Pondering

While I'm pondering the two days with our children, Josh and Mimi, their spouses, Tim and Cathy, and our four granddaughters, I wanted to share some of the quotes from my Mastery Foundation quotes box.

Some of them make my smile. Some make me ponder. They are all pretty short and deserve being thought about and being with them.

"Everyone wants to be on a championship team and nobody wants to practice.
                                                                   --Bobby Knight

"Nobody can make you feel inadequate without your permission."
                                                                    --Eleanor Roosevelt

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
                                                                   --Mark Twain

"Not everything that can be counted counts--and not everything that counts can be counted."
                                                                     --William Bruce Cameron

"When you make the finding yourself--even if you are the last person on earth to see the light--you'll never forget it."
                                                                    --Carl Sagon

"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
                                                                   --Sam Rayburn

"We can do no great things--only small things with great love."
                                                                    --Mother Teresa

"I'm sure my memory only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen." "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.
                                                                    --Lewis Carroll

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eye off the goal."
                                                                    --Hannah Moore

"Not a shread of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."
                                                                    --Brandon Gill

"Where there is great love there are always miracles."
                                                                    --Willa Cather

"Enjoy pondering these thoughts."
                                                                    --Jim Bradley

holy saturday

And holy it is.

Both our children and their mates and all our grandchildren are here!

And tomorrow we'll add John Anderson and Jack and Sherry and Robbie Ellis to the mix.

We'll be having dinner at 3 since Tim needs to go back to NYC tomorrow so he can show up at his office in, get this, the Empire State Building on Monday. But Mimi and Eleanor will stay over along with Josh, Cathy and their three girls,

Resurrection it will be. Our family and friends all together.

Who knows how long this will happen with all of us together?

Joyous and Wondrous and Mysterious Easter to you all, my beloved.

And you are 'my beloved' if you read this.

Shalom.

Good Friday

I often tell the same story on Good Friday after reading the Passion story from John.

In the early years I was at St. John's in Waterbury, we were a member of the Council of Churches. And every Good Friday there was a service from noon until three which paired the Prayer Book Service with "The Seven Last Words of Christ". So, I would invite 7 Protestant ministers to preach the seven sermons on the last words. It was an awkward service and I was delighted when the Council of Churches became an Inter-Faith group and we could drop the 7 last words part.

We got smaller crowds, but the music was great and there was lots of silence.

The worst service (and they were all bad since controlling preachers is like herding cats only worse)
was when an AME-Zion preacher took much more time than was allotted for the sixth word sermon.

When his 12 minutes was up, he said, "Let us now go back to Bethlehem" and I thought, "that's the wrong direction preacher."

I think he preached for 35 minutes, which meant there was simply no time for the seventh word sermon.

While the preacher droned on, I went over the Manor Tyson, a Southern Baptist Minister, and whispered, "Manor, you have NO time."

He whispered back, "I've got it."

When it was his turn, he read the last word from the Gospel of John, when Jesus says, "it is finished", and died.

Then Manor said, "Jesus said, 'it is finished'. But we know it's not!" and sat down.

The best Good Friday sermon I've ever heard.

I told that story at St. Andrew's tonight.

And I ask you to remember, beloved, Jesus said "it is finished", but we know it isn't.

Maundy Thursday

(An old Maundy Thursday for you. My spell check doesn't know 'Maundy'--not a Christian spell check. Frankie, mentioned in the sermon, is no longer with us, spending Easter, I pray, at an even more glorious feast!)

Maundy Thursday 2008

          Maundy Thursday is always my favorite holy day

          And I always talk about eating.

          And often I get too long winded and go on and on and people wonder when I’ll ever finish.

          Something about ‘meals’ keeps me talking beyond what is necessary.

          So, this year I wrote it down so it would be controlled and less than 10 minutes and you wouldn’t have to wonder if I’d wandered off into some crack in my brain and wouldn’t be back for a while!

          Easter dinner is special in our home. We aren’t surrounded by ‘family’ so we have invented a ‘family’ for holidays. We have friends who come to share our table on Thanksgiving and Christmas and, most of all, for me, on Easter.

         

          John will be there—a friend of mine since college who lives in New Haven and is a Warden at Christ Church. West Virginians through and through—John and I. We have a patois that is Mountain Talk that few can follow if they didn’t grow up in that lush and deserted place.

          He’ll call me and say, “Hey, Jem….”

          And I’ll answer, “Hey, Jonn…” and we’re off and running about the dogs that won’t hunt and the crazy aunts and stuff no one else understands.

          Jack and Sherry will be there—our friends who we met when we lived in New Haven. They are southerners—Virginia and South Carolina. They usually bring a country ham and dandelion risotto for Easter dinner. But they’ll be getting back from a trip to Italy and Greece and won’t have time to cook this year.

          I know John and Jack and Sherry as well as I know myself. We rub against each other in ways that make life make sense.

          And Mimi will be there. My ‘princess’, my love, my precious girl. She is nearing 30 but she is still my baby girl. An hour with Mimi is like an eternity in heaven for me. I love her so. She is so wondrous—did you know she has become a girl scout leader in Brooklyn for young girls from the projects? She raises money for the American Ballet Theater for a living, but she embraces young girls who need a mentor to make her life meaningful. She is so precious to me I can hardly speak of her without weeping. And she will be at the table.

          This year, we will have ‘family’. Uncle Frankie and his son, Anthony—Bern’s favorite cousin, and his daughter Francis and her life-partner Lisa will be at the table. They hale from West Virginia but all live in Rhode Island now. They will be there, bringing memories and stories that would otherwise not be there.

          And that is what the meal is about, after all, the telling of stories to help us ‘remember’ and to give us hope to go on. And we will eat the ham (both 'country' and fresh) and the onion pie and the deviled eggs and the salad and the scalloped potatoes and tell the stories and be present—so remarkably present—to what is alive and real and wondrous, even in the sad stories of Aunt Annie’s death and the fact that Josh and Cathy and our granddaughters, Morgan and Emma are in Taiwan this Easter and not with us. They will gather around other tables—not to celebrate the resurrection because they are either Buddhists or nothing at all—but they will gather around a table to eat and tell stories and love each other and be present—so present—to the heart of God.

          That’s what this night is about. How being around a table, sharing food, telling stories, loving each other, hoping for the future, wondering what happens next….

          That’s what this night’s about. A table set and full of food. Family and friends gathered. Passing the bread, sharing the wine….wondering what will happen next.

          Because Jesus sat around that table so long ago and shared his body and his blood with those he loved and those he would never know.

          Just sitting at a table, eating with those you love, is a holy thing. A holy thing. A holy thing.  Remember that always. Remember that. Remember…   

April 17, 1947

Seventy-two years ago, Virgil Hoyt Bradley and Marion Cleo Jones Bradley had their first and only child. Virgil was 41 and Cleo was 38--not unusual ages today, but unheard of back then.

The child was born in Welch Memorial Hospital, in Welch, West Virginia, 18 miles from where they lived in Anawalt.

And, surprise, surprise, that baby was me.

My father was working in his brother, Russel's, grocery store-the H and S market in Anawalt and my mother was a school teacher.

At the time of my birth, Virgil was a Hard Shell Baptist and my mother was a Pilgrim Holiness. Later, we would all become Methodists.

My mother died when I was 25 but my father lived to see his grandchildren and to know I had been ordained as an Episcopal priest--something no one on either side of the family would have thought possible. Plus, I was the second in my family on either side to marry a Roman Catholic! Who to my surprise, was received into the Episcopal Church after 7 years of marriage.

My mother was a Democrat and my father a Republican (though he wouldn't recognize his party today!!!) Both were 'conservative' in many ways. And I'm a Democratic Socialist. Go figure.

I slept until 9:30 a.m., ate a Belgian waffle and bacon for breakfast, had Manhattan clam chowder for lunch, a piece of my birthday cheese cake and we went to dinner and I had more spare ribs that anyone could eat--and will be eating them for two more days.

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, my favorite Holy Day and then Good Friday and our children and grand-daughters arrive on Holy Saturday.

"All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well."  --Julian of Norwich

I went for the first time in years

I went today to the Cathedral in Hartford for the Holy Tuesday renewal of ordination vows.

I road up and back with three friends and the trip was good.

The Bishop of Maine led a conversation around tables in the morning on a passage from Luke about Jesus telling the man who wanted to bury his father before following him, "let the dead bury the dead".

It also talks about foxes having holes and the Son of Man not having a place to lay his head.

But the conversation was good and the Bishop did a nice job.

The service was very good too.

Lunch was OK, but not great and because I have trouble registering for stuff on line, I had to pay $15 for lunch.

Not a bad day, but I do have to recall, every time I go to a clergy gathering, what Will Rodgers said about Methodist clergy. "Methodist ministers," he opined, "are like manure. Spread out, they do a lot of good, but all in one place they tend to stink."

I forgot

(Usually, I try each year to reprint the first post of now over 2300 over the years on the anniversary of that first post.. This year I'm over a month late of the birth of this blog. But here it is, late as it is.)

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 in 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 Nineva, 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 impications are astonishing!). Then God sends a worm to kill the tree. Well, that sets Jonah off! "How dare you kill my tree?" he challanges 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 Ninivah...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 scarcly understood their language and whose customs confounded me. And I found myself often among people (The Episcopal Cult) who made me axious 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 colemn for the school newspaper call "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 somemore. 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.