. Maybe Palm Sunday is important because of what happened after he got there.

The rest of the week is not so full of bravado and joy and excitement as the story of the procession. Things go sour right away—and five short days from now, seemingly all of Jerusalem is calling for Jesus’ death. Even his closest friends deny him and go into hiding.

It is not what happens “outside” the gate of the Holy City that we need to begin to consider, but what happens “inside” the city walls.

The Palm Sunday account actually leaves us still outside Jerusalem.

Perhaps the question we need to ask is not “will we welcome Jesus to the City?" Perhaps the question we need to ask is this: ‘WILL WE GO WITH HIM INTO JERUSALEM AND STAY WITH HIM OVER THE NEXT WEEK?’

For me, I guarantee you, the answer to that is not the answer I wish, in my weakness and fear and brokenness, that I could give. My answer falls far short of the one I long to give….

“YES, LORD,” I long to proclaim, “I’M WITH YOU TO THE END!”

And I know better. I too will betray and abandon and hide in fear. My answer falls far short.

But at least I’m asking the right question….

bulk trash week

I was out on the back porch, smoking a cigarette (actually, I smoked two, we smokers need to be honest about our addiction and such a marvelous spring afternoon demanded a two cigarette break) and saw four pick up trucks with stuff in the back, cruising down Cornwall Avenue real slow.

It's bulk trash season in Cheshire, which brings out the bulk trash collectors in droves. Cheshire is, I suppose, a tad more upscale than I think of it, and some people's bulk trash is another person's treasure.

I'm going to clean out our basement tomorrow. There are at least half-a-dozen bikes from our children's history down there and two push mowers (Bern used her brother's Amazon gift card to get a new push mower--I'm so dim that I didn't know you could get anything but books from Amazon....) And lawn furniture to die for and at least three Webber grills and lots of other stuff that is 'trash' to us and my make another person's day.

I missed this morning's breakfast with the Cluster's officers to plan the Cluster Council meeting on Tuesday. I got up, walked the dog, had breakfast and then Jean called me on our land line (I had no idea where my cell phone was) to make sure I was ok. I felt like an idiot. It was on my calendar on my computer but I seldom turn my computer on before early afternoon and I plum forgot about the breakfast. What an idiot.

I could blame it on the Saturday being the wrong one since we put off the Cluster Council meeting a week to let people see the UConn women win it all. But that won't fly. The truth is, I am so good at being retired that I seldom know what day it is prior to lunch since most all days are mine to spend as I wish. I set my alarm on Monday night and Saturday night so I can go to my clericus meeting on Tuesday and make it to church on Sunday. Other than that, I sleep until I wake up and don't worry about what day it is at all.

If I had set my clock, I would have gone to Durham and been there, but, in the midst of a book I really loved, I forgot when I got into bed.

What an idiot of the first degree.

It's the second time I've forgotten about a 'officers' breakfast'. I have no excuse whatsoever. And, for today, I feel like a total and irredeemable idiot. The problem is, for me, that my ego is about the size of Montana and the two Dakotas combined and by tomorrow, I won't feel guilty anymore.

One of my mantras is this: "guilt goes away...."

I'm not sure that's true for many people, but it is for me. That capacity to simply let go of guilt may be a good thing for me in lots of ways. But I'm not sure it ultimately is good. Seems to me Jews and Roman Catholics are lots better than me at sustaining guilt....

I need to ponder guilt and why it is so easy for me to let it go. I apologize profusely and simply assume forgiveness. Maybe I should try to make myself get more deeply into the occasional guilt I feel (I really don't do much of anything I should feel guilty about--besides forgetting meetings) or perhaps I could do a cottage industry in teaching people how to let guilt go.

Give me some time to ponder all this.

And if you want some bikes that are basically sound but need new tires, or a push mower or two...cruise down Cornwall Avenue on Monday.....

"wilting greens"

Tonight I was sauteing baby spinach to eat with chicken cordon blu and roasted baby potatoes and I remembered how my mother, all through the spring and summer and well into the fall, would "wilt" the greens my father picked.

He would pick them in our yard and my Uncle Russel's yard and the lot where we played baseball and football and in the mountains all around us. And my mother would "wilt" them, what I use a fancy french term to describe. She would 'saute' them in a frying pan with a little butter and oil and salt and pepper (I add garlic, which wouldn't have been on her 'food radar') and we would eat them as a side to whatever else we were eating. Certainly not chicken cordon blu in the home of my childhood. We spoke and ate nothing French.

But what I thought about was those 'greens' that my father found in the wild. In my memory there was a trace of arugula in it all--that peppery taste--but 'arugula' would not have been spoken in my childhood.

My father, only one generation removed from me, was a 'hunter-gatherer'. We had rabbit and squirrel as well as wild greens. And I am incapable of any of that. The 'hunter-gatherer' has disappeared from our line. The only 'green' I remember a name for was what my father called "English Plankton". There were at least a half-dozen other wild plants that went into our 'wilted greens' but I have no memory of their names. Even then, when I'd accompany  him in his gathering, all they looked like were weeds to me. Dandelion too, how could I have forgotten that? The greens from those little yellow flowers that turned to wisps of seeds borne by fluffy white that we blew away each summer. Dandelions and English Plankton. What else, I wonder, went into the 'wilted greens' that were a staple of our diet?

At least I remember the gathering my father would do. My children have no memory of eating out of the yard and my granddaughters, I think, believe greens of any kind were grown in a supermarket.

Does anyone out there still gather greens from the wild? What are some of the names? Email me at Padrejgb@aol.com if you have names. I only look at blog comments every few months.

They were good--those 'wilted greens', as I remember. I love 'greens' (sauteed or 'wilted') from collards to beet greens to arugula to spinach. I've become especially fond of root vegetables (parsnips, beets, turnips, like that) and greens as I age.

I wish I could go gather them in the wild.

What I really wanted to do....

I'm sure I've written this before in some shape or size, but, it's MY blog, so I can write what I want to....

All I ever wanted to do since, I don't know, Junior High School, was to teach. I came from two families of teachers--my mother and two of her sisters and my favorite first cousin on that side and an aunt and several 1st cousins on my father's side. Teachers: that's who we were. I was an English major, for Christ's sake--what else can they do other than teach or work at McDonald's?


In my senior year of college I had already been accepted into several Ph.D. programs, including the University of Virginia, which would have been my choice, when two professors of mine nominated me for a Rockefeller "Trial year in seminary" award. I kept telling people I didn't want to go to seminary and got it. So, for reasons I'm not yet sure about, I went to Harvard Divinity School. The rest is history.

Well, not so fast sweet-lips, tomorrow my latest class at the UConn branch in Waterbury starts. Since I retired I've been teaching every other semester in the Osher Life-long Learning Institute. It's not freshman English or Hemingway's Novels, but it is in a college and there are people who want to be there (over 50) on the edge of their seats, wanting to learn.

So, after all these years, in a real sense, I'm getting to do what I really always wanted to do.

Don't tell me life isn't full of Irony...and wonder...and completion....

Thank goodness and the Good Lord....

"The times they are (really not) achangin'...."

We spent the evening, Bern and I, with Mike and Mary Miano. We tried to remember the last time we'd seen each other. I was no help whatsoever since I am lost and awash in linear time for the most part. Mike had some suggestions, though my vagueness about time didn't even let me remember the years he thought of.

This I know, we went to high school together--Mike and Bern and I, though he was a year ahead of me and Bern three behind me. But we all knew each other. It was impossible in a school that graduated under a hundred a year not to know almost everyone.

And Mike and I were college roommates for a year and knew each other and saw each other many times during the other years at WVU.

Suffice it to say, it's been decades...maybe almost 40 years...since we've all been in a room together.

And tonight we were.

I was a tad anxious about their coming by--they live near Bristol, Virginia, in south-western Virginia are driving around the East Coast and the New England states. Just driving around, no destination, looking for historic stuff to do with Presidents. They've been on the road for over a week and plan to be (if 'plan' is a word to apply to their agenda!) for up to another week. (I have real difficulty identifying with this kind of vacation...I want to go somewhere and stare out at the ocean for as long as I can...but when they describe it, it seems almost like fun.)

I was a tad anxious because so many years have passed and people, as people do, tend to change. Mike and I were very close friends for many years in our teens and 20's. But we aren't in our teens and 20's anymore. I wondered if there would be enough connective tissue left from so long ago a relationship to enable us to move together.

I shouldn't have worried. It was remarkable how quickly the decades slipped away and the 4 of us were (not 'young again', God knows!) but still the same people, only more so, that we had been back then.

Mike isn't 'crazy' anymore. And he was one of the 'craziest' people I've ever known. But then, again, neither am I. There are more than a couple of things we did back then that neither of us would want any of you to know about! (Actually, if I'm honest, Mike was a good degree 'crazier' than I was. But I tend to attract 'crazy' and really resonate to it.) But, incredibly, in 4+ hours in our kitchen and a local restaurant, the decades didn't matter, didn't matter at all. The connective tissue survived the time. We are, remarkably, much the same people who liked each other so much so long ago. What a gift!

Bern and I will be married 44 years in September. Mike and Mary will be married 44 years in April 2014. Two old married couples separated for decades, both with a boy child and girl child--never having met each others' children, I think--both with three grandchildren (all boys for Mike and Mary, all girls for Bern and I). Lots in common, but most of our lives 'since then', very different. Mike was a mining engineer. I was a priest. Mike and Mary mostly lived below the Mason Dixon Line and Bern and I lived mostly in Connecticut.

And, as far as I'm concerned, all the twists and turns our lives had taken over the last 3 or 4 decades were dissolved in 3 or 4 hours tonight. Friendship, perhaps, endures in ways we don't automatically imagine are possible. That, if nothing else, gives a sweetness and value to life that should be unconcealed and celebrated. Really.

Mike had in his pocket tonight a pocket cross that I left in his couch or somewhere the last time I saw him. In emails and occasional communications over all these years, I have inquired about my pocket cross. And he has told me, over and again, he would give it to me only in person. As I was writing this, my phone rang. It was Mike, leaving a message that he would put the cross in an envelope and send it to me. I called him back and told him that 'possession in 9/10ths of the law and he had had it much, much longer than I ever did and it was meant to be his. Then he told me about a silver money clip I gave him when he and Mary got married (did I remember that? No!) and so he had two silver things from me.

That is as it should be. Mike deserves silver from me (gold, actually, but I'm not there to give it).

I don't know if you, reading this, can begin to imagine how finding a friend over the tides and times and flotsam and jetsam of all those years can be so precious, so rare, so very fragrant and sweet...something to ponder as years speed by and life grows shorter each year.

What a wondrous gift this day has been....Really....

Early post--G of T

I have to write early today because Game of Thrones, season 4 starts tonight and I'm a total "Thrones Junkie."

I even watched about 20 minutes of a U-Tube show called 'Screen Junkies' to review the plots (at least some of them) of the first three seasons.

It was my son, Josh, who got me into the books. Ten pages and I was hooked. I've read them all and the TV show is actually, so far, remarkably faithful to the stories. The one piece of advice Josh gave me was this: "don't get too attached to any of the characters...."

George R. R. Martin, the inventor of the series, subtitled "A song of ice and fire", tends to kill off key characters at an alarming rate.

If you're not at all familiar with Game of Thrones, it is a fantasy series set in an imaginary world that, in terms of development, is roughly in what we would call the 'dark ages' of our own history. The 'iron throne' of the 7 Kingdoms is in King's Landing. There is a North and South and then lands across the sea to the east. It is bloody and moody and full of violence from beginning to end. The fifth book came out in 2011 and the sixth is due, Lord help us, soon I hope....I'm like a Thrones addict that needs another hit.

Anyway, it's on HBO tonight and I'll be glued to it with a copy of A Dance with Dragons, book Five, because Martin has a list of characters at the end of the novels so I can remind myself who is who. (The list of characters takes up pages 995-1016, so you can understand how one might get confused from time to time!) Plus, Bern loves the show but never read the books--all of which are about 1000 pages long and I have to be able to give her some clue about what's going on.

My favorite surviving characters are Daenerys Targaryen, 'the mother of dragons', who has three and wants the Throne her father once held before being murdered. Tyrion Lannister, the only 'good' Lannister, a dwarf with a claim to the throne as well, whose awful nephew, Joeffrey, sits on it now. And Arya Stark, an 11 year old who is wandering the Kingdoms with a character called 'the Hound' trying to avenge her father's murder by Joeffrey.

According to the books thus far, those three will still be around at the end of season 4. I sincerely hope and pray so.

Watch it--it will confuse the hell out of you if you've not read the books or seen the first three seasons, but it is gloriously entertaining....

"Well, bless your heart...."

OK, this is a first--a requested post!

Ray Anderson, a wonderful, funny man who happens to play scratch golf and is an Episcopal priest (formerly the Missioner to the Deaf Community of Connecticut) emailed me to ask me to write a blog about the expression, "well, bless your heart...."

He'd heard it often traveling in the south and wondered what my take on it was.

Since I'm an Appalachian and not a Southerner, my take won't be 'the whole story', but I've known enough true Southerners to have a clue...and I heard the saying several times a day growing up. People down below the Mason Dixon line tend to say "well, bless your heart..." the way folks up here say 'have a nice day...." Like that.

Tennessee  Ernie Ford, anyone remember him? used to say, at the end of his radio and then his TV show, "Bless your pea-pickin' hearts". That was a Tennessee thing, apparently, since I've never picked a pea in my life.

Ray suggested that there was a lot of variety to the use of the phrase, and he is SO right.

First question: do they mean your actual, physical organ called 'the heart' or something metaphorical and nuanced? Both actually.

When it's a child--almost always said lovingly and with great affection--'well, bless your little heart...', I think refers to the rapidly beating, adult fist sized pumping machine in the middle of their chest that is keeping them alive and being charming and lovable.

When it's someone in distress or pain, no matter what age, it's a metaphorical, symbolic reference to the 'life-force' that might sustain them through their suffering.

Sometimes, it seems to me, it also refers to mental functions--like with someone working through a psychological issue. "Well, bless your heart...", then can mean, 'keep up your spirits', or 'don't let the bastards get you down' or even, 'I know this is going to be your ruin, but I'm hoping for you to get through it....'

But 'bless your heart' can, from time to time, turn malignant and ironic.

Like: 'I just got accepted to Harvard!' 'Well, bless your heart...(you're getting above your raising, aren't you smart ass?')

Or: 'I'm moving to New York City!' 'Well bless your heart...(where you grew up isn't good enough for you is it?')

Or: 'I'm marrying my Chinese sweetheart!' 'Well, bless your heart...(you're children won't have a chance in hell 'round here.')

Or: "Grandma, I need to tell you, I'm coming out as a lesbian.' 'Well bless your heart...(you just broke mine, you pervert...!')

Stuff like that.

It's a 'fits all situations' kind of phrase.

Have a good day....