Church Life
- Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Lectio Divina, Prayers, Reflections
Slight Return
I was a gangly skint-kneed sliver of a boy of eleven when I became a Christian. The term we used then was “getting saved,” and I got saved at a summertime Vacation Bible School worship service to which I had been invited by my best friend. Since that first terrifying moment when I stepped out into the aisle to make my way down front, feeling as if an invisible hand were pushing me along, my path has looped around to some interesting landmarks. I started out at the Church of the Nazarene, then faded into twilight in my teen years as I visited but never committed to a number of…
-
For Lauds, Saturday, August 8th A.D. 2020
-
Gray Matters
Perhaps it’s the weather. The humidity holds everything close to the ground, makes everything sit on the skin and hang in the senses. My thoughts are that way these days. I’ve been thinking about patterns in my life, especially my perception of myself and my strengths and weaknesses through the years. It’s not very pleasant to honestly face certain truths about myself, and one of those truths is that I spent most of my life believing that I was a lot smarter than I really am. Encountering a few really brilliant men in person didn’t show me the contrast right away, but the perspective provided by the passing years has…
-
Cold Spring Water
I received word of the death of a friend. He was a genuine old-timey mountain man, and a moonshiner deluxe. Like the legendary Popcorn Sutton (pictured above), my friend moved easily among the hills and hollers of this region, fashioning well-crafted stills and firing them with wood he cut himself, filling them with clear, cold spring water that trickled through the cuts and valleys beneath stands of oak and rhododendron. Unlike Mr. Sutton, my friend owned and ran a respectable business and his moonshining was strictly a side venture. He was a master at distilling corn down into the potent clear liquid that so many have savored. Who can number…
-
Such Will Not Be Found In A Church
One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of ‘perfection’ to his own life. He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books. Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him. He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict…
-
Easter, A.D. 2020
Easter, A.D. 2020 So this is what legacy looks like The offspring of those who raised hymns while lions Tore their holy flesh now cower within Their antiseptic catacombs, heroes Devouring the crumbs of Nero’s hourly updates. Will they write epistles on toilet paper? Will they anoint themselves with hand sanitizer? They may as well — such empty sacramentals Well depict the razed rubble of faith. ~ S.K. Orr
-
Consummatum Est
In the last few years before her death, my mother talked to herself. Or rather, she talked to someone. Throughout my life, during her years on this earth, the kitchen was Mother’s place of abiding. She spent most of her waking hours within its warm, productive walls. In those last years before she passed from this life, whenever I was home with her, if I came into the kitchen quietly, I would often find her talking quietly as she worked. It seemed that she was talking to herself, but perhaps she was having a dialogue with God, or with an angel, or with a long-dead loved one. I do not…
-
Hacking Alert UPDATE
The problem with the website at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey seems to be resolved. I have re-added the link in my “Please Support If You Are Able” sidebar. ~ S.K. Orr
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Lectio Divina, Prayers, Reflections
Lourdes, Lourdes
I’ve avoided writing about the current health scare for the same reason that I’ve avoided talking about it at length. There are too many sources of disparate, conflicting information, almost none of whom I trust, and I lack both the intellectual rigor and the sort of personality that delights in wading through all this dismal stuff. I suppose my stance on this situation is akin to my grandmother’s. I remember one day in the Seventies when a young plumber tried to engage her in a conversation about diet and heart disease. He presented all sorts of facts and figures in an evangelist’s voice, his eyes shining in his earnest face.…
-
A Deep Failure
“I am more and more impressed by the fact that it is largely futile to get up and make statements about current problems. At the same time, I know that silent acquiescence in evil is also out of the question. I know too that there are times when protest is inescapable, even when it seems as useless as beating your head up against a brick wall. At the same time, when protest simply becomes an act of desperation, it loses its power to communicate anything to anyone who does not share the same feelings of despair. There is of course no need to comment on the uselessness of false optimism,…