It's getting darker...

Every day these days dawn comes a little later and dusk a little sooner. Darkness falls, literally.

But not for too many more days--just before Christmas the Light expands--little by little, each day--until the Summer Solstice in far away June.

Light and Darkness are remarkable symbols as well as a reality. That Advent, in the Northern Hemisphere, comes at a time of gathering Darkness makes leaning toward the Light more powerful. And that Easter comes when Spring arrives is also a wondrous symbol. (I'm sure Christians in the Southern Hemisphere get it done--more of us there than in the north these days--but the symbolism is skewed.)

But this year the gathering Darkness is a metaphor for the political situation as well.

Fear is controlling a great number of people--fear of violence, fear of terrorism, fear of the unknown--seems to be driving the national conversation.

Here's what I think (even if you didn't ask me!) the opposite of Fear is not Courage...it's Hope.

Courage can confront Fear, but usually violently and with loss of dignity and humanity and possibility.

Hope, on the other hand, obliterates Fear and Darkness by looking beyond them to something better, something more noble, something that gives dignity to human life.

Living in Hope looks like this: remaining rational in the face of nonsense; remaining resolute in the face of un-knowing; remaining calm in the face of hysteria; remaining compassionate in the face of anger; remaining welcoming in the face of division; remaining loving in the face of hate.

I choose to live in Hope, even in these dark days. I choose to live in hope in spite of the hopelessness around me. I choose to live in Hope and even Joy as the Darkness gathers. I simply choose to live in Hope.

That's the remarkable thing about facing Darkness--we still have a 'choice'. We are not dis-armed. We can 'choose' Hope and Joy.

Hope and Joy aren't things that 'happen', they are things we 'choose'.

Imagine the power and possibility in being able to 'choose'.

It is the thing that shows us our 'better selves'--this ability to 'choose' the Light in a time of Darkness, to choose Hope in a time of Fear.

Choose well, my friends. Choose well....

Shalom, jim

pain in the butt

Any time I click on anything on my new Widows 10 computer, a box shows up that gives me every option besides the one I want--just keep doing what I'm trying to do. It is so frustrating I'm almost ready to try to put together my old computer so I can blog without all the interruptions. And when I hit backspace to erase something, the cursor jumps back to the beginning of the typing.

Maddening is what it is and and I have no idea how to fix it. (for example, I just hit 'x' in 'fix' one more time than I meant to and it took me a minute or so to 'fix' fix. How crazy is that?) And I wanted to add the ) and had to work to do that.

When your computer is smarter than you are, you're in trouble.

And it's a pain in the butt.

Just to let you know, I realized I'd written 'it' a pain' rather than 'it's a pain' and it took me about a minute and a half because boxes kept popping up when all I wanted to do was write a 's'.

How stupid is that--or how stupid am I? Same result.

Moving to Canada

I got a voice message from a friend today telling me we should have lunch before she moves to Canada. She went on to explain that if Donald Trump is elected President, she's gone!

What once seemed and impossibility, Trump being nominated, is becoming, each day, less impossible and veering toward 'possible', if not 'probable'. And, if not the Donald, most experts say, the next in line is Ted Cruz, who is to me even more frightening since Cruz has no comic relief factor.

But something that happened this week that makes me feel 'northern bound' more than Trump and Cruz is the advice given to students at Liberty University by Liberty's President, Jerry Falwell, Jr. Falwell advised students of the school to get gun permits and guns to 'shoot Muslims' if they came to campus to attack.

I was having lunch on Wednesday with three ministers from the Higganum area--we did an ecumenical Thanksgiving service together at St. James. The Congregationalist minister brought up Falwell's statement and another minister from a non-denominational sort of Mega-church said, "I'm not defending him, but we should hear it in context...."

What context, I wanted to know. He didn't say to have guns to shoot white people who walk into a Black Church and murder people or to shoot people who walk into a Planned Parenthood office to murder people or a white man who walked into a school in Newtown to murder innocent children and their teachers. Falwell said 'Muslims'. And even that pales in light of having a college campus armed to the teeth!

I'll probably never go to that clergy meeting again, though that's part of the problem too. I should go back to engage that minister in a conversation about guns and college students and Muslims. He's otherwise a kind, good man. I shouldn't avoid him but engage him.

Part of the problem is that we seldom engage and have conversation with people we disagree with. We are so polarized and divided into 'sides' that there's no interchange across the gaps. I'm not sure Trump or Cruz can be reasoned with, but maybe this minister could be. Maybe. Perhaps I should try at least that before leaving for Canada--a country with more guns per capita than the US and almost no history of mass shootings.

But Canada is so cold....

A couple of things about my new computer

OK, the games. I had Hearts on my old computer and I won about 51% of the time--which is crazy enough. But Hearts on my new computer, I'm winning 66% of the time! Ridiculous.

The computer players obviously don't know anything about hearts. They don't try to smoke out the Queen of Spades. In fact, I hold onto the Queen even if I only have a couple of Spades since I know they'll play diamonds and clubs and I can drop the Queen on the. Also, if they're the 4th to play and the high card is a seven, they'll take it with an eight and then lead the Queen of the same suite. Any Hearts player knows if you can take a non-hearts hand you throw your highest card. And they sometimes throw the Queen of Spades when they have other spades to play--just take 13 points for no reason and then lead a 4 of diamonds or something. Really awful. I'm planning on downloading the Hearts I had on the old computer. I love to win--but not 67% of the time.

Also, I click almost anything and a whole bunch of options show up in a box. I click to get rid of the box and they just move. Annoying at best.

When I'm deleting emails from people in Nigeria or some diet plan I don't want, I can only delete one at a time because when I click on the second, a box pops up with options I don't want and erases the check in the box of the junk email before.

Maybe I'll figure it out some day. But right now, it's just uber-annoying....

Aunt Elsie II

I was Aunt Elsie and Uncle Harvey's 'substitute child' for many years. They were childless and I was the youngest of 15 Jones family kids. So I would go each summer to spend a week with them--which, for me, was wonderful--coming from a southern West Virginia town of 500 to a suburb of Charleston, the state Capitol and a small city of 70,000, was an adventure.

The only weird thing was how, each night, before bed, we had to kneel down on our knees and say prayers. Uncle Harvey and Aunt Elsie were very devout. He was a Nazarene minister and she was his partner in running the church--musician, Sunday school teacher, accompanying him on pastoral visits. So we knelt down to pray before bed. Her prayers were short and sweet. His were loud and long. Mine were whispered and almost non-existent.

No TV in their house and the radio tuned to a Christian station. My parents were devout, but nothing like Elsie and Harvey.

When I was in high school, they adopted Denise, who was 6 or 7 at the time. She shook up their world. A TV appeared in their house. Lots of things changed. A child, at their age, made life different than it ever was.

When I was 11 or 12, during my summer visit, Aunt Elsie tried to teach me to play piano. I was an awful student but did learn a short song I can still play today. My father and mother came to pick me up and Elsie told me to go play my song. My father said, "Jimmy, we're trying to talk, can you stop that racket?"

Aunt Elsie explained to him that it was a song I had learned. He asked me to play it for him and I refused. Fathers and sons stuff. We hurt each other whenever we could.

Much later, when I was going off to Harvard Divinity School, my Uncle Harvey told me: "it's bad enough you're an Episcopalian. Don't go up there and become a Unitarian."

I think I answered something like this: "Episcopalians are really Unitarians with pageantry..." Something like that.

He was never comfortable with my Anglican leanings. Elsie didn't mind--was even interested, just glad I was a part of the Christian world....

Aunt Elsie

My last aunt died last week. On my mother's side I had: Aunts--Georgie, Juanette, Elsie and Elsie Mae (two Elsie's, can you beat that!) Uncles--Lee, Harvey, Jim and Graham. And two uncles--Leon and Edward, who died before I was born.

On my father's side, I had Uncle Russell and Aunt Gladys, Uncle Sid and Aunt Callie (who was also the daughter of my maternal grandmother's brother--making her my second cousin as well as aunt--hey, this was Appalachia, ok? Sid and Callie's children, Greg and Sarita, called me their 'double first cousin', though that wasn't accurate exactly) Uncle Del and Aunt  Ola, Uncle Les and Aunt Louise.

18 aunts and uncles--and Elise, my mother's younger sister was the last to die. My cousin Mejol and I talked about how we no have no generational buffer--we are next in line for 'that good night'....

Elsie was 90 just a few months before her death. I didn't go to her party at my cousin Jan's house, though 8 of my living first cousins did. Four are dead, so only 3 of the living ones weren't there. I sent a present--a cross I wore on years of Sundays and Aunt Elsie wrote to tell me she valued that gift more than any. And now she's dead.

She had a Ph.d in Theology from a Nazarene seminary and taught seminarians and was eventually head of the branch seminary in South Charleston, West Virginia. She also taught public school for 35 years or more.

She was the first member of my mother's family to go to college. But my Aunt Georgie (Mejol's mother) and my mother eventually got Master's degrees in Education and taught school for decades. All of them were from a dirt-poor Jones family that valued education. Bless them all.

So, I drove to Baltimore last Thursday and spent the night with Mejol and the two of us drove to Charleston--6 hours--the next day. We went to the wake at the Charleston Nazarene church (open coffin,which I could have done without) and the funeral the next day.

Nazarene's talk about their 'Wesleyan' heritage. The Methodist broke from the Anglican church (though both Wesley brothers were buried as Anglicans) because Anglicans weren't strict enough. Then the Wesleyan Church broke from the Methodists because they weren't strict enough. Then the Nazarene Church broke from the Wesleyan Church because they weren't strict enough. I wanted to tell the minister at the funeral that I was a priest in his 'home church' but didn't.

The funeral (closed coffin, thank God) was actually called, in the bulletin, "A Celebration of the Life of Elsie Jones Ours". I appreciated that.

And the only thing in the service that offended me--and I expected to be much more offended--was that the preacher recounted several pastoral conversations he had with Aunt Elsie in here last days. In the Episcopal Church, such conversations are sacrosanct--'seal of the confessional' private. Not to be replayed ever, not ever. And the thing that was worst about him doing that was that it was obvious he  told the stories to show what a good pastor he was.

My Aunt Elsie was, besides my maternal grandmother--Lina Manona Sadler Jones--the most devout and godly woman I've ever known. Nothing that man could have said to her would have improved her godliness. That offended me greatly.

I saw five first cousins I haven't seen for at least a decade or more: John Michael, Richard and Jan (all my Uncle Graham Jones and Elsie Mae Taylor Jones' children) and Joel and Gayle (children of Juanette Jones and Lee Pugh). They all looked exactly how I imagined they would look all these years later. Reason enough to drive 10 hours back and forth.

More about all this and other things later. Be well and stay well....

At last...

It took my friend, John Anderson, nearly 2 hours but he finally got me to the Castor Oil Tree on my new computer! I have tried to do it every day since I first got the computer. I could have never, in a thousand years have done it.

The problem was, I was trying to get to it through my email, having forgotten that when a woman at St. John's sat it up, she did it on a g-mail account....

At long last, I'm back!

Lots to write about later. For now just wanted to let you know I'm here....