YOU DON'T WANT TO READ THIS!!! PLEASE BELIEVE ME!!!

Two horrible things you don't want to read--PLEASE BELIEVE ME!!!--go watch something on U-Tube, call your sister, read a good book...anything, just don't read this....

OK, I'm not responsible.


The other day I was with a person who makes me totally and absolutely irrational. This person brings out the very worst in me and my 'worst' is pretty bad. I don't know why it is so, but it is. I can't be around this person without being a crazy person.

I could blame their opinions--which do make me homicidal. I could blame their demeanor, which is (to me) smug and superior. I could blame their personality, which totally conflicts with mine: I tend, in my first approach, to joke about almost everything. But when I run into someone who seems devoid of humor as I understand it, I revert to my reptilian personality and strike out.

And all that happened the other day. I was an ass-hole in front of people I genuinely admired and like. I lashed out like a madman and said things I deeply regret--not because I didn't mean them, but because they were so inappropriate in a social setting.

And what I've come to realize is I've met my Samaritan.

Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan drove good Jews over the edge. Samaritans, didn't Jesus know, were 'the other', the 'evil ones', those to be shunned. What right did he have to make them look at a Samaritan that was not only 'good' but better than the three moral Jews in the story?

What I've come to see is that the next time I'm with the person who makes me a maniac, I have to realized God sent them to me to find the nobility in them I am unable, unwilling, reluctant to see.

First, I will apologize to them. Sincerely. And share with them my epiphany that they are God's gift to me to make me a better person, to find the 'noble' and 'good' in them. To 'appreciate' them.

I will do that and apologize to the others who were there.

And, believe this beloved, this is one of the hardest things I've ever written. I told you not to read it and hope you didn't.

I am humiliated by recognizing my 'Samaritan' and acknowledging why God sent them to me--and how much I need, for my own soul, to embrace and welcome them.....

Fog

Yesterday, driving to church in Killingworth, I drove through the worst fog I remember driving through. Coming home was second worst....

And that's from a guy from the fog capitol, Southern West Virginia. Mountains and moisture and rapidly shifting temperature make for a log of fog a lot of the time.

But yesterday was Epic Fog.

Between Durham and Killingworth on Routes 79 and 80, it was ghostly, the whole landscape. Not to mention that part of CT looks more like WV than any other.

I actually like the fog.

You could do worse than pull over to the side of the road and just get out and stand in the fog.

It's an apt metaphor, in many ways, for how I go through life, just feeling myself along, straining to see the right direction, hoping I'm not going to fast.

Being lost in a Cloud is an image from Christian mysticism for seeking God or the Holy.

Not a bad place to be--'the Cloud of Unknowing'.

"Knowing" is well over rated. 'Unknowing'...now, that's getting someplace even if the view isn't clear and directions are difficult and 'seeking' becomes a way of being....

Next good fog, go out and 'be there'....

You'll thank me for it.

a week away....

With a coating of snow, it's not hard to believe Christmas is a week away--but the temperatures forecast for the next week are back in the 40's, maybe even 50 on Christmas Day!

Bern has spent the day rearranging furniture! I stay out of the way!!! I would probably never move a piece of furniture across the room, much less upstairs to downstairs. I just lay low and pray she doesn't hurt herself since I'm still no help because of my knee immobilizer.

Plus, she doesn't want me helping anyway....

First it was the candy houses that focused her for days. Today, and probably tomorrow, whole rooms with be transformed by her single-handily. Bless her energy. I'll just stay out of the way.

I've already finished and illustrated her story for this year and since she only drove me away for one day, she must have finished whatever she made me.

Our children know to donate money--hopefully to pet rescue groups--for our presents.

My little gifts are all in bags on the table beside me.

We've discussed the Christmas Day menu.

All that's missing are the kids/their spouses and the grand-daughters....

But that's good enough to wait for a few more days.

Waiting, after all, is what Advent's about. It just makes the gift sweeter to wait on it....

ok, now it's New England

Today I'd been driving and when I started to get out of the car--still awkward because of my knee immobilizer--the wind blew the cold, cold air against the car door and shut it on my good leg!

I've lived in New England for 36 years (+2 years in Cambridge for Grad School)--that's 38 years, It's 55% of my life that I've been a resident of the (thankfully) blue-state New England. There's an old joke in Connecticut: the first hundred years are the hardest....It takes a while to 'become' a New England-er, but I think I now qualify.

And today it was officially New England. The temperature plummeted 25 or more degrees from yesterday and the wind got angry. Wind chill tonight is below zero. And will be all day tomorrow, if the Weather Channel is to be believed. (Though, since we're in Trump-world, why believe the National Weather Service any more than the CIA?)

But it snaps back on Sunday to high 30's/low 40's and may be in the 50's part of next week and ON CHRISTMAS DAY!

So, New England lives for 48 hours or so and then we're back to what we're becoming--part of the Mid-Atlantic states: Maryland, Virginia, Delaware...places like that.

But it can't be 'climate change', Lordy, no! That was canceled out by the Presidential Election.

Maybe everything here in Trump-land is simply becoming more like Mar-a-lago.....

The moon, the moon

As bright as could be, nearer earth than it really is, just off our back porch to the east: a full as full can be moon. Oh, my Lord.....

I realize I've written about the moon many times before. I found a couple of them for you....

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The moon

Tonight, as I stepped out on our chilled deck to smoke a cigarette (I know! I know! Don't chide me about it! The cold does more to curb my smoking than all my friends' warnings....) I looked up, as I always do, to find the moon.

It's too overcast to see her, but I looked anyway.

Today I was sorting through all the 'paper' of my past, and found a poem I wrote a decade ago about the moon. I was sure I must have shared it in the 1100 or more posts on this blog, but when I typed 'moon' into the blog search box, I got several hundred responses (I mention the Moon a lot) but none that was this poem. So here it is, from November 26, 2004--4 days short of 10 years ago.

THE MOON

OK, so I'm out on the deck smoking a cigarette
and drinking red wine.
What I'm really doing is watching the moon
through the trees in this, my now favorite tiime
of the year...when all is bare, stark, dying and thin...
knowing what comes next is new life.

Most people I know would chide me for smoking
and more than a few would deride my for
the red wine--but I no longer care.

What I care about is the moon, the moon, the moon.

I know why countless ancient folks worshipped the moon.
Why wouldn't one worship what brings dime light
to deep darkness and moves the seas.

Like the seas, the moon moves me.
Outward into the great chill of the ionosphere and beyond...
though I will never possess the moon, she draws me near,
though I will never own her, I worship her.

When the waxing ceases and the waning begins,
the moon pushes me back, deep inside myself,
down along a dim passage I seldom have walked,
to a door to a room I don't remember knowing,
and I open the door...and there I find, the moon.

So I stand and stare, wishing to know more,
longing to possess the wondrous brightness of it all.
Waiting on my deck, smoking and drinking, watching this only:
through the bare trees--the moon, the moon, the moon....

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The moon, the moon....

The moon, in the sky beyond the half dozen hemlocks beside our back porch, is as full as it can be in the eastern sky.

OK, I know the moon doesn't really shrink and then swell, it's all about the earth blocking the sun that reflects off the moon. I know that. But I like to think the moon does really shrink into darkness and then swell into wholeness. It seems right.

"Lunatic" comes from the Latin for 'moon'--luna. And I truly believe the moon has an effect on the way we are.

At St. John's, all the years I was there, we dreaded the full moon. Crazy people got crazier and people who didn't seem crazy got a little bit crazy.

Folks in the Soup Kitchen acted out a bit more. Street People became more aggressive. And a Vestry meeting on the night of a full moon would devolve into nonsense.

No kidding.

I actually knew today that the moon would be full tonight. I had this energy unlike my normal energy--just a little off the grid. I said things to people I probably wouldn't say at a quarter moon or half-moon and never in the dark of the moon.

I like believing the cosmos has some power in our lives. Like the moon drives us a bit. And the seasons make us different. The Spring 'me' is different than the late Autumn 'me'.

We are looked over and driven by the stars. Don't tell me astrological signs are meaningless. I am Aries on the cusp of Torus and that rules my extroversion and my irony. I really know that.

If you get a chance, go out and look at the moon tonight or tomorrow night. A full moon is a lot of energy. Really.






(back to 12/12/16)

I'm just into the moon in a way I don't understand. Maybe I'm into it because I don't understand why. That would be 'moon-like' after all....

Open Letter #6

I've been a while, Morgan, Emma, Tegan and Ellie. I've been living day to day knowing that for a few more weeks Donald Trump isn't 'really' President of our nation. Not yet, dear Lord, not yet.

I've been in deep denial that he will ever be your president (our!) but denial really isn't much more than a river in Egypt.

I have to face the facts (even though Donald doesn't!) and admit this is going to happen and happen soon.

I think I mentioned he said "millions" voted illegally with no basis in truth.

Since then he's taken credit for keeping a thousand jobs in the US (while actually a multi-million dollar tax break by Indiana did).

*He's taken on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and Alex Baldwin again on twitter for making fun of him. (The boy hasn't learned the adage that 'all publicity' is 'good publicity'. Most people would be delighted to be made fun of on SNL! But not thin skinned Donald....

*He's not receiving the daily 'security briefings' a President Elect should be getting. He says he doesn't need to be told things over and again and to 'brief him' if something new comes up.

*Plus, and the worse yet for the future, he has said the CIA report on Russian hacking in order to influence the election isn't accurate. Well, maybe, if he doesn't believe the CIA about that, he doesn't believe them about other things and simply doesn't want to hear from them!!!!

People all over the political spectrum have eyes rolling out of their heads and eyebrows having to be scraped off the ceiling. If the President doesn't trust the CIA, who does he trust? Brite-Bart news? Putin? His own intuition? His own 'imagination'?

In a little over a month, he's going to be the Commander in Chief and the boss of the CIA. Will he simply 'fire' the CIA like he fired people on his TV show?

This my beloved grand-daughters is a moment verging into the surreal. The CIA stands between all of us and lots of evil. And the man who will be President (in spite of my denial....) doesn't believe them????

Lordy, Lordy.

I'm not just saying that as folksy Appalachian-speak. I'm calling on the God of the Universe to help us.....

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.....

Love  you girls like I love my own heart, because you are. Granpa....

Advent III

I was ordained in 1975--so, I've been preaching almost every Sunday for most of 41 years.

In the Episcopal Church, the Sunday readings are on a three year cycle. So, the same lessons show up every three years. I don't usually use a text or even an outline for a sermon, but I do write them out many weeks and store them in my computer.

One of the ways of 'cheating' in preaching is to go see what you said one of the other times on Advent III, for example. Just to get ideas, you understand, not to preach the same sermon over and over...

So I looked up Advent III in my sermons and found one from 2013--three years ago, so on the same readings. But the more I looked at that sermon, the less I could remember preaching it. Writing and preaching are vastly different experiences. I looked at Advent III, 2013 in Emmanuel Church's service book and low and behold, that day the churches I serve were cancelled by snow! No wonder I couldn't remember the sermon....

So I used it today and here it is for  you....

Advent iii, 2016

          John Baptist was out of control.

          He lived in the desert for years—eating only what he found in the wilderness. He did not participate in society—instead he railed out dire warnings to the sand and the rocks. He wore strange clothing he had fashioned from animal skins and never cut his hair. Little wonder then that when he appeared from the wilderness, proclaiming that the Kingdom was near, people were both frightened of him and yet almost irresistibly drawn to his strangeness.

          And one thing John never forgot—he was a ‘prophet’ of the One Who Was To Come. His whole life and everything he did pointed, not to himself, but to another. He was to make the Way straight—to clear the ground for the Coming One of God. He was not ‘the One’—he was the forerunner, the harbinger, the messenger of One greater than him.

          Little wonder then, when John found himself in prison, soon to lose his head for daring to condemn the royal family, that he suddenly wondered if his life-work had been in vain. Had he made the rough ground smooth or had he wasted his time and energy…had he failed to fulfill his only mission in life?

          John sent disciples to Jesus. “Are you the One?” they asked him.

          “Are you the One, or are we to wait for another?”

          In all the gospels, Jesus almost never gives a direct response to a question. He either asks a question in return or tells a story or gives what seems like a non sequitor in reply.

          His response to John’s disciples is no different. Instead of answering their question—instead of claiming to be The One all Israel was awaiting—he tells them to go back and tell John what they see and hear.

          “…the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them…..” Jesus tells the disciples of John that what he “does” should answer the question of who he “is”.

          Jesus’ words echoed the description of the “holy one” from the prophecy of Isaiah. His identity is found, not in who he ‘says’ he is, but in the works he does.

          When John heard the message he must have realized that he had fulfilled his mission. John must have known that Jesus was “the one”.

          It is really no different for any of us. The proof is in the pudding. By the fruits we will know who someone truly IS.

          The Kingdom is near—the Kingdom is always near, always ‘at hand’, always just out of the sight of our periphery vision. Close, but ‘not yet’.

          So the question is not, ‘who do we say that we are?” The question that matters is how do we live into the coming Kingdom? How do we lean into the reign of God? How are we part of the in-breaking of Light into the Darkness?

          We are the children of the Kingdom that was and is and is to come. We are God-bearers, Light bringers, the vehicles of healing in this tragic and suffering world.

          It is not who we ‘say’ we are that draws the Kingdom nearer. The Kingdom is unveiled in our midst by what we ‘do’.

          Advent is not simply a time of ‘waiting’ for the Coming One. It is a time to ‘prepare’ to welcome the Kingdom just at hand.

          Make straight the road of Kindness.

          Smooth out the way of Compassion and Generosity.

          Tear down the mountains on Indifference and Judgment and build highways of Love and Inclusion and Acceptance.

          Through the Wilderness make a path for Forgiveness and Mercy to walk on.

          We too must ‘prepare’ the way of the Lord.

          We are the ones for whom the Kingdom waits.

          We are the ones God is expecting to welcome the Child.

All this is expressed beautifully in the Wisdom from the Hopi Elders. Listen….

          There is a River flowing now, very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.

          Know this: the River has its destination. The Elders say we must let go of the shore, push out into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

          At this time of history, we are to take nothing 'personally'. Least of all, outselves. The moment that we do that, our spritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

          The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

          Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary.

          All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

          We are the ones we’ve been waiting for….

          We, you and I, are the ones to lean into the Kingdom.  Amen.