Posted this before, most likely, but again is good

I DRIVE HOME

 

I drive home through pain, through suffering,

through death itself.

 

I drive home through Cat-scans and blood tests

and X-rays and Pet-scans (whatever they are)

and through consultations of surgeons and oncologists

and even more exotic flora with medical degrees.

 

I drive home through hospitals and houses

and the wondrous work of hospice nurses

and the confusion of dozens more educated than me.

 

Dressed in green scrubs and Transfiguration white coats,

they discuss the life or death of people I love.

 

And they hate, more than anything, to lose the hand

to the greatest Poker Player ever, the one with all the chips.

And, here’s the joke, they always lose in the end—

the River Card turns it all bad and Death wins.

 

So, while they consult and add artificial poison

to the Poison of Death—shots and pills and IV’s

of poison—I drive home and stop in vacant rooms

and wondrous houses full of memories

and dispense my meager, medieval medicine

of bread and wine and oil.

 

Sometimes I think…sometimes I think…

I should not drive home at all

since I stop in hospitals and houses to bring my pitiful offering

to those one step, one banana peel beneath their foot,

from meeting the Lover of Souls.

 

I do not hate Death. I hate dying, but not Death.

But it is often too much for me, stopping on the way home

to press the wafer into their quaking hands;

to lift the tiny, pewter cup of bad port wine to their trembling lips;

and to smear their foreheads with fragrant oil

while mumbling much rehearsed words and wishing them

whole and well and eternal.

 

I believe in God only around the edges.

But when I drive home, visiting the dying,

I’m the best they’ll get of all that.

 

And when they hold my hand with tears in their eyes

and thank me so profoundly, so solemnly, with such sweet terror

in their voices, then I know.

 

Driving home and stopping there is what I’m meant to do.

A little bread, a little wine and some sweet smelling oil

may be—if not enough—just what was missing.

 

I’m driving home, driving home, stopping to touch the hand of Death.

Perhaps that is all I can do.

I tell myself that, driving home, blinded by pain and tears,

having been with Holy Ones.

 

8/2007 jgb

 

 

Warm today, warmer tomorrow....

 Today was a relief from the cold. It was in the 40's.

The big storm on Saturday really didn't materialize in Cheshire.

We had snow and ice and lost our computers and phones and TV for a few hours.

You can live perfectly well with no TV, landlines or computers.

We didn't lose power.

That would have been a nightmare.

60 by Thursday.

Maybe 70 by the end of the week.

Spring is coming!

Spring is coming! 

Thanks be to God.

Church in Killingworth today

I did the service at Emmanuel, Killingworth today. I served them, as a part of the Middle-Sex Cluster Ministry for almost 7 years. They are without a priest currently and I was supplying on my Sunday off from Trinity, Milton.

I loved the three Cluster churches and hated to leave, but the bishop had new ideas for the churches and I didn't fit into them. He wanted each church to have a part-time priest--at the time I was the only one of three who was paid more than Sunday supply.

It has been over a year since I left, so I don't think I broke a Rubric by going there today. In fact I'm sure.

Charlie Price, my professor of Liturgical Matters at Virginia seminary, told us, "never unknowingly break a rubric."  

Notice, he didn't tell us 'not' to break them, but never 'unknowingly'.

Charlie was a wise man.

It was like a family reunion! People I loved and who loved me were there. Lots of hugs. Great organist. Great coffee-hour.

A homecoming, in a sense.

And I loved it all.

 

Have I published this?

 

THE SKUNK AND THE KITTY

 

On my way out, up the hill to where I go,

I passed a patch of road

where a skunk and a black cat

were both dead—road kill.

 

My car window was open

on an uncharacteristically warm

January morning—foggy and strange.

 

So I carried the skunk smell with me

all the way to where I was going.

Something about the smell of skunk,

millennia in development,

whether as evolution or God’s plan:

skunks have an odor to peal paint,

leave you hyperventilating

and just a little nauseous—

more than a little if smelled before breakfast.

 

I though all day, where I was,

about those two creatures—

dead as door nails and splayed on the road.

The cat was someone’s friend and companion.

The skunk was a marvel of defense mechanism—

a mother/father of small defense mechanisms.

Both were deserving of a better fate

than to swell and burst and decay on a state highway.

I prayed for them at noon prayers—

silently, of course, lest I seem to animistic in my faith.

The skunk and the kitty—both black,

both dead,

both nameless to me

(though the cat surely had one,

and who can say about skunks?)

so I couldn’t pray for them by name.

 

Going back down the hill,

from where I’d been to where I live,

I noticed the cat was gone—

claimed, perhaps by some human who loved her,

given a proper burial, mourned, missed.

Appropriate funereal rites, as bifit her.

 

The skunk was there still—

torn to pieces by the tires

of SUV’s, Buicks, foreign cars, UPS trucks.

 

His odor was less on the way back,

but, God bless him, still potent.

And I wondered—heretic and pagan

that I truly am—

whether he died for our smells….

 

 

jgb—1/30/09

This week's sermon, following the last post....

(if you go to Emmanuel, Killingworth, don't read this!)

 

Lent 2, 2022

      Where I come from, in Southern West Virginia, my people (WASP’S through and through) said ‘reckon’ a lot.

      “Think it’s going to rain tomorrow?” you might ask.

      And the answer would be, “I reckon.”

      I asked my wife Bern if her people (Italian-Hungarian-Roman Catholic Americans) ever said ‘reckon’.

      She said she never heard the word until she was in high school with WASP’s!

      In the Old Testament lesson today, God tells Abram (not yet “Abraham”) that his descendants would be ‘more numerous than the stars in the sky.

      Abram believed God and (I quote) “God reckoned it to him as Righteous.”

      “Reckon” has several meanings. Among them are—“to believe something is true or possible” (‘I reckon that we are lost’) and “to calculate sense” (‘they reckoned it to be a mile’) and to “regard or think of as so” (‘I reckon it will rain tomorrow’).

      And God ‘believed it was true’ that Abram was ‘righteous’.

      What do you think God ‘reckons’ about you and me?

      Are we ‘righteous’?

      Who knows, but God?

 

      In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees, who had yet to turn against him, came to tell Jesus that he should leave where he was because Herod wanted to kill him.

      But Jesus says, “Go tell that fox….”

      I love that—go tell that fox.

      Foxes are cunning and dangerous.

      I was once walking my dog, years ago, in a cemetery in Cheshire when a fox suddenly appeared.

      The fox looked and me and at Bela and sat still for a while.

      We stared at each other for what seemed like five minutes. Then the fox thought better and disappeared into the woods.

      Bela looked at me and I looked at him. I shrugged and Bela barked and we went home.

     

      Lent is a time to look at the fox—the Devil, the Tempter.

      We must stare the Tempter down and move on.

      “Temptation” in English, means something that will lead us into sin or evil.

      But the Greek word is “per-i-zine” which means, literally, “to test or to try.”

      It is not a totally negative concept.

      We’ve all passed ‘tests’ and survived ‘trying times’.

      Lent is meant to test and try us, not defeat us.

      Jesus says he wants to gather us “under his wings as a hen gathers her brood under her wings”.

      But we will not be able to do that until we can say, “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      Lent is the time for us, through prayer and meditation and self-denial to say that.

      “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      Say it with me:  “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      We are now under God’s wings.

      Alleluia! Easter is coming! I reckon….

Reckon

When I was growing up, my people (Anglo-Saxon Protestant) used the word 'reckon' to mean "I suppose so."

Is it going to rain tomorrow? I reckon it will.

I just asked Bern if her people (Italian-Hungarian Catholic) ever said 'reckon' and she said she was a teen before she heard the word.

In the New Oxford Bible, which I use, God tells Abram, before he was renamed Abraham, that his descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the night sky.

Abram believed God and God "reckoned it as righteousness".

God took Abram's belief and 'believed it to be true or possible' that it was Righteous.

Interesting term.

Ponder what you 'reckon'.

 

Today

 Today was like a glimpse, a taste, a hint of Spring.

It was over 60 in Cheshire.

I only wore a dress coat to church.

I just went out at 9:30 p.m. and it was still warm/cool like Spring.

I can't wait.

It won't be below freezing, even at night for the next week according  to the weather forecast.

Thank the Lord.

I long for warmth, for the need for air-conditioners.

For the hot.

I love the hot.

Soon...soon, I pray.

Spring is coming.

Alleluia!