The tree is up

We got a long needle pine that almost touches the ceiling in our living room.

It's a concolar pine that smells like oranges. Really....

Bern put the lights (all white) up since I am miserable with tree lights and we'll decorate it for the next few days.

We have 4 large containers or ornaments, so we'll see how many we can hang on it.

I like long needle pines and was glad when Bern picked it out.

It should be beautiful unless it collapses from all the ornaments!

 

A slow week

 I don't have church Sunday. No sermon to write.

I haven't done much this week.

Took out the trash and recycling and brought the empty buckets back.

Bern has been doing Christmas.

We got a tree yesterday. Bern picked out a long-needle pine--which I prefer. I can't remember it's name--a 'something pine'--but Bern tells me it smells like oranges. My spell is mostly gone.

I grow old.

The gifts to our two kid's families have been wrapped and mailed.

I hope we don't decorate the tree until next week.

I like a slow week.

Guns

 There have been so many mass shootings in our country in the past year--most recently at the University of Nevada Los Vegas--that I would be in favor of taking guns away.

I know, I know, that gun owners fear that and rebel against it--but enough is enough.

The US is almost a war zone.

So many shootings in so many places--something must be done.

Our law enforcement groups can't control it.

So let's outlaw guns.

Hunting rifles, OK, but rifles are often used in mass shootings too.

Too much death.

Too many guns.

It's time, beloved.

It's time.

my first post

(I do this ever so often to remind you why my blog is called "Under the Castor Oil Tree.)

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.

 

 

 

 

The most unusual funeral ever

 I did a funeral for G. yesterday. He had been a member of St. John's on the Green in Waterbury where I was Rector for 21 years.

He was a great guy and I welcomed the chance to bid him farewell.

All the music was recorded and made up his favorite songs--mostly secular.

All I did was the Gospel, the Homily, Communion and the blessing.

All the rest were poems and the songs.

Three members of his family told remarkably funny stories about G.

I've never been at a funeral with so much laughter--but he would have approved and enjoyed that.

I told a story in my homily about when he was at a retreat at Holy Cross Monastery with other members of the church. Holy Cross is an Episcopal monastery where silence is observed from after Evensong--about 7 p.m. until after the Eucharist at 10 a.m. the next day. Even breakfast is eaten in silence.

G. was not a great one with silence!

After communion the second day, he danced down the hallway singing--"The Silence is over, The Silence is over, the Silence is over!!!"

Several people sang it for me as I greeted them at the door after the funeral.

It was a great service. A wondrous way to be remembered and sent on his way to the Lover of Souls.... 

This week's sermon

 

Advent 1, 2023

        Though Advent is a time of deep darkness, Jesus tells us to stay awake and ‘watch’ for the man returning from his journey.

        And in this dark time, the Collect tells us to “cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

        Waiting is hard for most of us.

        Waiting rooms are nightmares.

        We don’t want to wait—we want to move on.

        But Advent is a month of ‘waiting’ for the Christ-child to come, for Christmas to occur.

        So today we begin to wait and watch.

        It will not be easy.

        We need to rely on each other to wait and watch with us.

        The lesson from Isaiah is truly frightening. God has apparently forsaken his people because of their wrong doing.

        Listen: “But you were angry, and we sinned:

        Because you hid yourself, we transgressed.

        We have become like one who is unclean,

        And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.

        We all fade like a leaf,

        And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

        Pretty bleak, isn’t it.

        But as the collect tells us: ‘now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.”

        To be born in a strange town, in a stable and to be laid in a manger—doesn’t get much more ‘humble’ than that.

        So, we wait and we watch.

        We must stay awake and be aware.

        We are waiting and watching for Jesus.

        I don’t know about you, but I see the works of Jesus all around me.

        That stuff in the back of the church—the food and clothing—that is the work of Jesus.

        People being kind and loving and generous is the work of Jesus.

        Looking out for our neighbors and for strangers is the work of Jesus.

        Loving others is the work of Jesus.

        So we shall be aware and awake and watching—but we will also do the work of Jesus.

        We shall. We shall. We shall. Amen and Amen.

 

I hate the cold

This morning I went out and started the car 15 minutes before heading up to Trinity, Milton.

I wanted to be able to be warm for my 33 mile trip.

The front and back windows were covered with ice.

I washed it off the front with the wipers and put on the back heater to melt that away.

I hate when it's cold.

I know it's only beginning.

Oh, I know that!

But my hatred will grow hotter as the weather grows colder.

I promise you that!