January 30, 2004
Epiphany season
Epiphany doesn’t offer much of a shopping season.
So its symbols [whatever they are besides kings riding camels back home and wondering how they could ever explain where they’d been and what they’d seen] don’t attract shoppers any more than they annoy the ACLU. The irony of God is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in creating us human beings in the first place and then choosing us as an icon, a window, through which can be seen not only God and ourselves, but through which, as well, the whole universe gets a shot at expressing and understanding itself. Epiphany.
Epiphany maybe lasts too long. On the other hand, we’re already half way through, and Christmas, with all its sweetness and light, is out of sight and out of mind for most of us. Now we can get back to nitpicking our great Scriptures and arguing about our tradition and the usual unreasonable foolishness about our reason.
The Nazarenes took their hometown boy about as seriously. But when he stopped preaching and went to meddling, their neighborly tolerance was out of the question. There he was, in the synagogue of all places, reminding them of something they should have learned in kindergarten. They probably never called it Christmas and Epiphany, of course, but it was “show and tell time,” nevertheless.
January 29, 2004
Field trip
“We are about to embark on what is arguably the coolest geologic field trip in history.”
This magnificent claim was made by no less than Dr Steven Squyres, the Mars mission’s principal science investigator. It makes me mindful of our freshman Geology lab assistant’s encouraging words when first we struck out into the surrounding Texas hills, rock hammers and sample bags in hand.
Science was required for all undergraduates. So naturally, I asked around the frat house what was the snap freshman science course. Little did I know at the time, but that’s how I became a geologist. It was a long and sometime arduous path, diverted by the Great Middle War, but diligently resumed finally to issue in two degrees and many cool geologic field trips, if I say so myself.
I avoided the romance of the Texas oil bidness through no fault of my own — or God’s either, I might add — when I got the notion that I’d study for the priesthood. At the time, I was geologizing for the highway department, “breaking rocks for the state,” as my bishop put it, when I embarked on what’s become an even cooler field trip itself.
January 28, 2004
Epiphany entropy
My old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk is concerned that OoN is too often flippant and apt not to be read as the truly serious commentary it is intended to be. He said the only thing worse than the anecdotal is the trivial. It’s not the first time he’s pointed that out to me. This time, I took it to heart.
As everybody knows, there are three laws of thermodynamics, but the second law, the one that expresses the irreversibility of processes, is the only one that ever gets any press. It goes like this: Entropy always increases in any closed system not in equilibrium and remains constant for a system which is in equilibrium.
Now that that’s perfectly clear, remember in high school physics, we learned that it takes one calorie to heat one gram of water one degree centigrade. For example, if you eat a very cold dessert (which is largely water, anyhow), the digestive cycle takes its essential calories from the only available source — body fat.
A dessert served and eaten at near freezing will shortly be raised to our normal body temperature. For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately thirty-seven calories. The average dessert portion is about 168 grams.
The second law tells us that 6,216 calories are extracted from body fat as the dessert’s temperature is normalized. (To do the math takes more column inches than we’re normally allotted here.) Anyway, allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net loss is approximately 5,000. Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat, the better off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal, which it often is during the Epiphany season and the subsequent entropy of New Year’s resolutions.
Furthermore, this process works equally well when drinking very cold beer in frosted glasses. Each ounce of beer contains sixteen latent calories, but extracts 1,036 calories in the temperature normalizing process. Thus, the net calorie loss per ounce of beer is 1,020 calories. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240 calories are extracted from the body in the process of drinking a can of beer.
Ice cream is even more beneficial, since it takes eighty-three cal/gm to melt and an additional thirty-seven cal/gm to raise it to body temperature. The results here are really remarkable. The process beats running hands down.
Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink beer, pizza (loaded with latent calories and usually served above body temperature) induces an opposite effect. Thankfully, as the astute reader surely has already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of beer with pizza and follow up immediately with large bowls of ice cream.
Maybe we’ll get around to the first and third laws of thermodynamics during Lent. In the meantime, try to get a little more out of the Epiphany letdown than usual. (Note: Questions are welcome. Answers? Well, that’s another matter.)
January 27, 2004
Pilots
It was one of those yard parties where there’re never enough places to sit down, and the food is a selection of the wholesale grocery’s frozen finest for fingers. Furthermore, it was a women’s club gala where the men only meet each other once a year and never have much in common except husbandry and being there.
CP was only trying to help when she introduced me to a fellow who, as I, had flown airplanes for Uncle Sugar in the Great Middle War (aka WW II). He was cordial, I’d say, especially under the circumstances, and he began to tell me all about his fighter pilots association and their monthly luncheon and why didn’t I come.
By the way, he went on, what did you fly? Four-engine bombers, I said. Oh, he said, and reached for another quiche.
January 26, 2004
Shells
CP left Thursday for her annual week in Florida at Sanibel. Friends have a January time-share on the beach. I’m always invited, but she needs the rest. Me, I get to go to the diocesan convention.
Like a lot of beachcombers, CP hunts shells. Once, she found one that bore on its side an image strikingly like the Jesus-of-the-Christian-Bookstore, one whose eyes, were they large enough, might follow you around the room. Feeling a bit lonely, I got the shell out for comfort and was surprised to find it’s changed. It looks a lot more now like John Kerry.
January 23, 2004
Shine, Baby, shine!
Just so we can hear what this Sunday’s press release is all about, Paul and Jesus have stopped preaching and gone to meddling.
Paul’s lesson in gross anatomy never fails to make abundantly clear how connected we are to one another. If that fails, there’s always the Eucharist to remind and re-member us driving home again and again that we are the body and all its parts, homely and beautiful, functional and freeloading. Even with all our selfish preoccupation about whether we’ve got it right (aka “orthodox”), that’s the way God does it.
So it is with Jesus’ reading of Isaiah. Justice is all wrapped up in good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to all. But that’s not enough. Whatever one’s take on the Bible — infallible book or dust-collecting bookend — as glorious as may be its words, it’s all pointless until it’s fulfilled.
“Today this scripture [Isaiah’s wild and crazy ideas about peace and justice] has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus wasn’t talking about still another Morocco-bound red-letter version or a new commentary. He was talking about himself. He was the fulfillment. He was the word become flesh. If you’ve got ears, listen.
And, like Paul, he was also talking about us. We are the body. All this Bible talk, all these resolutions, all this voting and consenting and whatever, we are IT. Is IT fulfilled or not? That’s what our Baptismal Covenant is about, to fulfill, to re-member, to embody good news and vision and release and freedom. To be what God calls us to be.
Don’t let the quaint language of last Sunday’s collect go in one ear and out the other. God grant that “your people, illumined by your word and sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory… ” [BCP p 215]. Shine, Baby, shine.
January 22, 2004
Attraction
We wonder about evangelism. We chop it up in decades. We spend tons on it. We quantify it. We “plant” churches and “make” disciples.
We fret over all the gray heads in the pews and pulpits. We want more young people. We create a special ministry for that and call it youth “work,” without a clue for how that sounds, what it implies.
Will there ever be an end to “mission statements” that try to one-up the Baptismal Covenant as if it never existed? Could there be a sillier, more self-serving notion than “bringing somebody to Jesus”?
Ever so often, just so we don’t get too serious about all this, we stop playing church and start playing God. We errant selves will tell you all about the inerrant word. We’ll hide our pretense to subvert the church behind sex, insulting along the way our Creator who made us that way. We’ll tell you all about how you should live your private life while we ignore our public responsibility.
We churchers can be a pitiful sight. A large part of evangelism would seem to be to be known. And not just to be known, but to intrigue folk to want a piece of the action, not be repelled by it.
At a college where I was chaplain, a middle-aged woman undergraduate was dazzled by her professor’s judgment and knowledge, but even more so by her calm and obviously secure bearing in class. She never seemed defensive and always spoke and listened with winsomeness.
One day, after class, the student asked her teacher how she came by such demeanor. The answer startled her, but intrigued her even more. “Through my church.”
January 21, 2004
Growing old is not for sissies
The Orkin man stopped by this morning. He’s just a plain guy like the rest of us, not so imposing as the TV termite busters. We’d had a visitation of moths making inroads on one of our better Asian rugs, so CP called Orkin for an unscheduled visit to check the invasion.
She was not here to receive this subsequent courtesy call just to see how things were. I was, but I’d as soon that I hadn’t been. For as he left, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Are you feeling all right? Take care of yourself. You’re looking pretty good.”
That’s what he said, all in the interest of the best consumer relations and preventive care. But “Growing old is not for sissies” is what I thought.
January 20, 2004
Will
My son Will died three years ago yesterday. He was 43. I’m not sure whether my vanity will ever let me recover.
A part of my grief is that I never knew him. He was one of our four, the middle son of three, our daughter, the oldest. He was different, almost from his birth, an outcast. His tastes, his take on life, his “style” always mystified the rest of us. I tried early on to “meet him where he was.” Most of the time, I failed.
From unfinished high school, he went into the navy at my encouragement. I thought it would offer him a chance for the self-esteem he never got at home. It may have done just the opposite.
I hear his voice now as present as ever when he would call long distance, “Father, this is your son… ” We both, of course, knew there were two other sons, and we both knew he was the only one who called me “father.” We both probably knew, as well, that he needed to remind me of that, but even more, I needed reminding. He never forgot.
The pain remembering this is as immediate as the word about his death that came, according to his clinician, from hepatitis C and cirrhosis. He knew, though, as well as I, that he was only being loyal to his family’s disease of gene and choice — acute alcoholism. He was not an outcast at all.
January 17, 2004
Athanasius and Antony
We inserted the Athanasian Creed (BCP pp 864ff) into the Eucharist one time and for some quirky reason, probably liturgical illiteracy, read it just before rather than after the homily. The homilist, ever about his wits and gracious to the core, began, “Now that that’s perfectly clear… ”
You’ll probably be disappointed to know that Athanasius no more wrote his creed than the apostles wrote theirs, but if there were any royalties, they’d get them. On the other hand, downloading is probably altogether without penalty.
Athanasius was a bishop for forty-six years [which, of course, is enough to disorient anybody and to get them blamed for that creed], but even with seventeen of those years in exile because the principalities and powers thought him wrong on Arianism [see ff], he soldiered on and wrote prolifically. An eighth-century monk said, “If you find a book by Athanasius and have no paper on which to copy it, write it on your shirts.” This could have been a precursor to the current collegiate haberdashery disarray fad and a possible facilitator for crib notes.
All of which brings us somehow to today’s observation of the Egyptian abbot and desert-father Antony [251-356 AD] whose biography “The Life of St Antony” was written by St Athanasius, himself. Antony [without an “h”] was not, as is popularly thought, the inventor of the antonym, but may be best known for being the patronymic of San Antonio, TX.
He is looked upon as the founder of monasticism. He overcame more than his share of temptations and ended up spending most of his life in a cave, probably one of the better places to practice self-control. Another benefit of cave-dwelling — and good counsel for us all — is that he was said to live in perfect health for over 100 years. Some people sought him out for advice, but most, I suspect, were just curious.
He, along with Athanasius, had a thing about Arianism which taught that Jesus was a “mere” human being and that the title “Son of God” was only a celestial honorific something like a latter-day Order of the Garter. This was a popular and common belief of both congregations and vestries and especially of politicians who liked to refer often to “The Man Upstairs.”
Antony’s emblems in art are a pig and a bell. If you’re into symbology, maybe you can do something with that. Mediaeval organists did, often anticipating his day, January 17, as a chance to work the belloinquisimo registers into one of their ornamentations.