dual personalities

Tag: spirituality

July 12, 2020

I drove my Cooper

by chuckofish

This weekend the wee babes came over to play while their Mommy went to the sofa store and the wee laddie found my toy Mini Cooper high up on a bookshelf (quelle eagle eye.) No amount of telling him that it was off limits would prevail, so I said, fine, play with it. (Am I becoming a push-over?) He played with “my Cooper,” along with his “special cars”…

…and his “special book”.

When it was time to go home, however, he made quite a scene when told the Mini Cooper had to stay at Mamu’s house. (I am not a complete push-over.) He was tired, but he put up quite a fight. Later when his Dad got home from work and asked him what he had done that day, he told him all about “my Cooper.” His Dad asked if he played with the Beanie Babies etc and he said, “Yeah, and I drove my Cooper. I love that car.”

I was glad that daughter #1 had come home for happy hour, so that she could help wrangle the nutballs. We deserved those margaritas we had when they left.

Later the OM ordered take out from Amigo’s and we watched The Pajama Game (1957) and sang along with Doris Day and John Raitt.

On Sunday morning I drove my Cooper to an estate sale where I got some needlepoint coasters (can a person ever have too many coasters?) and a book. Daughter #1 found some sewing paraphernalia. She headed back to mid-Mo soon thereafter.

I FaceTimed with the infant and her Mommy. Life is quiet and our joys are simple.

I leave you with these thoughts about Life from Frederick Buechner:

The Temptation is always to reduce it to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery. As far as anybody seems to know, the vast majority of things in the universe do not have whatever life is. Sticks, stones, stars, space—they simply are. A few things are and are somehow alive to it. They have broken through into Something, or Something has broken through into them. Even a jellyfish, a butternut squash. They’re in it with us. We’re all in it together, or it in us.

Life is it. Life is with. After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.” 

Have you wept at anything during the past year? 

Has your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty? 

Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you are going to die? 

More often than not, do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak? 

Is there anybody you know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself? 

If your answer to all or most of these questions is no, the chances are that you’re dead.

4 Comments
June 26, 2020

“Forc[ed] to sing our songs in little rooms”*

by chuckofish

So another weekend is upon us. June is nearing its end! The year is already half over! Good grief.

But it is tiger lily season here in all its glory. And fireflies are back! Summer is definitely here in flyover country! I’ll toast that!

In other news, I liked what Paul Walker said in his daily devotional the other day:

Christ Church, Charlottesville, is taking its Sunday morning service outside this week. I don’t know if that means they will not be recording it. If so, I will miss them. But it is a good thing that more and more churches are getting back together in person. I salute them.

I liked this too, written by Sam Bush, who plays the guitar at the Christ Church services. (The bit by John Mulaney is pretty funny too. I haven’t watched SNL for 100 years.)

While rummaging in the basement, I found some smocked dresses made by my mother (and two store-bought) plus one made by my grandmother. I washed and ironed them this week and sent them to daughter #2 for Katiebelle.

Here’s Katiebelle’s Mommy wearing one of them!

I didn’t do anything else too interesting this past week. The OM and I watched Patton (1970)–all three hours of it!–and enjoyed it, but not that much. Patton ends on a depressing note. As usual, journalists come off badly.

We also watched The Train (1964) an American/French WWII film with Burt Lancaster getting to do all the physical stuff at which he excelled.

The story takes place in August 1944 when masterpieces of modern art stolen by the Wehrmacht are being shipped to Germany by train. The Nazi officer in charge of the operation is determined to take the paintings to Germany, no matter the cost (in other words, he’s a nut.) The French resistance members (led by Burt) save the paintings but at quite a loss of French lives, begging the question, is art worth human lives? The obsessed art-loving Nazi in this story would say, yes, without hesitation. But Burt doesn’t agree–very existential, and in black and white too (unlike the poster above, of course).

I will note that on this day in 1977 Elvis Presley held his final concert in Indianapolis, Indiana at Market Square Arena. We might want to watch an Elvis movie and raise a toast. Jailhouse Rock (1957) anyone?

Have a nice weekend!

*Billy Collins, “American Sonnet”

7 Comments
June 12, 2020

Natural circumstances and the perversity of human will

by chuckofish

Another week almost gone with the wind. They do go by. I had a busy week “at work” and I went to a Vestry meeting. Yes, the Vestry meeting was actually at church, in Albright Hall, where we sat 6 feet apart and wore masks. It was a little ridiculous, but at least we were together all in one place. It felt kind of normal. We are the only Episcopal Church in the diocese that is meeting together on Sunday and I am proud of our Rector who is jumping through a lot of hoops to do this. I have a feeling there are many ministers/priests who are sleeping through this period and glad of the excused absence.

I liked Paul Walker’s daily devotion (from Charlottesville) the other day, which read in part:

I also went to the dentist (high fives all around) and drove to pick up a Victorian chair I won on the online auction held at our local auction house. It is a needlepoint rescue and nothing special, but it felt good to be back in the game.

Of course, there has been much FaceTiming and cooing over our sweet Katiebelle. She has changed so much in her first week!

And look how confident DN is getting compared to 3 years ago when he practiced holding the wee babes.

The wee babes at six months are about the same size as Katiebelle at one week!

Meanwhile the OM and I have been watching The Last Ship, a series on Hulu that was originally aired on TNT back in 2014, about the crew of a U.S. naval destroyer that is forced to confront the reality of a new existence when a pandemic kills off most of the earth’s population. Timely, right? It stars Eric Dane and Adam Baldwin. We are enjoying it and I recommend it if you are in the mood for an action series that has some depth to it. And the leads are handsome.

We also watched 49th Parallel (1941), a British war film made by the Pressburger/Powell team with the help of Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey to help sway American opinion in favor of joining the war effort. It is pretty good and maybe it was considered tough stuff back then, but the Canadians seemed rather dim-witted and trusting next to the dirty Nazis who are trying to escape the RMP. I guess that was the point.

You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

Have a good weekend!

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December 19, 2016

Yea, amen! let all adore thee*

by chuckofish

It was a busy week. Daughter #2 came home and between going to work, trips to the NICU at the hospital and an ice storm, we managed to trim the big tree

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and watch Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Edward Scissorhands (1990). We even made several fires in the fireplace without the aid of our Eagle Scout who did come and help us wrangle the tree into the tree stand. Merci beaucoup.

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Daughter #2 graded 29 papers and the OM gassed up the cars.

We went to church yesterday, the fourth Sunday in Advent, and sang the rest of the advent hymns. The rector gave us all high fives for showing up. In fact, a lot of churches were closed because of the weather and very cold temperatures. This is a new thing. On Saturday night you see the names of church closings scrolling on the bottom of your television screen, just like school closings during the week. [Insert eye roll here.] Please.

Today we will go back to work for a few days and visit the hospital and get ready for daughter #1’s arrival on Friday. And we will “rejoice! rejoice!” because, you know, “Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!”

Have a good week and stay calm.

*Hymn 57, Charles Wesley

4 Comments
November 15, 2016

Better to wear out than to rust out

by chuckofish

No, that isn’t a saying originated by Neil Young (“it’s better to burn out than to fade away”). Indeed, this aphorism is attributed to quite a few people, but one of those people who firmly believed it was George Whitefield (1714–1770), an 18th century Anglican clergyman who was one of the founders of Methodism and the evangelical movement, “The Great Awakening.”

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It is said that Whitefield preached at least 18,000 times to perhaps 10 million listeners in Great Britain and the American colonies.  Impressive.

He is honored today, together with Francis Asbury, with a (lesser) feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church.

Francis Asbury (1745 – 1816) was one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. In 1784 John Wesley named Asbury and Thomas Coke as co-superintendents of the work in America. This marks the beginning of the “Methodist Episcopal Church of the USA.”

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For the next thirty-two years, Asbury led all the Methodists in America. Like Wesley, Asbury preached in all sorts of places: courthouses, public houses, tobacco houses, fields, public squares, wherever a crowd assembled to hear him. For the remainder of his life he rode an average of 6,000 miles each year, preaching virtually every day and conducting meetings and conferences. Under his direction, the church grew from 1,200 to 214,000 members and 700 ordained preachers.

Holy God, who didst so inspire Francis Asbury and George Whitefield with evangelical zeal that their faithful proclamation of the Gospel caused a Great Awakening among those who heard them: Inspire us, we pray, by thy Holy Spirit, that, like them, we may be eager to share thy Good News and lead many to Jesus Christ, in whom is eternal life and peace; and who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Boy oh boy, both the Episcopal Church and the Methodist Church could really use these two today.

3 Comments
November 8, 2016

Let the people say Amen

by chuckofish

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Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
–Psalm 27:14
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November 3, 2016

Variations on a theme

by chuckofish

Photo courtesy of the Missouri Dept. of Conservation

Photo courtesy of the Missouri Dept. of Conservation

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

We’ve quoted Bonhoeffer before on the subject of thankfulness, but can we ever say it often enough? Probably not. It is so central to our well-being.

November is a good month to take a look at the things for which we are thankful, so I plan to do that.

Meanwhile, here’s a poem by W.S. Merwin:

Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen

And I am thankful for the flyover view.

“Grumbling and gratitude are, for the child of God, in conflict. Be grateful and you won’t grumble. Grumble and you won’t be grateful.”
―Billy Graham

2 Comments
November 1, 2016

Rescued from oblivion

by chuckofish

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Even the most cursory of diaries can be of incalculable value. What the weather was doing. Who we ran into on the street. The movie we saw. The small boy at the dentist’s office. The dream.

Just a handful of the barest facts can be enough to rescue an entire day from oblivion — not just what happened in it, but who we were when it happened. Who the others were. What it felt like back then to be us.

“Our years come to an end like a sigh . . . ” says Psalm 90, “so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (w. 9,12).

It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we’re sighing about when the last of them comes.

~ Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

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The illustration of parked cars on a residential street is from This is New York by Miroslav Sasek.

4 Comments
October 27, 2016

Alive and well somewhere

by chuckofish

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“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 

I went to a memorial service yesterday at the Unitarian Church on “Holy Corners” in the Central West End.

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You can see the Christian Scientist and Methodist churches in the background, built in better days around the turn of the 20th century.

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The Unitarian Church was built on a more humble scale and added to accordingly. It turns out it was the church of William Greenleaf  Eliot, the founder of my flyover university and also of the girls’ school I attended. Not that he would recognize this congregation.

Anyway, I had never been to a Unitarian memorial service before. The music was pretty bad and there was only one scripture reading–a terrible translation of Psalm 39–and one prayer. (We never even said the Lord’s Prayer.) The minister gave a long homily about the mystery of life and how everything dies, and a  long eulogy about the deceased, and the husband of the deceased gave a long eulogy. Like her parents, she was a lifelong member of the church and a serious Unitarian and social justice warrior. She and her husband were also big supporters of their partner church in Transylvania–yes, there are Unitarians in Transylvania! They are the second largest group of Unitarians in the world!  It is amazing what one doesn’t know about people.

Well, it all got me thinking about old Walt Whitman’s lines about death in Song of Myself, which seem very Unitarian in spirit to me but are more meaningful than anything I heard in the service. I like to think that my friend is alive and well somewhere, although I guess that’s not what she expected.

*The painting is “Moonlight” by Fausto Zonaro (1854 – 1929)

4 Comments
October 25, 2016

On the way to knowing

by chuckofish

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I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something–whatever you like–you will be on the way to knowing more about Him; that is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence; and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.

–Vincent Van Gogh

3 Comments