Cold and you're back

There is cold and there is COLD.

Today was the latter.

It didn't get above single digits on our back porch and will drop below tonight.

Tomorrow it will be in the high 20's and low 30's and will seem warm.

As I said before, temperature is relative.

And on top of that, the last two days have seen over 300 views of this blog!

You're back!

Thank goodness for you.

I write because of you.

YOU are why this blog exists.

Keep coming.

I'll try to be outrageous and honest and as humorous as I can be in these strange times.

Stay well and be well, my blog friends.

Get a shot. Wear a mask. Social distance.

Someday we'll look back and realize what a long, strange trip the last two years have been.

Sooner, I hope, than later.

But only Dr. Fauci and God knows how long it will be until then.

 

Central heat

 I grew up until I went to college in a two bedroom apartment over a grocery store with no central heat.

The store kept us relatively warm in the winter with a coat stove we had in the living room and a wood oven in the kitchen.

But when I was 16 the store closed and there were two years of very cold winters.

Our bathroom had no heat, so we bathed in a tub by the coal stove filled with water heated by the stove in the kitchen.

I never lived with central heat until I went to college at WVU and lived in Borman hall.

When I went home on college time off, my parents had moved to Princeton, WV and had central heat.

They waited  for me to leave to get central heat.

I love, love, love central heat.

It's going to be in the single digits tonight but we'll be warm inside.

Cozy and warm.

I told Bern today that one of the things I'm thankful for is central heat.

And I am.

(By the way--over 300 views yesterday along with 159 the day before. You guys and gals are BACK!!! Thanks so much for dropping in to read.)

 

Over 100! Way to go guys!

 Today is the first day in over a month when I got over 100 views on my blog. Nearly 150 with several hours to go.

The last month I've had low numbers. 2231 vs. 5627 in November.

I put it down to the Christmas rush and hope that's true.

Maybe you guys are back!

I hope so.

I write so people will read.

Keep it up....

Relativity

 I went outside this morning and it felt warm.

I looked at the temperature and it was 22!

Maybe it felt warm because the high yesterday was in the teens and when I went to bed it was zero.

Temperature is relative.

once more

Sunday, March 8, 2009

My first post

Sitting under the Castor Oil Tree (March 7, 2009)

The character in the Bible I have always been drawn to is Jonah. I identify with his story. Like Jonah, I have experienced being taken where I didn't want to go by God and I've been disgruntled with the way things went. The belly of a big old fish isn't a pleasant means of travel either!

The story ends (in case you don't know it) with Jonah upset and complaining on a hillside over the city of Nineveh, which God has saved through Jonah. Jonah didn't want to go there to start with--hence the ride in the fish stomach--and predicted that God would save the city though it should have been destroyed for its wickedness. "You dragged me half way around the world," he tells God, "and didn't destroy the city....I knew it would turn out this way. I'm angry, so angry I could die!"

God causes a tree to grow to shade Jonah from the sun (scholars think it might have been a castor oil tree--the implications are astonishing!). Then God sends a worm to kill the tree. Well, that sets Jonah off! "How dare you kill my tree?" he challenges the creator. "I'm so angry I could die...."

God simply reminds him that he is upset at the death of a tree he didn't plant or nurture and yet he doesn't see the value of saving all the people of the great city Nineveh...along with their cattle and beasts.

And the story ends. No resolution. Jonah simply left to ponder all that. There's no sequel either--no "Jonah II" or "Jonah: the next chapter", nothing like that. It's just Jonah, sitting under the bare branches of the dead tree, pondering.

What I want to do is use this blog to do simply that, ponder about things. I've been an Episcopal priest for over 30 years. I'm approaching a time to retire and I've got a lot of pondering left to do--about God, about the church, about religion, about life and death and everything involved in that. Before the big fish swallowed me up and carried me to my own Nineva (ordination in the Episcopal Church) I had intended a vastly different life. I was going to write "The Great American Novel" for starters and get a Ph.D. in American Literature and disappear into some small liberal arts college, most likely in the Mid-Atlantic states and teach people like me--rural people, Appalachians and southerners, simple people, deep thinkers though slow talkers...lovely for all that--to love words and write words themselves.

God (I suppose, though I even ponder that...) had other ideas and I ended up spending the lion's share of my priesthood in the wilds of two cities in Connecticut (of all places) among tribes so foreign to me I scarcely understood their language and whose customs confounded me. And I found myself often among people (The Episcopal Cult) who made me anxious by their very being. Which is why I stuck to urban churches, I suppose--being a priest in Greenwich would have sent me into some form of shock...as I would have driven them to hypertension at the least.

I am one who 'ponders' quite a bit and hoped this might be a way to 'ponder in print' for anyone else who might be leaning in that direction to read.

Ever so often, someone calls my bluff when I go into my "I'm just a boy from the mountains of West Virginia" persona. And I know they're right. I've lived too long among the heathens of New England to be able to avoid absorbing some of their alien customs and ways of thinking. Plus, I've been involved in too much education to pretend to be a rube from the hills. But I do, from time to time, miss that boy who grew up in a part of the world as foreign as Albania to most people, where the lush and endless mountains pressed down so majestically that there were few places, where I lived, that were flat in an area wider than a football field. That boy knew secrets I am only beginning, having entered my sixth decade of the journey toward the Lover of Souls, to remember and cherish.

My maternal grandmother, who had as much influence on me as anyone I know, used to say--"Jimmy, don't get above your raisin'". I probably have done that, in more ways that I'm able to recognize, but I ponder that part of me--buried deeply below layer after layer of living (as the mountains were layer after layer of long-ago life).

Sometimes I get a fleeting glimpse of him, running madly into the woods that surrounded him on all sides, spending hours seeking paths through the deep tangles of forest, climbing upward, ever upward until he found a place to sit and look down on the little town where he lived--spread out like a toy village to him--so he could ponder, alone and undisturbed, for a while.

When I was in high school, I wrote a regular column for the school newspaper called "The Outsider". As I ponder my life, I realize that has been a constant: I've always felt just beyond the fringe wherever I was. I've watched much more than I've participated. And I've pondered many things.

So, what I've decided to do is sit here on the hillside for a while, beneath the ruins of the castor oil tree and ponder some more. And, if you wish, share my ponderings with you--whoever you are out there in cyber-Land.

Two caveates: I'm pretty much a Luddite when it comes to technology--probably smart enough to learn about it but never very interested, so this blog is an adventure for me. My friend Sandy is helping me so it shouldn't be too much of a mess. Secondly, I've realized writing this that there is no 'spell check' on the blog. Either I can get a dictionary or ask your forgiveness for my spelling. I'm a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa ENGLISH major (WVU '69) who never could conquer spelling all the words I longed to write.

I suppose I'll just ask your tolerance.

 

 

 

Right now

It's 4:28 on Monday and I can hear Bern down the hall talking on Facetime with our grand-daughter, Elinor. 

They do this Mon/Wed/Fri.

They play with dolls, tell stories, sing songs.

It's wonderful!

I sometimes pop in for a while, but it is THEIR time and I know it.

It's also very cold.

Into the single digits tonight and cold for the next few days.

Tomorrow will be the worst, with a high in the teens.

I hate the cold--as I know you know.

I would want to go south, but this year the weather is so weird that only south Florida would work.

And I hate Florida for many reasons.

I have several doctor's appointments this week.

Not looking forward to that.

It's tough getting older--but way better than the alternative.

That's what I'm thinking about, right now....

 

Tomorrow's Sermon

JANUARY 9, 2022

          Christmas is over. Jesus has been born in Bethlehem.

          Epiphany is over. The Magi found the child when he was almost two and gave him their precious gifts and went home by another way to avoid King Herod.

          Jesus and his parents have gone to Egypt and returned only after Herod was dead.

          Herold killed many male children under two in the slaughter of the Innocents.

          All that is over and we return to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and his baptism by John in the Jordan.

          Baptism is a strange ritual.

          I was baptized at 12 in a church with a pool by a Methodist minister after I was “saved” at a Methodist revival meeting. Mountain Methodists aren’t like New England Methodists!

          A few days after my baptism, I was in Math class, taught by my aunt, and she told the class what had happened. I was terribly embarrassed and dropped my pencil.

          When I bent over to pick it up I looked up Donna Grubbs skirt and thought---“Oh God, it didn’t ‘take’!!!”

          As a priest, I haven’t observed the ‘no communion without baptism’ rule.

          At St. John’s in Waterbury, where I was Rector for 21 years, I put in the bulletin each week, “All people are invited to receive communion.”

          A parishioner, who loved the rules, called the bishop and the bishop told me to take that out of the bulletin.

          I did take it out, but I always said, “all people are invited to receive communion” right before the communion itself.

          I’ve always believed that if the baptismal font can lead to the altar, then the altar can lead to the font.

          Over my career as a priest, I must have baptized two dozen people who received communion before they were baptized.

          So, my theory is right!

          Two people in particular stick in my mind. A 78 year old mother and her 50 year old daughter at St. John’s, they came to communion regularly and then realized the rule was ‘baptism before communion’.

          So they came and asked to be baptized. I put them with several others through a class or two and asked if they wanted to stop receiving communion before their baptism.

          The daughter said ‘yes’ but her mother said, “I’m too old, I need all the Body and Blood I can get.” So she kept coming to communion until, a month or two later, in a glorious service, I baptized them and several others.

          In my mind and heart, I believe God works in mysterious ways.

          John baptized Jesus and the Spirit came to him like a dove and spoke, “you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

          Mysterious ways.

          Jesus took Bread and Wine and shared it with his disciples (and we don’t know how may of them had been baptized) and told them it was his Body and Blood and to always remember him when they shared it.

          And we do that today—take Bread and Wine and share his Body and Blood.

          I don’t understand it at all, but I do it.

          God works in mysterious ways.

          Mysterious indeed.

          Be well and stay well and Amen.