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Showing posts from April, 2014

Earth Day / "Black Dirt"

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Earth Day, April 22, was so close to Easter this year that we weren't able to properly acknowledge it in church. So on Saturday, May 3, we're going to have "Earth Day Morning Prayer," incorporating some of the resources on offer from Earth Ministry . Then we'll proceed outside (weather permitting) to plant the bulbs used to adorn our altars for Easter. This year's Earth Day got me thinking back again, one of my favorite pastimes.  To the left is an undated picture of the Edge Moor Power Plant, located near Wilmington, Delaware, right on the Delaware River. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s about a mile or so from this bad boy, back in the days when it was coal-fired (in the interest of truth, I should tell you that the parent company announced in 2010 that the plant was converting to natural gas). Practically next-door to it was the Edge Moor Plant, a DuPont facility that made pigment for white paint. That whole part of the riverbank was just industrial hea

Jesus without surfboard

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This is not Jesus! Holy Wednesday.  Many churches will hold Tenebrae services this evening, as it grows dark, to commemorate the encroaching shadow of Good Friday. In my own halting way, I am limping after Jesus towards Jerusalem and the cross. Jesus is the most real for me during Holy Week. I understand pain and loss. I have a notion of what betrayal feels like. Gethsemane might look familiar to me, were I there. Most people have suffered. Most of us have had our Gethsemane moments.Pain and loneliness are known to most of us. We have seen them written on each others' faces. To the left, in contrast, is a photo of Ted Neeley, who played Jesus in the movie version of  Jesus Christ, Superstar.  My grandmother had on her dining room wall a painting of Jesus that greatly resembled Mr. Neeley, except that her Jesus's eyes were blue.  This is the image of Jesus I grew up with -- Blond, Gentle Jesus. Jesus who loved the little children. A Jesus who would look perfectly comfort

Tree of hope

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That's a magnolia tree there, to the left. Not one that I know personally, because we're a little far north here for magnolias. They're a real southern phenomenon -- think Steel Magnolias -- but one of my favorites. My grandmother, who lived with us when I was little, planted a magnolia tree in the front yard. Why she would do this is anybody's guess. She wasn't from the south, but she did love flowering shrubs. And Granny could be a little ... stubborn. So there was the poor magnolia, in the center of the front yard, on an east-facing slope in Delaware, about a mile from the Delaware river, exposed to the cold easterly winds blowing in from the river. In those days, April frosts and snow were nothing unusual. I lived at home for my first twenty years, and I think I saw the magnolia bloom a whole  two or three times. Most years, the buds would bravely appear and begin to swell in early spring, hoping the warn sunshine would last. Then, on a cold night, th

God, the pattern-keeper

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I'm thinking a lot about the past during these days of Lent ("That's a typical old-person statement!" my son would say). But it's true that the older we get. the more the past sometimes comes into focus: it's not just a muddy river of flowing time that has washed us up in the present. Memories begin to stand out in sharper relief. Eddies and whirlpools appear in the current. Rocks peek above the flow. Patterns emerge Our bodies, of course, carry some of our patterns. One of the readings in my book of reflections for Lent,  Lent Is Not Rocket Science , discusses genetic patterns. The writer notes that, although the many different types of cells comprising our bodies die and are replaced at varying rates, our most essential physical patterns, encoded in our DNA, remain pretty much the same, preserving our uniqueness. I am short and have gray eyes; these patterns will not change, though the cells in my skeleton and in my eyes will be renewed over time. P