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| Out of Nowhere, by Lane Denson, Southern Sage and Jazz Musician |
ZOIC
Massive Paleozoic limestones and shales lie extensively under middle Tennessee. Like Jesus once suggested, they talk, but this time in the grammar of geology in road cuts and quarries, buildings, wells, and dry stack fences.
When push came to shove from east and west many of these rocks were left in a north-south trending fold or anticline. Millions of years of erosion removed the top of the fold leaving the sides to form in what has come to be called the Eastern and Western Highland Rims. This orogeny exposed the center to form the Central Basin of Tennessee to grow more blue grass than Kentucky.
The Western Rim is one of the state's largest geologic regions and a primary source of iron consisting mainly of the mineral limonite, an ore of iron, oxygen, and water, with small amounts of phosphorus and sulfur which stay with the iron when it is smelted, making it an impure variety. Iron from these sources was used for Andrew Jackson's Artillery in the War of 1812. They weren't especially concerned about the purity of their cannonballs.
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| Buddy Stallings. Vicar of St. Bartholonew's Church, NYC |
Did You Say "TULLY"?
A week from today we commence an entire weekend of activities to honor Bill Tully’s retirement. When this year of transition began, Jane Tully in a light moment asked me in Bill’s presence if I thought “I would be sick of hearing about him by January 22, 2012.” I opined that I probably would. Yesterday, Bill and I spent some time with a reporter from the New York Times who is writing a feature on his retirement and the change in leadership at St. Bart’s. Though we were interviewed separately, the conversation was all about him!
As, of course, it should be.
Seventeen years is a long time anywhere and perhaps particularly in a place like St. Bart’s. While a parish is infinitely more than its leader, an entire generation of St. Bart’s worshippers has been definitively affected by the Tully era. Though he and all of us agree that in general, collaborative leadership is always best and most effective, Bill’s stamp is deeply ingrained on life as most of us know it now at St. Bart’s.
Right or wrong about individual issues (in my experience and to my thinking much more often right than wrong), Bill has been passionate about the direction he believed St. Bart’s should go. He wanted it to grow, to be theologically honest, to exist as a house of prayer and faith for all people, to survive and thrive as the architectural treasure it is, and to be a place in and through which the lives of seekers might find both solace and transformation.
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In the priest business, it is unseemly to talk too openly about success -- unseemly but not surprisingly widely done -- priests being in the end, and the beginning for that matter, just like everybody else. Bill has had an astoundingly successful run at St. Bart’s -- successfully, even brilliantly, affecting the lives of many, many people.
And though this is beginning to sound like a eulogy (which it emphatically is not; I saw him yesterday; he is in fine form, and in fact looks younger than I do -- a truth I deeply resent but that is another story), I can’t end this piece without acknowledging my profound gratitude and appreciation of him as a friend and colleague. Let alone the immensity of what I have learned from him, I have enjoyed him. Particularly in this last year, we have spent many hours laughing, talking, dreaming, and hoping about St. Bart’s -- and more than that, sharing our personal pondering about life and God and how all of it works. He is a faithful friend; and happily since he is not dead, I don’t intend to lose him!
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| Brian's Reflection, by Brian Orrock McHugh |
Love: The Many Splendid Thing
I think that making love is the best form of exercise. - Archibald Leach, born January 18, 1904, in Bristol, England. (Archibald Leach?? Google him!)
I agree! When I go for my daily 1/7 mile walk, I apparently work off about 150 calories or more ..... I walk at a pretty brisk rate. I read somewhere that a vigorous "bout" of love-making works off about 150 calories. I vote for the latter.
Mr. Leach was either Gay or Bisexual. So say most of his friends and biographers. He lived with the actor Randolph Scott for 12 years. Stories abound.
"Making Love" is absolutely the best form of exercise towards being a wholesome, healthy human being. For the Body, yes; it helps ..... and is FUN. But much more importantly, for the Spirit, for the Mind, for the Heart. The message of Jesus, of the Gospel, is that if we do not love, we "wither and decay" ... on every level. Like everything that humans do, "making love" physically is a sacramental symbol: it points to the truth that loving oneself, "God", and one's "neighbour" enhances Life. Not loving shrivels us.
Dare I suggest that one should make physical love with one's Beloved (which engages of course many other levels) often ..... and then extend it to a deep loving of all human beings, and then further extend it to affirming and honouring every human being whom one is privileged to encounter in Life?
Of COURSE I do!
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| Poet and writing teacher Elizabeth Ayres (http://www.invitationtowonder.com) hosts the radio program, Soundings, Monday evenings at 8:30 p.m. eastern time at www.wryr.org |
Blue Moon
It hung in the sky from sunset to sunrise, spanning the last day of 2009 and the first day of 2010. A quixotic event that, every 2 to 3 years, arrives now in one season, now in another, bestowing upon the month of its appearance a second full moon which, because it is outside all systems of lunar nomenclature, has no proper name and is called, simply, blue. On December 2, 2009 we had an Oak, Cold or Long Night Moon, while on December 31, 2009, we had a Blue Moon which, as I’ve already pointed out, shone its uncommon light on the last hours of 2009 and the first hours of 2010, becoming, as it were, a bridge. A yoke. A hinge. Making, of the two distinct years, one indivisible unit.
Leaping from Astronomy to Quantum Physics, I’d like to point out something else. Scientists can demonstrate in their labs that, while atoms are mostly empty, the emptiness is not really a void but, rather, a cloud of possibility out of which protons, neutrons and electrons appear and disappear. Matter isn’t solid at all, it’s a furling unfurling abyss from which substance manifests, and, according to Superstring Theory, the newest scientific model, all those particles as well as the gravity that binds them together form, not separate objects or distinct forces, but an indivisible strand of energy in constant communication with itself.
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Leaping from Quantum Physics to a recent walk on the beach, I’d like to tell you about the dead heron I found. I felt compelled to spread out its wings, as if the bird were still flying. To stretch out its neck, as if it were heading westward. To place, in its beak, the dead fish lying next to it. Then I scrubbed my hands with sand, rinsed them in waves that flapped on the beach like wings, continued my stroll. Later, going back to my car, I heard a rifle’s report in the woods. And realized: that heron had been shot from the sky in full flight, its dinner wriggling in its mouth.
Where did it come from, the impulse to re-enact the heron’s last few minutes of life? I believe there was a silent tug on the strand of energy linking our bodies. You can believe what you want, but let me point out that the first year of the second decade of the only new millennium any of us will ever know has begun in exceptional fashion, linked by a rare and special light to the year preceding it, asking us to pay attention to that which is bridged, yoked, hinged together. It is not a concatenation of separate objects, this Universe we inhabit, it is a continuum, an indivisible unit existing for a common purpose, unto a common promise. What is it they say? “United we stand, divided we fall.” Patrick Henry and Mahatma Gandhi used it of their separate nations, perhaps this year we’ll learn to use it of the continuum called Earth.
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| Clergy Family Confidential by Tim Schenck |
Sh*t Rectors Think (but don’t say)
Talk about going viral. In 2009, a semi-employed comedy writer named Justin Halpern started a Twitter feed to record the often salty comments made by his father. Eventually this turned into a book titled “Sh*t My Dad Says” which reached number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was subsequently turned into a sit-com which is currently running on CBS starring William Shatner.
I never read the book nor have I seen the TV show but the concept has spawned all sorts of take-offs and parodies which I will leave you to Google since I’m not going to be responsible for endorsing any of the content. The title of this post alone will likely get me into trouble with a certain set. I guess I could have called it “Stuff Rectors Think” but that would lose the viral appeal of the coattails I’m shamelessly grabbing.
So here’s an ecclesiastical take on the concept. If you have others, by all means share them. In the meantime here goes (and remember this has been filed under the ‘church humor’ category):
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Sh*t Rectors Think (but don’t say)
1. Could the organist possibly play this hymn any slower? The “grace” is rapidly losing its amazingness.
2. (During a pastoral counseling session) You think you have problems? Let me tell you about mine!
3. I wonder how many more tedious vestry meetings I’ll have to endure before I retire? Is there a Golden Number for this?
4. Please stop the overly dramatic reading of the Epistle. It’s not as if you wrote it yourself.
5. I hope the bishop doesn’t have any spies around here.
6. I hope the bishop doesn’t read my blog.
7. The homemade cookies are nice but can’t someone give the rector a nice bottle of scotch for Christmas?
8. How does a twit like Joel Osteen get tens of thousands of people to show up on a Sunday morning while I’m lucky to get 200 or 300?
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9. (When visiting another church on a rare Sunday off) Why would anyone possibly come to this place?
10. “What time is the Easter service?” does not qualify as a pastoral emergency. See you at Christmas.
11. (Musing at coffee hour as you can’t remember any names) Why is it that all children under the age of five look alike as do all gray-haired ladies?
12. When does the Pension Fund kick in?
13. Why don’t they make homiletical candle snuffers to be used when the assistant/seminarian’s sermon loses its focus?
15. I wonder if we get wi-fi in the chancel?
16. Must that guy in the fourth row be a split second behind on every congregational response? I wonder if I can summon an usher using mental telepathy to have him removed before the Nicene Creed?
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17. If you gave up that membership to the country club, maybe you’d be able to “afford” a pledge greater than $5 per week.
18. A monkey could have done a better job arranging those flowers on the altar.
19. It’s not that the microphones “don’t work as well as they did when Father XX was the rector,” it’s that you’re going deaf.
20. This meeting better end before “Modern Family” starts.
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