Snow on the way

I can't get clear about the coming snow.

When's it starting?

How much will there be?

Will we have Church in Killingworth?

Can I get out of my driveway at 9 a.m.?

I guess we just have to wait and see.

Tomorrow morning will come--snow or no snow.

I told the Sr. Warden if I 'didn't call' I was coming.

Snow probably worse here than Killingworth--much closer to the shore.

We shall see.

That's all we can do...wait and see....

Life is like that--and not just the weather.l

Deep breath.

Relax.

Wait and see.

(My advice for you.)

The day after....

Mimi, Tim and Eleanor left this afternoon. Bern and I had a second Thanksgiving meal for dinner.

As always, Bern got the house back to normal and orderly after they left.

Things move slowly on the day after any big deal.

The dog almost is over the change from a full house to a normal one.

Bern is watching TV, I'm doing this.

Soon, Brigit will go out for the last time tonight.

Then reading in bed ans sleep.

It's the day after...things slow down and move quietly.

I love the 'day after' days.

Just my speed.

Hope your Thanksgiving was a joyful as ours.

And no political arguments--all anti-Trump Democrats at our dinner.

Be well and stay well.

Thanksgiving and a poem

Mimi, Tim and Eleanor are here for Thanksgiving. John Anderson, a friend since college came up from New Haven for dinner. Great food and Great company. What a joy!

Also, I came across this poem I wrote over 16 years ago.


Walking out of Shadows

This poem has three things
(four really...)
a back porch, badly lit,
a deck in shadows,
and a Puli dog.
(The fourth thing comes at the end.)

My back porch is small.
4 by 6 or so,
and the light bulb,
surrounded by opaque plate,
is 40 watts at best.

The deck is largerer--12 by 20, mabe,
and gets little illumination from the porch light.

The Puli is black as black can be.
So black there are highlights
of more blue and brown in his coat
in direct sunlight.

But at night, when the dog walks on the deck,
I cannot see him for the shadows
and he emerges suddenly
from darkness into light.

Now the fourth thing--the crux of the matter--
how much is that like you and me, all of us,
in the most profound and deepest way,
wandering mostly in places we cannot be seen,
emerging sprisingly,
into some dim light?
Only some of our hearts and souls
are visible at all.

jgb---2/4/06


 

Mucus

MUCUS

Since you've had your recent cold,
I've been thinking again about
something I think about entirely too much
(and shouldn't ever reveal to others,
not even in passing.)

It is astonishing and thought provoking
to me how much fluid the human body can produce.

Bags of skin full of mucus, blood, bodily fluids and bone.
Sucked out of unconscious patients
Sneezed onto the steering wheel
Coughed up like little guppies
Hard little creatures blown out of my nose
Draining through a plastic tube from a surgical wound
Marcus Aurelius' "a bag of bones and foul smell"
Oozing from around scabs
Running from the eyes and hardening up like plaster overnight
Gushes and gushes from a fleet enema
The breaking of the waters of the womb
And the cheesy stuff that covers newborns--
Never mind the placenta itself, a veritable freezer bag of gunk
Vaginal discharges the puss from venereal  diseases
The gook, inexplicably, in your ears. Where does that come from?
The body is a mucus making machne.
Like flows of syrup from a maple tree.

jgb

Advent I

(Since it's coming up, here is last year's sermon.)

Advent I 2018

           

          In the name of the God who is coming among us, Amen.

          “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near….”

          That’s what Jesus says in today’s gospel. He is teaching in the Temple. He is standing in the holiest spot on the face of the earth for his people and he is teaching about the end of days, the Last Things, the Apocalypse, the signs that will signal the coming of the Son of Man in power and great glory. “Heaven and earth will pass away,”  he proclaims, “but my words will not pass away….”

          And what does he tell his disciples to do? How does he want his followers to face the end of all things? “Stand up!” he says, “stand up and raise your heads…your redemption is drawing near….”

          We tend to see Advent as the time to prepare for the celebration of Christmas. We tend to spend these weeks talking about “preparing our hearts for the Christ Child.”  But that misses the more dominant theme of Advent. Advent is a time to reflect, not on Jesus’ birth, but on his promised return to Earth as the Son of Man. Advent not about the ‘first coming’ of Jesus. It’s about his second coming…and the end of days.

          “When you see these thing taking place,” Jesus teaches in the temple, “you know that the Kingdom of God is near….”

                                                          *

          When I went to Israel 18 years ago now, our group toured an archeological site called Megiddo. Megiddo is located on the south side of the Jezreel Valley on the Eeron Pass—the route taken by conquerors from the Pharohes of Egypt to King Solomon to the Roman Legions to the British Army in World War I.

          Megiddo is a vital strategic location for anyone seeking to control Israel. That is why twenty different cities have been built on that one spot—one on top of the other. Each conquering army destroyed the city they seized and built their new fortress on it’s ruins.

          The first settlement at Megiddo dates back to 4000 B.C.—6000 years ago, at the dawning of human civilization. To stand amid the ruins of Megiddo today is to stand on a spot that dates back to the Stone Age. That is almost impossible to ponder—a place that takes in the whole of human history.

          But after telling us all this and more about the history of Megiddo, our guide told us something else. Megiddo has another name. It is also known as Armageddon.

          The hair on the back of my neck stood up. For a moment I could hardly breathe. All the old stories of the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood rang in my ears and in my heart. The Day of the Lord…the Second Coming…the last battle of planet earth—all that was contained in that single word: Armageddon. We were standing on the place where the Book of Revelation tells us the world will end….

                                                *

          When I was a child, the end of the world through nuclear war was something almost everyone imagined could be true. We got under our desks in grade school and covered our heads, practicing for the Atomic bomb attack.   And today, the ecological crisis should provoke our imaginations as well. It is possible that we human beings could bring death to the planet through our carelessness and greed. The end of the world, in that way, is not unthinkable.

                                                                   *

          When I was 25 years old, I spent many hours over the span of a week, sitting by my mother’s deathbed. I took turns sitting there with other members of my family, watching for the signs and portents of the end of my mother’s days. It was over 45 years ago, yet the memories of those days and hours and moments are still vivid in my heart. Though she was in and out of a coma and never spoke during that week, she did wake up enough one day to let me feed her a little cup of vanilla ice-cream with a plastic spoon. She drifted away before she had eaten it all and I took the last bite. I still remember that as one of the most delicious and sensuous bites I’ve ever had. All my senses were heightened because I knew each moment I sat there might be the last moment of my mother’s life.

          I would try to match my breath with her breath, try to breathe in rhythm with her. And in those moments, every breath I took was distinct and different. Like snowflakes, no two breaths were the same.

          Most of the time, I don’t even notice that I’m breathing.

          Jesus tells us this today: Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down…and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap….Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.

          Advent is the time to wake up. Advent is the time to remember to be aware, on guard, alert while we are waiting. Most of the time, we just don’t notice how life is flowing around us. Most of the time, we are asleep.

          While I sat and waited for my mother to die, each moment took on “meaning”, every instant was important, the normally unnoticed seconds of my life were precious and rare and like snowflakes, all different from each other.

          While we are “waiting for Christmas” or “waiting for the Coming of the Son of Man”, the gift and meaning of Advent is that the “in between time” is precisely where we will find love and purpose and hope and wonder and God…and each other.

          It’s not What we’re waiting for that’s important. What’s important is what we do with the “waiting time”.  Our lives have purpose. Our love “makes a difference” in this world. Every bite of ice cream, every moment of waiting, every second of our lives is full and overflowing with the glory of God.

          Advent calls us to “be always on the watch”, wide awake with anticipation, leaning into every hour of our existence as if God were always breaking into our lives.

          Advent calls us to wake up and notice every breath as if God were breathing in rhythm with us. The Kingdom of God is that close to us, as close as our next breath…

          “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

One of the many things I don't know

I am very good at knowing 'what I don't know'. I live fully into my ignorance of many, many things. I actually glory in not having to 'know' everything.

One thing I don't know--and know I don't know it--is, as I've said before in this space--what happens when we die.

I consider myself a faithful Christian--I'm an Episcopal priest, after all. But I know I don't know if I truly know the Christian belief of an after-life. I lean toward it and try to believe it--but I know I don't know.

Bern told me about a novel she was reading when someone very important to an 11 year old girl died.

"Where is he now?" she asked.

Her father answered, "before he was born he was no where and now that he's dead, he's no where again."

That's one of the answers of what I know I don't know about what happens when we died.

But just the other day, I talked with a woman whose father had just died. I asked her how she was and she said, "I just know he's with my mother now and that's where he wanted to be since she died."

I nodded and hugged her.

Being with people you loved who are dead when you die is a lovely way of thinking. I'd be delighted and exuberant if that turns out to be true.

But I know I don't know if it is.

You see, I think Christianity is about 'how we live', not about 'what happens when we die'.

Jesus taught us to be compassionate and generous and to care about the lot of 'the least of these' in our midst. He taught us to be truthful and courageous in the face of sin. He taught us to never buy into the lies of those above us and to always love and care for those below us.

And that's enough for me to be a Christian. I know that I know all that is true and right and good.

Beyond that there is simply a lot I know I don't know.

And I'm fine with not knowing.

What I lean toward and live for is enough for me.

Nobody, I mean 'nobody' read this....

I was looking through my blog archive and saw the not a single person read this 2016 post. Some posts have been read by over 450 people, but no one read this. Let's fix that, okay?

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Am I that out of line?

In my sermon on Sunday, I apologized to the congregation and to David, who was being baptized for the Collect of the Day. ('Collect' is Episcopal-speak for a prayer....also, the entryway to the church is the 'narthex' and the basement is the 'undercroft'--go figure Anglicans!)

Here it is: the collect for the Sunday closest to July 20...

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking; Have compassion on our weakness and mercifully give us those things  which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

OK, in one prayer (sorry, 'collect') we are calling ourselves "ignorant, weak, unworthy and blind". And we prayed that prayer on a day when David IV (and the other three were all there!) was being 'marked as Christ's own forever' and declared both a child of God and a member of Christ's Body.

It is times like that which cause me to think Christianity is schizophrenic! On a day we declare David and ourselves "marked as Christ's own" and, indeed, Christ's Body in this world we decide that we are, as Marcus Aurelius (not a Christian, a Stoic) said: 'a bag of bones and foul smell'.

Ignorant, weak, unworthy and blind are hardly attributes of "Christ's Body in this world". And certainly far, far, far short of the Bible's assertion that we are created 'in the image and likeness of God'.

So, which will it be? God's beloved or pond scum? The Body of Christ or miserable, nasty, sinful, awful creatures?

So I told the group I go to on Tuesday mornings about my apology and read them the collect to prove my point. They'd all heard it since 3 of them were priests and the 4th is an every-Sunday worshiper.

And to my utter dismay, none of them were offended at all by the collect. They even seemed to agree with it. I became so irrational that I really could do very little except sputter in exasperation and utter four-letter words....

I just assumed they, like me, thought of human beings (much less Christians) as beloved 'children of God'. Can I be that out of line? I'm not stupid. I can't miss the incredible evil of the world. But I simply assume that 'evil' is a perversion of who we really are.

I have known for some decades that my heresy of choice is Pelagionism. Pelagious was British but taught his theology in Rome in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. What he taught was rather simple (if condemned by 5 or 6 church councils and St. Augustine!). It went like this: human beings were born with the same free will and moral choices as Adam before the Fall. Humans could choose to do 'the right thing' without Divine intervention. The concept of 'original sin' was rejected by Pelagious.

I reject it too. I told David IV's parents that God loved David IV as much before he was baptized and God would love him after  he was baptized. We are not 'born sinful' in my theology.

(By the way: since you're going to be a heretic anyway, CHOOSE your heresy carefully. I start my classes in Gnostic Christianity at UConn by saying, "How many of you are heretics?" Only a brave soul or two might giggle and raise their hands. Then I ask, "How many of you believe in the Immortality of the Soul?" Every time either all or almost all raise their hands. "So," I tell them, "read the Nicene Creed. We believe in the 'resurrection of the body', not 'the immortality of the soul'. You're all heretics!")

More and more these days, I find that I'm outside the 'orthodox' box. I've never much wanted to be 'inside' it, but I'm often struck by how 'out of line' I am.

I still think that's a terrible Collect!

Some of the Episcopal Church's collects are wonderful in their wisdom and guidance. My favorite is the Collect for Good Friday. Listen: Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross.....

Now that's something to hang your Pelagion hat on: we are God's 'family' and Jesus was willing to die for us.  That's the humanity I'm a part of. Part of the Family. Worth dying for. Know what I mean?

Am I that out of line?


(But then, maybe my archive is just on the bad....)