- Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Mrs. Orr, Photographs, Quotations, Reflections
Lanes And Patterns And Oh, Forward…
Most of us experience brief flashes in our lives during which we are aware of the singularity of a particular moment. This is special. This will never come again. I have never experienced this before. These flitting glitters of awareness have usually vanished before we can fully form a thought about them. The weather this week has been so astonishingly gorgeous….I have exhausted all the daylight hours staring like a lovestruck schoolboy out through the pollen-painted panes of the windows and doors. It has been special. And this particular weather pattern will never come again. I have never before experienced this exact pattern of light and leaf and life. For…
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Photographs, Reflections
Ash Woden’s Day
And so Lent begins today. This is the first year since my awkward and stumbling embrace of Catholicism began that I will not be observing the day or the season. It is a fitting coincidence that today also marks the anniversary of my receiving my honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps and became a civilian again. Leaving the Corps was an interesting experience, bringing with it a feeling of being unmoored and yet settled on a somewhat shrouded path. That’s a good description of how I feel today. I look outside and see the tiniest patches of green in the woods and little emerald dots along the length…
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To Roam Through The New Earth
Heeding the news or pundits or bloggers about what’s going on in the world is like listening to preachers expound on the book of Revelation. None of them really knows what he’s talking about. It’s naïve speculation at best, and cynical self-centered grandstanding at worst. I grew up listening to sermons and skimming booklets that “proved” that Richard Nixon was the Beast, or that Henry Kissinger was the antichrist. And where are those authors now? Look at the current crop of blathering boys & girls, ignorant of both history and human nature, standing atop their picnic tables and waving their arms about. They, too, will be completely forgotten someday. Any…
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My Thoughts, They Are Provoked
WJT posted one of his singular pieces that troubled me, delighted me, and had me staring at the floor, lost in thought, long after I read it, just as his classic Supergod Delusion essay kept me chewing on his words for weeks after I read the post. Reading this sort of material doesn’t finally answer any questions for me, but like a good Zen koan, the act of reading and the subsequent attempts to digest such things helps me see myself with greater clarity. For the majority of my Christian life, I saw myself as a pretty smart fellow. It was a liberating but excruciatingly painful day when I began…
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It’s The Usual Question, Regina
It’s always a mistake when I think to myself, “I’ll just duck in here and pick up a few things. It’ll only take a few minutes.” So there we were, meee-eee-eee-eee and Mrs. — Mrs. Orr. (Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr…) There we were, fresh out of a grocery store where we’d stocked up, and on the other side of the parking lot I noticed the Dollar Tree…those places where, yes, everything’s a dollar. They’re great for things like notepads, generic anti-inflammatory drugs and pain relievers like Ibuprofen and acetaminophen, for cheap kitchen matches and implements that can be used in gardening (like colanders for…
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Pugilistic-19
During the past two weeks of the current, ah, crisis, I’ve been able to work from home quite a bit, and am grateful that I haven’t been laid off. One of the fringe benefits of working at home has been getting to spend a lot of time with our dog Jinx. I can take a break any time I want, and usually my breaks include going outside to romp or walk with the spotted menace. Even though Jinx is mostly red heeler, I enjoy telling him regularly that his spots can be traced to disreputable Dalmatian genes. I also like advising him that it’s only an act of deliberate magnanimity…
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Rememberance
If I had a large brood of children, and if I sat down to write them a letter by which they might remember me, and if in this letter I offered some general guidelines on how to live a virtuous life and honor my memory… And if, on the other side of this life, I learned that my children were constantly divided against each other because of their individual insistence that each of them had the correct, full, and perfect understanding of my letter, and if I saw them spending long hours analyzing and parsing every syllable of my letter instead of getting on with the business of being my…