I'm Just Sayin'

Beautiful morning, which started with frost. Rosie had turned on the ceiling heat and I turned it off and opened the door and turned on the table fan until my face and ears cooled off.

I slept until after nine, having gone to bed soon after twelve last night, and I’m still tired. I think I’m getting caught up on some long needed rest.

Listening to WUOL, Bach piece that is getting a little monotonous. I’m sure if I had brain-one about the composition of music I’d appreciate the variations and crap he went through with this. Actually I do have an intuitive feeling for what he’s doing but I don’t care to be as exhaustive as he is.

Then there’s Carol Larson, a lovely woman who announces, who (or as she would be sure to say, whom) I have met in person to affirm her loveliness, but sometimes she gets to me because she is so smarmy and prissy, prim and proper. She has had piano lessons and knows music inside and out and assumes her listeners have the same level of knowledge as she does and it ain’t so, Carol. And when she announces a work by a French composer and/or performer, she blows you away with her correct, non-native French. Piss off, Carol, you dear, sweet, phony woman. And God bless you.

Thanks be to God, anyway, today, that I am well again and I hope once more on the right road to recovery.

All three devotionals I'm reading right now were good this morning. The Upper Room is about "new life" (eternal life), which I speculate will be something much, much better than any of us expects. From Daily Reflections, wise counsel not to try to change others, only myself: "live and let live." And Buechner the ecclesiastic poet, in Listening to Your Life, describes the shopworn Christian word, "grace," and reminds us that it's a gift. He says its meaning is something like:

"Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you."

I guess those last two sentences are no more fantastic than the glib belief that the Big Bang occurred, something from nothing, without Somebody to light the cosmic fuse.

I'm just sayin'.

That Old Clown Is Back

Sunshine is back today after a protracted absence and it is particularly welcome, even as a good, slow, soaking rain over a number of days was welcome earlier in the week.

The New York Times today contains two stories on the declining influence of the religious right in politics: one is in the column of Frank Rich and the other is in the magazine and is written by David D. Kirkpatrick. I found both to be instructive in what is going on in religion and politics in the United States today.

I am still an advocate of the position of Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, which is that there is more to the teachings of Christ than an opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and evolution. And that there is a conflict in the crusade to preserve life when it applies only to the unborn and not to opposing war, capital punishment, and being indifferent to the health care of children, the struggle of people in this nation and the world to be free from want when there is plenty for all. I could go on about the inconsistencies of the personal-piety wing of Christianity.

In the NYT Magazine's story, "The Evangelical Crackup," these remarks by the Rev. Gene Carlson, a well-credentialed conservative of Wichita, Kansas spoke to me:

“ 'There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,' Carlson said, 'and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.' He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. 'Now it is a growing phenomenon,' he said."

God, I hope so. How I hope so. The death grip of the neocons and the Roves on the religious "right" has nearly killed us all and may do so yet. I pray not.

This Is More Like It!

Beautiful October morning in Madi-tucky, Indiana. The kind that James Whitcomb Riley wrote his doggerels about. Frost not quite on the punkin, but it might have been this time of year before Al Gore's inconvenient truth. Frost, anyway, though a better poet than Riley, is dead too, so we move on.

Anyhow, "that old clown sunshine" (Updike) is barely over the horizon and is letting its light fall on the wall, with shadows of the slats of the mini-blind and dancing leaves. Dancing shadows in sunshine make me happy. Night before last we had a tornado scare but for all the promises of the weather boys that we were going to have a perfect storm it didn't happen and we're still here. :-)

Rosie and family and I are readying stuff for an estate sale of sorts, moving some of the old folks' belonging out and hoping to get a few liquid assets to defray the expense of Howard's stay at Thornton Terrace.

It is too easy to buy music from iTunes. Little and often makes plenty for Steve Jobs.

Since I've been out of the hospital I've been to at least one and sometimes two rehab sessions every day. It's a good life. I like the fellowship and I'm trying to help others in the same boat, which gets my mind off me, me, me. And I've felt better every day.

Only 11 more shopping days until Hallowe'en! Tune up your brooms, have a dental checkup of your fangs, ...

Good Gray October Afternoon: It's Good to Be Home

I recently was in hospital for seven days for a life-long malady of mine, and am now home and glad to be here. Just wanted the handful of family and friends who have an RSS to this blog or just check it from time to time know that I'm back and things are OK for now. Thanks, love, and blessings to all who were concerned. Onward and upward.