Watching Theology evolve

At the Convention of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut yesterday, I got to be present to watch Theology evolve.

Lots of Christians would be at odds with that statement. They would say that Theology is set, immutable and forever--it can't evolve.

But I watched it do just that on Resolution 11. You need to read it and then I'll explain.

RESOLUTION #11: COMMEND AND ADVANCE BAPTISMAL COVENANT LANGUAGE THAT REFLECTS OUR UNITY WITH ALL CREATION.

Resolved, that the 230th Convention of the Diocese of Connecticut receive with appreciation the good work of the Baptismal Covenant Working Group, extend its gratitude to the parishes that participated in the Baptismal Covenant creation language study, and comment the study report to the Episcopal church in Connecticut.

And be it further resolved, that this Convention submit to the 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church the proposed resolution and explanation contained in the study report:

        Resolved, the House of ______________ concurring, that the 78th General Convention
        authorize the trial addition to the Baptismal Covenant of a sixth question concerning
        our responsibility as baptized Christians to care for God's creation,
      
       And be it further Resolved, that the additional question and response be worded as follows:

                  "Will you cherish the wondrous works of God and protect the beauty and integrity of
                      all creation?"

                  "I will, with God's help.";

And be it further Resolved, that use of this additional question and response be authorized for trial use as part of the Baptismal Covenant for the triennium 2016-2018.

***

OK, that's a resolution to Diocesan Convention authorizing a resolution to General Convention. This is the way Episcopalians do things--in Byzantine configurations of complications and 'where-as-es' with lots of "be it further Resolved" (in which 'Resolved' is invariably capitalized) that move from one earthly level to another until finally approved by the 'triennial' (every three years) General Convention of all the kit and caboodle of bishops and priests and lay deputies. Amen.

I sat there wondering if anyone who didn't want Theology to evolve would get up to either speak against the motion or propose an amendment--an amendment, I imagined, to the title of the resolution. I didn't have to wait long.

A priest went to the microphone and began, haltingly, because I'm not sure he was clear about what was 'wrong', in his mind, about the resolution, to ask if he could amend the 'title'. Told by the Chancellor he could, he said, "I would like to amend the title to replace "unity with" with "stewardship of".

Bingo.

A passage from the book of Genesis 1.26: "Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'"

In the Creation story (I call it a 'story' rather than a 'myth' because many people think a 'myth' is simply false while 'stories' can contain profound truth) God gives the Creation to humankind. It 'belongs' to humans. It was 'made for' humans. Humans have 'dominion' over all the world.)

And it the amendment to Resolution #11 had passed, all would be well in Theology-land. Because Judeo-Christian theology has always held that humans were the pinnacle and fulfillment of Creation and 'owned' the world.

But the amendment failed, overwhelmingly. So the title of the Resolution that enabled another Resolution (from Connecticut to the General Convention) remained "in unity with" rather than "stewardship of".

The Diocese of Connecticut passed Resolution #11 overwhelmingly and, in so doing, undid 2000 years of theological belief that humans 'owned' the world rather than being 'in unity with' Creation.

I remember how, in the Regan years, Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, was challenged about government funds going to projects that were highly suspect environmentally. His response was along the lines of: it belongs to us, we can do whatever we want with it....

At Emmanuel Church in Killingworth today, we celebrated the Feast of Francis of Assisi and blessed animals. I talked about Resolution #11 in my sermon and how a wrong has been set right.

We don't 'own' the earth, we are simply a part of it. Creation doesn't 'belong' to human beings, we are merely rather a late addition to it. And our role is to seek to be 'in unity' with creation rather than 'having dominion' over it.

Theology evolves.

I saw it happen on Saturday.

And, if you don't mind me saying--About Time....

What keeps me humble...

I've not written a post for almost a week because I am such an incompetent computer user.

When I tried to go to The Castor Oil Tree on the 21st, I got a message from Google (where the blog is) that there was something wrong with my 'cookies and cache', neither of which I understood what they were. But there was a place to click to straighten it out, so click I did.

After 4 hours over 3 days of ineptitude, I gave up and called my friend John, who knows all sorts of stuff about my computer. He's the one who put it together and comes whenever I call "Help!" about something.

He came today and here I am. I didn't make it easy on him since I'd forgotten passwords and stuff. And then I remembered I didn't start the blog, a friend of mine at St. John's did years ago, so I'd been giving him the wrong user name and the forgotten passwords for the wrong user name!

It took him about an hour because of my stupidity and forgetfulness....

Remember the saying that goes: 'give someone a fish and they'll eat for a day; teach them to fish and they'll eat every day'? Well, I'm incapable of being taught to 'fish' with computers! So John  has to 'give me a fish' every so often!

It's probably good that I am so horribly bad with computers...it's the thing that keeps me humble. Every time I start thinking I pretty much have everything handled, I just remind myself what a dope I am with technology and restore myself to a realistic view of  my own abilities.

(A employer ask a potential employee, "What is your greatest weakness?"

The applicant replied, "my honesty."

The surprised boss said, "I don't think of honesty as a weakness."

"I don't give a damn what you think," said the not-to-be employed guy.)

Sweeping the deck

Our deck is surrounded by 7 evergreen trees. Most are hemlocks though there are a couple of long needle pines.

This time of year those 'evergreens' are not 'ever' by a long shot. They drop brown needles, some of them 3 inches long, and clusters of needles so consistently that we could sweep the deck hourly. Most of the problem with the droppings is our Puli goes out and lays on the deck and brings in a handful or more of needles and clusters. We pick them off as best we can, but he spreads them throughout the house.

What strikes me about all this is how sloughing off the past creates the future.

We do the same, you and I with hair and skin cells. We leave them behind and move on.

Go look at your hair brush and how much you've shed lately.

Nature is always renewing itself by casting off the old and getting ready for the new.

I love Autumn because I know all the fallen leaves and withered plants are simply to make room for what will break forth in the spring.

Things change...we can't stop that...but things renew and come forth again.

Nature teaches us that.

We should ponder it.

Really.

a bird's life

Yesterday I was up here in my little office where I am writing this when I heard a crash downstairs.

I went down and our cat, Luke, had knocked over a huge vine on a trellis just by the back window at the bottom of the back staircase. (We have stairs just inside the front door and another set in the back of the house at the end of our kitchen, sitting room area.)

I went outside to find Bern so we could clean it up (she did most of the cleaning since all the plants--that have come in from the deck for the cold--are her domain). Lukie wouldn't stay away from the window no matter how we shooed him away and when the plant was upright again, Bern realized there was a bird trapped between the window and the storm window/screen contraption.

I went outside and realized the storm window had a three inch gap at the top and that's how the bird got inside. The cat had freaked him/her out so much that she/he couldn't figure out how to find the gap at the top. There was a gap at the bottom where the bird could escape because the screen was down and the storm window up there. But again, the cat had the bird freaked out.

I shut Luke up in our bedroom and Bern put some of our parakeet's seeds on the window bottom and eventually the bird came down and flew away.

In the midst of all the unspeakable horror of war and pestilence and unrest in the world, giving a bird back his/her life is surely not worth mentioning.

But it felt wonderful to know the bird would live on and not die in our window.

Little things that you can control matter so much in the face of global things you can't control

Ponder that and notice the little things of life a little more. Turn off CNN and never turn on Fox News and be present to life's small gifts and wonders.

That's what I intend to do, more and more.

I just realized

I just realized that Daylight Savings Time begins on November 2 this year.

'Fall back' comes on All Saints' Sunday!

I still have to think a bit more since linear time confounds me to decide if I get an hour more sleep or an hour less. Right now I'm betting it's an hour more.

I also found out, as I researched this a bit on line, that different places in the country and the world, give the hour back at different times by law or something. How crazy is that? Does it matter if we fall back from midnight to 11 p.m. or from 3 a.m. to 2 a.m.? Aren't we all mostly asleep when this happens? Can't I just set my clock back when I go to bed--or even sometime Saturday afternoon? What difference does it make? It's just an hour, after all.

But since Christians are so consumed with worrying about stuff that, in the galactic scheme of things makes no difference: like whether a woman can be a priest or whether a woman can have an abortion or whether a woman and man can practice birth control or whether fetal stem cells can be used to cure horrific diseases or whether two men and two women can love each other enough to be married (all of which I would say a resounding YES! to) shouldn't we be worried instead that the time change always takes place on a Sunday and impacts Christian worship more than anything else?

And changing the clocks on All Saints' Sunday violates the sanctity of one of the most high Holy Days of the church calendar. Come on people, that gives us one more meaningless things to be huffy about.

There is a resolution to our annual Diocesan Convention, signed by people I love, that seeks to keep people from calling their male priests "Father".

The mid-East is involved in a war that might consume it ultimately. Hong Kong is a nightmare. Ebola is killing people faster than we can count. The distance between rich and poor in this, the richest country in the world, grows more disparate every day. Europe is still mired in the recession we have escaped.

What people call their priest seems, how to say it without causing offense?--well, there is no way, stupid and meaningless.

I told someone today that a 'non-gender' title for an Episcopal priest could be "ass-hole".

That could work. "Ass-hole Bradley"...I'd answer to that....

Lord help the Church to take it's eyes away from it's navel for just a moment....just a moment.

Hard to tell it's done in the dark

I love to grill. I do all the meat stuff (hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, pork roasts, chicken, lots of kind of fish) but I do vegetables as well (peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, asparagus, potatoes, onions, mushrooms, etc.)

But when fall comes, things get iffy.

Our grill in on the deck (charcoal, thank you, a Weber) and I never use lighter fluid, a chimney with newspaper is my way. But, although there is a light on our back porch, it doesn't quite illuminate the deck and since we eat at 7, telling if something is done in near darkness is hard.

Tonight I did some marinated tuna (lemon and oil and pepper mostly, with some other spices) and it was so dark I couldn't tell if it was done, fully cooked.

Finally I just took it off to take it in the kitchen and check and discovered it was just right. I've taken to buying fish and everything else in two thicknesses since Bern likes everything more done than I do. My thick filet was pink in the middle and her thinner piece was cooked through white all the way.

It was very good, thank the sea and my grill and good luck.

But, unless I grill in the daylight, grilling is probably over for the year. It is plum dark at 7 in mid-October. And we're about to go back on Eastern Standard time so soon it will be too dark to grill before 6.

Too bad. I love to grill.

Cabbage core

Back when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother 'up on the hill'--which is how we described where she lived. I had 4 Pugh cousins and 2 Perkins cousins who lived nearer her. The Pugh's (children of my uncle Lee and aunt Juanette) lived across the red-dog road from Mammaw Jones. Bradley and Mejol Perkins lived in a house half-way down the hill.

I lived about 5 miles away.

Mejol was my youngest cousin and she's five years older than me. All the others (Duane, Joel, Marlin and Gayle along with Mejol's brother, Bradley) were even older. I was the baby of the brood and alternatively spoiled rotten and harassed by them--except for Mejol. She was my line of defense from the boys.

Whenever my grandmother fried cabbage on her wood cooking stove (and she fried it a lot: cabbage was a food group on my mother's side of the family...the Bradley's seldom ate it) whichever cousins were there would fight over the core. Cabbage core was one of the treats of my childhood. Usually we'd go to great lengths to divide it up.

It is crisp and sweet and better with salt with a little tang of something earthy.

I thought about it because I fried cabbage (not on a wood cooking stove, by the way) earlier this week, and I carefully saved the core.

As I've been writing this, I've been eating it, with garlic salt, because I can.

You know how lots of foods from the past don't live up to your memory when you eat them in today?

Let me tell you this: cabbage core does!

While I've been writing and eating (cabbage core with white wine--that's not from my childhood!) I've been tasting my grandmother's kitchen, up on the hill, so long ago.

(A week or two ago, I fixed myself a turkey sandwich on white bread with mayo, iceberg lettuce and bread and butter pickles. It's a sandwich that the women of one of the Black churches in Anawalt, WV, when I was a boy, would sell. We didn't socialize with Black folks back then, but we bought their food....I always remembered those as the best sandwiches I ate growing up. The one I made myself almost lived up to the memory. I'll try again after Thanksgiving since I think the key is that the turkey come from a bird, not the Deli.)

But cabbage core....Lordy, Lordy, it was like being with my cousins again! Back at Mammaw's house, with the smell of frying cabbage in the air.

I've realized between this and the cabbage rolls Bern made today, that cabbage is one of my favorite vegetables. An slaw...I love slaw. And sour kraut, how good is that?

I'd probably forget to put cabbage on the list for my final meal...but I hope not.