Tag: personal
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Summer Solstice Day
For the height of summer: a song, and a poem. The lyrics, and another version of the song here. An analysis of the poem here. Image: “Midnight sun” (cropped), Yan Zhang, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Theme Change Trials and Tribulations
I changed my blog theme. And then I changed my blog theme again. I think I’m finally “OK” with the results. Have I learned anything as a result? Maybe. But I must admit, I felt fairly ridiculous by the end of this whole process. At least, I hope it’s the end. For a long time. […]
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Last Good Days
I noticed on Saturday that it was the anniversary, liturgical yearly speaking, of our last Cajun Dinner. It was traditional for us to hold it on the Saturday before Ash Wednesday. That’s if “traditional” can be something we’ve been doing for under twenty years. Not everyone would say that, but I would. It was a […]
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Affirmation
Can we be “on a level” with everyone else, and also be “special”? Important in a way that matters, to other people, and to us? People get really exercised over that question, and confused, in my experience. We’ve all heard those grumpy complaints about how “now EVERYONE has to be ‘special’” in schools on awards […]
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Delayed but Grateful
Notes on Ezra will post soonish, I hope, now that I am through being examined by the Presbytery of Ohio Valley and approved for ordination, to a new validated ministry that will involve pulpit supply, sacraments, and governance (i.e., moderating session meetings). This takes place on what I have learned is the feast day of […]
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Xin Nian Hao
Because it’s Chinese Spring Festival / New Year, and because I found this article on how to say “Happy New Year” in Chinese, and because in particular this year is the Year of the Tiger, which is our baby girl’s year, which makes it especially … hao … good. [She is not a baby any […]
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Tutoyer
In French, when people se tutoyer, they address one another familiarly. They use “tu” rather than “vous,” the “familiar you” rather than the formal one. The one for close friends and family. Sunday was Baptism of the Lord Sunday, and our pastor pointed out that in Luke’s gospel, and in Mark’s, God addresses Jesus directly: […]
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Harvest Home
Granted, this year we will be joining our future in-laws and their family for a holiday celebration to which we’ve been generously invited, and we will be living in the present and making new memories … even so … I always spend Thanksgiving with my mom and dad … … in the car, late at […]
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Memories
In the fall of 1994 the Presbyterians were building a new church building. Long before the building was finished, though, something needed to be done about the landscaping. Because there was a sloping strip of dirt about ten feet wide that ran the entire length of the property on the far side of the parking […]
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Happy Birthday, Baby Brother
You’re a hero. Image: United States Treasury Building, by Rchuon24, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Ritual and Ritual Sensibility
Ritual has human and humane purposes. Ritual needn’t serve nefarious purposes, although it can. It does not always, invariably and inevitably, prop up the power of oppressive overlords and normalize the unjust stratification of privilege. Ritual can reflect any idealized social order, a beautiful one as well as a vicious one. Ritual can symbolically represent […]
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Acceptance, Thankfully
Churches, like other organizations these days, have “retreats” and “planning meetings” and “visioning sessions.” Meetings where members get together and reflect on what seems to be going right and not right and where that seems to be headed, and in the case of the church, where God seems to be calling people. Our congregation has […]
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Feeling the Music
“Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling, but a song makes you feel a thought.” Yip Harburg I didn’t learn that quotation at church. But I learned the truth of it at church. A hymn is a song. And it is probably fair to say that most of us churchgoers learn […]
Matters of Interpretation 