dual personalities

Category: Spirituality

November 8, 2018

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”*

by chuckofish

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Koichi Okumura (1888-1976)

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

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We still have most of our leaves on the trees here in flyover country, but winter is coming…

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. (Ecclesiastes 3:15)

The last five paintings are by Andrew Wyeth.

P.S. I watched Nevada Smith (1966) last night. “I’ve got a rifle, a horse and eight dollars. It’ll  hold.”

*Ecclesiastes 3:1

 

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October 31, 2018

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott*

by chuckofish

Screen Shot 2018-10-30 at 1.24.29 PM.pngOctober 31, 1517 was the day Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

Screen Shot 2018-10-30 at 2.14.26 PM.pngDid you know that Luther’s theses are engraved into the door of All Saints’ Church, Wittenberg? The Latin inscription above informs the reader that the original door was destroyed by a fire, and that in 1857, King Frederick William IV of Prussia ordered a replacement be made.

Today is also the anniversary of our pater’s death in 1992. One of his former students gave me a picture of him and I have it in my office. He watches over me with a slightly annoyed look on his face.

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I forgave him for his many imperfections a long time ago and I don’t mind him hanging around in my office.

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

So join me in a toast tonight to Martin Luther and to ANC III.

And if you’re going to a Great Pumpkin party, make good choices!

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*Martin Luther

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October 8, 2018

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them?”*

by chuckofish

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A busy weekend precluded doing much of a blogpost today. We did get pumpkins at the Methodist pumpkin patch though.

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Score.

And at church, our rector, who is actually in the process of getting a divorce, had to preach on the day’s gospel lesson, Mark 10:2-16:

Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate…

He met the challenge head on though and owned it. It made me think of Martin Luther saying, sin bravely, meaning, do the best you can.

Same goes for all of us.

*Psalm 8:4/Hebrews 2:6

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October 4, 2018

Look for the blessing

by chuckofish

 

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Some days are better,

Some days are worse.

Look for the blessing instead of the curse.

Be positive, stay strong,

and get enough rest.

You can’t do it all. But you can do your best.

Thought for the day. It’s a good thought, right?

[The painting is by Edward Le Bas (1904-1966)]

4 Comments
September 28, 2018

Child of God

by chuckofish

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Earlier in the week I received the news that Charlie, the 20-year old grandson of one of my dearest friends, had been killed in a car wreck driving back to KU. This is crushing. Every parent’s nightmare.

Indeed, we hear such terrible stories all the time, but when they hit close to home, it scares us and we wonder if life is just one blow after another until we too die.

But then I was listening to my daily Tim Keller sermon as I rode my stationery bike yesterday and he was talking about 1 John 3:1-3:

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Though we see through a glass darkly, Charlie sees Christ face to face now. We must try to rejoice in that.

Most merciful God, whose wisdom is beyond our understanding: Deal graciously with Charlie’s family in their grief. Surround them with your love, that they may not be overwhelmed by their loss, but have confidence in your goodness, and strength to meet the days to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This week has been a very stressful week at work, compounded by this tragic news. I feel unfocused and on edge. But the weekend is upon us. My boy will be riding once again in the Pedal the Cause bicycle race for cancer survivors. He is two years cancer free.

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Have a good weekend. Tell your loved ones you love them. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (I Thessalonians 5:18)

[The engraving above is Rosa Celeste: by Gustave Doré]

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September 26, 2018

Let not your heart be troubled

by chuckofish

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I thought this was a good point.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

And don’t forget:

…And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matthew 28:20)

(Tiffany window in the Pullman Memorial Universalist Church, Albion, NY)

4 Comments
September 18, 2018

Under the surface

by chuckofish

“That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.”

–Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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Good luck and vaya con dios, Michael.

“Had he, during the course of his ministry, changed a single life? He recalled the words of a woman overheard when he was leaving his last parish. ‘Father Martin is a priest of whom no one ever speaks ill.’ It seemed to him now the most damning of indictments.”

–P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders

“Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”

― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale 

2 Comments
September 17, 2018

“Get behind me, Satan!”*

by chuckofish

Well, it was a sunny weekend here in flyover country and there was a lot going on all over town. The OM and I opted for our local Greentree parade on Saturday, even though the wee babes were unable to join us.

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The usual suspects were around except there were no floats from any of our local churches–no rockin’ Methodists, no one. I found that troubling.

After that I visited a few of my favorite antique malls and rescued a needlepoint pillow.

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I finished reading Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, which my DP recommended so highly a few weeks ago. I recommend it as well–it was very good!

Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart.

Next up on my reading list is Give a Man A Horse, written in 1938 by Charles J. Finger (1867–1941)  who was a prolific writer who settled in Arkansas after an early life of travel and adventure. One of his many adventure books won the Newbery Prize for children’s literature. In addition to writing and publishing a magazine from his Fayetteville farm, Finger was employed from 1936 through 1938 as an editor of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) guidebook, Arkansas: A Guide to the State.

Screen Shot 2018-09-16 at 1.26.06 PM.pngI can’t remember where I ran across this long-forgotten writer, but he sounds like a fascinating fellow. I bought his book and now I’m going to read it.

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The gospel lesson in church on Sunday was one of those difficult ones for preachers–especially Episcopal preachers–“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels”…because it describes so many of them (and us), you know? Not many want to talk about sin these days. Thank goodness there are still some Presbyterians out there who do:

Screen Shot 2018-09-16 at 2.43.27 PM.pngSorry, if I sound a little grouchy–sometimes that’s the vibe. Thankfully, we went over to see the wee babes on Sunday night. Daughter #3 made tacos. My mood lightened.

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Have a good week! Run, dvil, run!

*Mark 8:33

 

 

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September 12, 2018

Even our tears belong to ritual

by chuckofish

The First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph’s dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

–Howard Nemerov

Boy, do I remember sending my children off to school back in the day.

You are so careful with your children and then one day you just say goodbye and they go off to school. You can’t protect them anymore, once they’re out of your house, not from mean kids and not from overzealous teachers with opinions. They are on their own.

When they were in elementary school, my kids walked to school and I would see them off at the back door with their backpacks and their lunches. Put on the full armour of God, I would pray.

…Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place,15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6: 14–18)

Sometimes I would say outloud, “Remember! You can go over the top for Jesus!”–which I had read was the last thing Tony Campolo’s mother would say to him as a child leaving the house on the way to school. We would chuckle about this, but I believed that sending them out on a positive note was important. And I never stopped praying for them.

2 Comments
September 5, 2018

Protected, directed, corrected

by chuckofish

Thank you, Denzel Washington! Well said.

Watch the whole thing, but try not to be distracted by the woman to the left of Denzel, who is looking at her phone throughout his speech. Can you imagine not paying attention to Denzel Washington giving the commencement address? I mean really.

Denzel made this speech at Dillard University, a private, historically black, liberal arts college in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2015.

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