Personally, I Find It Bland and Soul-less, Like Most Secular Ideas About the "Spiritual"

The Spiritual and Spectacular Meet at an Ultramodern Community Center in Connecticut

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue - All Blues

Extra Seat [1995]

The best conversation I ever had about the surf was also the shortest. And the quietest.

There are sounds common to every hospital, from Manila to New York City. Besides the murmur of voices and the occasional rasp from the intercom, there is the beeping associated with the various telemetry and servo-mechanisms, sometimes with the bellows rhythm of a respirator or the gurgle of a pleur-evac. I don’t know what it’s like for the patient; I don’t know if they stop hearing all of it or whether, since it’s the only distraction permitted when one can’t read, speak, or see, these sounds become comforting in their constancy.

Sitting in an ICU bay for more than a day, I know I stopped hearing them, permitting me a quiet vigil. Except for the forty-five minute ambulance ride and the six hours during which she was in neuro-surgery, I had been at my wife’s side for over thirty hours, still wearing the clergy collar and tweed suit from Sunday morning. As the ER physician had told me she wasn’t going to make it, I had given her “last rites” at noon the day before [since most people know what that term means I’ll use it; I’ll leave it to pedantic bishops to point out that “last rites” is not technically correct]. At 6pm, now at a second hospital, I had anointed her with the oil of unction, as I had been told that she might make it, but there would be lingering disability. With therapy and care she might be able to speak or even walk again. “After a fashion”, said the neuro-surgeon.

It was now 6pm the next day; two days before Ash Wednesday. I sat in the chair next to her bed, holding her hand in the noisy silence, waiting to see what the free-ranging pocket of blood still left in her brain sac would do if it came into contact with healthy tissue. If it did, it would further disable her or kill her. Then again, according to the surgeon, it could just dissipate with no further damage. If she were able to speak sometime in the next day, it would be a sign that the blood was dissipating.

I spoke to her for hours, without response, about family, pets, the daunting labor of filling out college aid applications. When those topics were exhausted, I spoke of our vacations to the various beaches we had enjoyed during our six years of marriage; about sailing the Lesser Antilles the year before, about the vacation we would take once she had recovered, maybe to Aruba or Barbados; about waves and surf and swimming and diving. I had just finished describing in lush detail a trip we could take one day to Kona when her hand, limp for a day and a half, suddenly squeezed mine. Then, through dried lips and a throat parched by the previous day’s intubation, she said, “We’ll have to buy an extra ticket for the surfboard.”

I knew that there had probably been more poignant words spoken in human history, but I really couldn't think of any. She could speak, and would in the months to come converse normally, regain her balance, walk, and return to work without any lingering effects from the sub-arachnoid aneurysm; and we would, after she was cleared by her physicians, begin to visit the beaches and coral reefs about which I’d spoken during those terrible hours of one-sided conversation.

And once, on a flight to the Palancar Reef, when we noticed that our row contained a vacant seat, we exchanged a silent smile.

[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]

A Collision of Religion, Economic Class, and Race in a Neighborhood in Oakland

Oakland Gospel Choir Draws Nuisance Complaint, Faces $500 A Day Fine

“Kind of hard to believe because we’ve been here about 65 years in the community and all of a sudden we get some concerns about the noise,” said Thomas A Harris III, the pastor at Pleasant Grove. Church pastors who met Wednesday said the real issue is gentrification. The church sits in a neighborhood full of old Victorians being snapped up by affluent tech workers.

No, it's not hard to believe at all, especially as I've observed the same prejudice from people who move next door to churches in quaint New England towns and then object to the fact that the churches have bells and ring them.

This is Why War is Not Spoken Of Outside the Circle of Warriors

“In fact, seeing the reaction to my father’s story in recent days has highlighted for me the almost stunning level of ignorance that the general public has about war. CNN introduced him as a ‘war hero,’ and yet people were surprised and even uncomfortable when they were given a glimpse of what that might have entailed. . . . This country has been at war for almost 15 years, and as I think about the ridicule leveled at my father in the past 24 hours, I can’t help but imagine what these same people must think about the service of my own generation. In their eyes, did we simply spend some kind of twisted ‘semester abroad’ in a place with plenty of sand, but no ocean? Or conversely, do they ignorantly dismiss our experiences, as they have my father, as those of cold callous killers?”

Well, given of whom you speak, the answers to those questions are "yes" and "yes".  Warriors are always held in contempt by the elites in any society.  There are Roman poems from the days of empire that lament that tendency, not to mention it is a leitmotif in the works of Rudyard Kipling.  This is why those who have been in combat tend not to speak of such things with family and friends who have not shared in what philosophy would describe as a form of "limit situation".

I attended an Episcopal seminary with three veterans, one of whom was highly decorated in Vietnam.  Because the Episcopal Church is disquieted by the notion and practice of military service, all three kept their backgrounds a near secret so they would not be marked as "other" by their classmates and the seminary faculty.

Giving Members Greater Say in How the National Church Uses Donations Would Certainly Help

Episcopalians and the Tithe

"Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says"

The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.

Please, New York Times, it should be "collaborative" rather than "collective".  Also, one will find, even with a cursory examination of history, that divine inspiration is almost always collaborative, at least in Christianity.  After all, what Jesus offered us was a radical redefinition of community.

The Word "Unexpectedly" Seems to Show Up in a Lot of Media Reports These Days

Unexpectedly, The Middle East Meltdown Continues

One problem is that while President Obama saw the nuclear deal as an opportunity to bridge divides with Iran, both Russia and Iran saw the negotiation as an opportunity to advance an anti-American agenda. While President Obama and his negotiating team were hunting for compromises and mutually face-saving agreements. Russia was looking for ways to turn the deal into a formula for destabilizing the region at Washington’s expense. Thus Russia insisted at the 11th hour in the negotiations on the lifting of a conventional weapons export ban. And even as President Obama scrambled to dodge Congressional scrutiny of the deal, Iran unhelpfully insisted that U.S. domestic debate consisted a material breach of the deal and rattled its sabers at home.

Caught in the midst of all of this are the Middle-Eastern Christians, who are being brutalized and slaughtered on a daily basis.

It Took Awhile, but It Was Worth It

Today: @WNCathedral dedicates the Isaiah window, begun in the 1970s and officially completed last year: pic.twitter.com/VMvJQBCySu

— National Cathedral (@WNCathedral) October 15, 2015

I Confess

More people watched 'NCIS' than the Democratic debate

One of the Reasons New England Has Difficulty Attracting Clergy

It's a mighty challenge.  Don't you love such a noble battle?

But What Does This Have to Do with Climate Change?

12 Christians Brutally Executed By ISIS Refused to Renounce Name of Christ, Died Praying, Reciting Lord's Prayer

The Episcopal Church statement may be found here.

Oh, Look. An Internet Argument.

There was a big argument on the Internet, I think it originated on Twitter, about this photo.  The original poster maintained that the man holding the puppy was Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume of George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, along with many other works.  It was taken during the Spanish Civil War, when Blair/Orwell fought against the fascists.

Thing is, that's not him.

The photo was once used to illustrate the paperback version of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which is probably what created the confusion.  That, and the puppy-holder does bear a superficial resemblance to the author.

As happens, and not just with Internet controversies, there was considerable back and forth about the photo, with clear divisions between the pro- and anti-Blair contingents.  As Blair/Orwell had been a Communist for awhile, things became rather ideological and degraded into exchanges of Hitler accusations and Stalin references.  Name calling came next, of course.  Typical of our modern age, really.

Arguments such as this narrow one's perspective and renders focus opaque.  So much so that none of those involved in the back and forth noticed the tall, hat-less, bespectacled fellow in the center of the photo.  Yep, that's Ernest Hemingway.

If the Past is Any Indicator, Badly, Poorly, and Harmfully

How Will the Government Structure American Diets Next?

And another:  The More We Learn on Nutrition, the More We Ignore

I Know the Feeling

Aging Mother Knows Any Wrong Move Could Be Taken For Telltale Sign Of Dementia

Unfortunately, There is a Generation of Naval Officers Who Will Get Lost When the Power Goes Out

After Twenty Years, Naval Academy reinstates celestial navigation

I learned to do this about fifteen years ago and not only was it fun to learn but on at least one occasion it was invaluable.

Plus, this quote:  "After all, you can't hack a sextant."

This Made Me Uncommonly Sad

The Hill: Obama: Those taking religion seriously are often suspicious of others

There has been no time in my life, a life spent mostly in pluralistic institutions, where this has been even remotely true.  In fact, whether the "person taking religion seriously" is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a member of the Native American Church, or any other body, it has always been their openness to others that has marked the commonality of true people of faith.

I appreciate that those who seek the power and compensation of civic life tend only to see the world politically, with religion simply serving as another convenient tool for sectioning the population, but beyond "political Christianity" and "political Islam" and the like there are actually people who live their faith and use it to transcend the petty nonsense that so informs, distorts, and perverts the secular life.

Good Lord, the charitable giving alone of the "seriously religious" far outstrips that of the atheo-secularists, and those funds generally go to "others".

Archaeological News

Antikythera shipwreck excavated by marine archaeologists

This is the site where the famous Antikythera Mechanism was found, a device that altered our thinking about the ancient world and its technology.

Just Another Day for the EPA

EPA dinged for another wastewater spill in Colorado

Well, at least they still concentrate on the important stuff:  EPA spends 160 million on public relations.

Besides, the only people really impacted by the original toxic spill were the Navajo, and we gave them an "Indigenous Peoples Day" yesterday, so they should be good.

"This Sure Takes the Sting Out of Attempted Genocide"

So says an Eastern Shawnee acquaintance, tongue in cheek.  Of course, it is a ripe opportunity to "virtue signal".

More cities celebrating ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’ amid effort to abolish Columbus Day

Me?  I'll spend the day celebrating my "indigenous" heritage as well my immigrant heritage.  People are rarely as simple as political ideology would have them be, don't you find?  Mainly, though, I'll be at work.