The Times They Are A Changing

The weekend before I left for the Dominican Republic we changed our clocks back to "Standard Time." Of course, "Standard Time" is now in effect for fewer weeks in the year than "Daylight Saving Time." So obviously, it is not the standard time any more. But I digress.

We set the clocks back in the wee hours of Sunday morning November 4th. Monday night, the 5th, I stayed at a hotel near JFK, and Tuesday morning, the 6th, I flew to Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic is on "Atlantic Time," which is an hour ahead of "Eastern Time." I came home this past Monday, and my body clock is totally confused. It always takes time for me to adjust to the time change, but to go to another time zone immediately after changing the clocks and then returning two weeks later...

Since I was off last week, this evening was the first time I came home from the office in the dark. In fact, it was nearly dark when I left the office. In another week or so it will be completely dark when I leave the office. It is just dawn when I left for work this morning.

Dark. Dark. Dark. My mother combats the darkness by setting timers on several lamps, which she calls her "dawn lights." Her room gets gradually brighter until her alarm goes off, and she gets up in light. I just get up with the alarm clock and curse the darkness. I cannot imagine what it would be like living any further north.

Yet in less than a month we will mark the Winter Solstice, and the days will start getting longer. By that time my body will have reset itself to the artificial time change we mark on our clocks. At least until we change them again in the Spring...

Peace,
Jeffri

Headlong Into Advent

Thanksgiving has passed, and we are now fully into the Holiday Frenzy. We embraced the frenzy fully on "Black Friday" when my brother and I took his family into New York City to see some of the sights, have dinner, and see 9:00 p.m. showing of the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. I generally try to avoid the City the day after Thanksgiving, but this was one of the few times the whole family was here, and my brother really wanted to make the trip and see the show with his wife and kids. We had a good time.

Saturday we celebrated my mother's birthday early, which was the whole point of this family reunion. I would say "just a quiet dinner at home," but that just is not possible with four kids ranging in age from 9 to 19 and my brother and me. Two generations of sibling bantering--not to mention three generations of parent-child bantering. And, of course, we took some family pictures, including a couple of just me and my brother. After 45 years, now that I've lost enough hair to match his hairline and his hair has become as gray as mine, we finally look like brothers.

Late Saturday afternoon they left to return to Pennsylvania. Mom and Bill can reclaim their house, and I have my apartment back. The two youngest slept on air mattresses on my floor, which makes things pretty crowded in a 450 square foot apartment. Especially with the 14-year-old being taller than everyone in the family! Fortunately, we did not spend a lot of time there. When we were not sleeping we played Carcassonne together, or the youngest played computer games while the 14-year-old and I did crossword puzzles. Then we would pile into the car and drive over to Mom's.

I have completed about half of my Christmas shopping, but only because I bought some things while on my various trips around and out of the country. That does not mean I will have a calm prayerful Advent, however. Work promises to be especially stressful over the next few months, between various ongoing projects, a major conference, and the reorganization. I have some projects for church to work on. The first big cluster of family birthdays falls around this time. And I have friends that need my attention.

Generally, this means that, no matter how intentionally I start out, Advent is over before I have a chance to breathe and sit quietly. Sometimes, if I am lucky, God sneaks up on me, and I have a few quiet moments of calm in the midst of the frenzy.

Peace,
Jeffri

Late Night (Early Morning?) Pastime

A friend pointed me to this, and having nothing better to do...

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Why am I not surprised?

Peace,
Jeffri

Before The Horde Descends

I am enjoying the last few minutes of calm before Thanksgiving weekend. The shopping is done. The laundry is half done. The apartment is clean. In a short bit I will go to Mom's for dinner, and we will await the arrival of my brother and his family.

This will be the first holiday we have all been together in about three years, and it will be the first time my brother's entire family will be up here for a visit in many years. I decided that we ought to make the effort to all be together this year, as Mom's 70th birthday is just after the holiday. No big fuss, which Mom would hate, but some time together. Things sort of spiraled from that decision. You can read some of Mom's thoughts here. Fortunately, given the number of people involved, my stepsister is hosting Thanksgiving dinner.

There was some talk of going into the City Friday morning. I put a stop to that right off. New York City the day after Thanksgiving? Are you nuts? With three teenagers and a nine-year-old?

And I don't even want to begin thinking about Christmas!!

Peace,
Jeffri

As The Anglican Tempest...Ummm...Whatever

When I was little I would watch the afternoon soaps with my mother. I continued to watch a couple of them after school well into my junior high school days. I remember one character who started junior high at the same time I did, but by the time I finished junior high, he had graduated from college. Children, it seems, do not make for good plot lines on soaps, unless they are the focus of a custody battle or paternity suit. Their time lines are sped up while those of adults are slowed down. This is particularly noticeable on the occasional sick day when there is nothing on afternoon television, but I need noise as I drowse. Or when I visit my brother's family, and my sister-in-law is catching up on her tapes of her favorite soap. Within the course of one episode, I find I have caught up on every character I once knew and learned almost as much about any new characters.

These thoughts came to mind this morning as I caught up on news, checked my favorite (and not-so-favorite) blogs, and generally re-entered the life in the Northeast after two weeks of meetings in the Dominican Republic. In less than an hour I was fully caught up with the latest in the Anglican brouhaha. A retired bishop leaves a "liberal" province for a more "conservative" one. Self proclaimed "orthodox" bishops cross provincial lines to "rescue" so called "orthodox" parishes and dioceses in "heretical" provinces. Lawsuits. Posturing. Nasty comments. Witch hunts. Threats. From both sides of the aisle, so to speak. In other words, nothing new has happened. Not that I really expected it to, but the the sameness of it all truly reminded me of the soap operas.

This may be in part because most of my two weeks were spent with writers, lay and clergy, from the dioceses of Province IX of the Episcopal Church. In spite of cultural, language (think British English vs. U.S. English and multiply by eight or nine), and theological differences, these writers came together, formed a community, and began producing a Spanish language curriculum for Province IX. We talked together, worshipped together, worked together, ate together, and even played together. And yes, we argued together. Passionately. We argued over things seemingly as small as the meaning of a single word to things seemingly as large as the meaning of what it means to be a church. Sometimes we came to agreement. Sometimes we did not. No one stalked off because they disagreed with the outcome of these discussions. No one stopped talking to anyone else. No one went off to write their own curriculum. And no one removed themselves from the community. Always we remained a loving, caring community.

So coming back to the ongoing series of snit fits that seem to dominate the blogs and the news has been a little jarring. Having experienced, even for a brief moment in time, a caring community that did not require uniformity to belong, that respected its own diversity, the mean spiritedness and the calls for separation and "purity" are difficult to process.

Much to mull over in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

Peace,
Jeffri

Quick Report From The Dominican Republic

I'm in the Dominican Republic to provide logistical and technical support for a workshop for writers from around Province IX of the Episcopal Church. They are writing a Spanish language Christian Education/Formation curriculum for all age levels for the province that comes from their own context rather than being a translation of something put together in the United States. We are meeting in the Dominican Republic because it is fairly easy to get to from the other eight dioceses of the province.

It has been an interesting experience for me because I have been operating in three languages: English, Spanish, and German. German is my second language, so when I start to struggle with my limited Spanish, my brain reverts to thinking in German. At that point I have to translate for myself back into English and then into Spanish. Generally I understand what I hear and read in Spanish, but I still have a lot of trouble speaking the language. Fortunately, we have three people who can translate.

Because our internet connection here has been unstable, I have not had much news of the tempest in a teapot that seems to be the Anglican Communion these days. Instead, in this meeting room we have been steeped in the work of the Church.

If I get a chance, I will write more before we leave. Otherwise, I'll be back in the States next week.

Peace,
Jeffri

This Is Not An Apology

Recently Greg Griffith of StandFirm misidentified as Bishop Barbara Harris a woman in clerical dress in a photo taken at an October 27th Anti-War demonstration in San Francisco. The original post and the resulting nasty comments (another example of the site's "witch hunt" mentality) can be found archived by Jake here. When it turned out that the woman was not Bishop Harris, Greg posted an apology in which he wrote:

Well, I really stepped in it this time, accusing Bishop Barbara Harris in another thread (now removed out of respect for her) of marching in an anti-war march in San Francisco wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh as a stole. Turns out it's not her.

I allowed past shows of support of Yassir Arafat and the Palestinians by Bishop Harris, like this, to influence my thinking, so when I happened across a photo of a woman in vestments bearing more than a striking resemblance to The Rev. Harris, I leaped to a conclusion I shouldn't have.

I apologize and ask for her forgiveness. This was an instance of my bearing false witness, albeit inadvertently, and I am sorry. My apologies to Bishop Harris are offered without qualification.

Now compare this to what Greg wrote in response to another comment in the thread about Elizabeth Kaeton's comments regarding Anne Kennedy:, addressing another commentor, in regards to Elizabeth's apology:

d---------,
Kaeton’s ‘apology’ is not an apology, plain and simple. An apology is not “I’m sorry that what I wrote hurt you, but I was completely justified in writing it because blah blah blah...”

By Greg's own definition, his apology is not an apology.

I seriously thought about titling this post "Apology Not Accepted," but then Greg was not apologizing to me. Just as Elizabeth was not apologizing to him but to Anne. However, I do not think it is too much to expect that Greg follow his own guidelines for an apology.

Peace,
Jeffri

Hymns I'd Rather Not Sing

This morning at Grace Church we celebrated All Saints Day. And, of course, we sang A Song of the Saints of God, possibly one of the most insipid and trite hymns in the 1982 Hymnal. The tune isn't bad, but the text is just awful. Even though it was written in the 1920's, it is full of Victorian English imagery (meeting saints at tea...). Ick.

Victorian imagery haunts us in many of our hymns. "All Things Bright and Beautiful," for instance, where Cecil Alexander's words were set to a melody lifted from a book of dance tunes. Alexander is also responsible for the text of "Once In Royal David's City." It is a popular hymn for Christmas services. I love the stateliness of it, but it romanticizes the conditions in which Jesus was born.

Nor are more modern hymns exempt from odd imagery. It's almost impossible to get through "Earth and All Stars" without giggling, especially when you reach the line about the loud boiling test tubes!

There's a reason I don't write hymns!

Peace,
Jeffri

In Nature's Way

In November a couple of years ago I attended a conference in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. The weather was a little cool, even for November, and cloudy. It even rained a couple of times. At the Sunday worship service for the conference, the local pastor who led the service started off his greetings to conference attendees by apologizing if the locals were joyful about the weather. They needed the rain, he said.

My immediate thought was, "I have no sympathy for people who move to the desert, plant grass, and then complain about the lack of rain." I'm having a similar reaction after watching news reports from the Florida coast as it was lashed by Hurricane Noel.

I grew up in a coastal community, so I know first hand what storms can do to beaches and other shoreline geography. I also understand the allure of shore front homes. However, if you are going to build on the shore and then complain about the natural effects of wind and water on the shoreline (both erosion and build-up), then you are not going to get a lot of sympathy from me. The same goes for those who decide to build in the mountains, destroy the hillside ecosystem, and then complain about the mudslides. And it even applies to those who build in the woods, refuse to let smaller, controlled fires burn as part of the forest's natural life cycle, and then complain about wildfires.

There are ways to live near the shore, on the hills and in the woods that are less disruptive to the ecosystem. There are even ways to build our homes in ways that lessen the impact of storms. I remember watching news reports a couple of years ago after a fairly severe hurricane passed through central Florida. It was interesting to note that the houses that survived with minimal damage were those built either before 1940 or after the new building codes were implemented in the wake of Hurricane Andrew.

We can never totally eliminate the results of natural "disasters." Sometimes we cannot avoid the destruction, no matter how carefully we plan and build. Nor do I want to belittle the losses of those who have endured the fires in California and Tropical Storm, now Hurricane, Noel. However, if you continue to disregard nature and build in places and ways where you know it is probable that your house will be destroyed, how many times do you honestly expect to be bailed out by insurance companies or the government?

Peace,
Jeffri