Monthly Archives: September 2006

September is the busiest month

At the meeting of ministers on Tuesday, I heard several of the ministers talk about September in a tone of voice you might use when talking about implacable forces of nature. “Not a chance, not in September.” “Well, you know, it’s September.” Churches are busy in September — at least, liberal churches in this part of the world are busy in September. There’s no good reason for our churches to be so busy in this month, but they always are.

I know from experience that if you get behind in September, you won’t catch up again until after Christmas. I’ve already fallen behind this year. Our Director of Religious Education resigned a week and a half ago, and that put us behind schedule. I’m officiating at two memorial services over the next week and a half, and that has put me further behind. I’ve already had to give up several non-essential projects and plans.

But I haven’t given up the Wednesday morning work parties we have scheduled. Four other people showed up at ten this morning, and we all went out into the garden. It was a gorgeous late summer morning. We pulled weeds, we spruced up the gravel path by the front door to the church, we enjoyed the sun, chatted with each other, and drank strong coffee.

I suppose I should have been sitting indoors staring at a computer screen or talking to a disembodied voice on the telephone, feeling the stress build up in my body. But feminist theology has long warned us that being disembodied, being out of touch with our bodies, forces us to ignore something essential about what it means to be human. In which case, hands-on physical labor outdoors with other people makes more theological sense, than staring at a computer screen does.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The official Web site of International Talk Like a Pirate Day doesn’t go much beyond instructing you in the use of such basic pirate-talk as “Ahoy,” “Avast,” Aye-aye,” and “Arrr.”

But popular literature offers many more possibilities for creative pirate-talk that go beyond a few simple add-on words. Here are longer pirate-talk phrases (some with translations) from the ace writer of pirate-talk, Robert Louis Stevenson:

There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terwards, you may lay to that!

We’re that near the gibbet that my neck’s stiff with thinking on it. — Things are not going particularly well.

Stow that! Don’t you get sucking of that bilge.

Ah, it’s a fine dance you’ll do, and it’ll look mighty like a hornpipe in a rope’s end at Execution Dock by London town, it will. — You are in deep trouble.

To extend the silliness further, below are some of the sayings of Nancy Blackett, Amazon pirate, terror of the seas (from the children’s book Swallows and Amazons):

Let’s broach a puncheon of Jamaican rum.

Drink to the Jolly Roger, skull and cross-bones, death and glory, and a hundred thousand pieces of eight! But you aren’t a pirate, so you can’t drink to that.

I’ll shiver your timbers for you if you don’t stop chattering, Peggy.

Barbecued billy-goats!

Let’s parley first and fight afterwards.

Now grab a cutlass and shake a leg, and talk like a pirate for all ye’re worth. For if ye don’t, ye’ll find yerself in Davy Jones’s locker with the fish cleaning your bones for ye. Arrr!

Death in the family

My sister Abby called me this evening to tell me that one of our cousins had died, the youngest daughter of my mother’s twin sister. She was the cousin who is closest to me in age, only three years older than I. I had planned to write about something else today — can’t remember what now. I had lost touch with this cousin over the past four or five years. I knew she had some serious health issues, but nothing that had been life-threatening. Her death came as a complete surprise; shocking that she died so suddenly.

Another church joke

I’ve spent far too long writing and rewriting this week’s sermon. Time for bed, but before I go, here’s a joke I heard today from Rev. Eric Cherry of Unity Church in North Easton:

The minister droned on and on with the sermon, putting half the congregation to sleep. At last he finished, and at the close of the worship service he announced, “Will all Board members please join me for a meeting after the final hymn.”

Instead of going to coffee hour, the Board members dutifully followed the minister into a meeting room off the parish hall. Just as the door was about to close, another man walked in, someone no one knew. The minister said, “Perhaps you didn’t understand, this meeting is for Board members of the church.”

“Oh,” said the man, “I’m a bored member of the church, I’ve never been so bored in my life as I was during that sermon.”

Autumn watch

My friend Will and I took a long walk in the Blue Hills Reservation today. It was a cool grey day with low clouds that sometimes showed little bits of blue sky. We stood at the top of Great Blue Hill and could barely see Mount Wachusett through the moisture-laden air.

Looking down from the top of Great Blue Hill, we saw a long line of reddening maples marking out the course of the little stream through Fowl Meadow. Near the top of Boyce Hill, Will noticed that the bracken ferns were brown, as if they had been bitten by an early frost. We walked out the boardwalk into the Atlantic cedar bog on the edge of Ponkapoag Pond, and saw several small maples where every leaf had turned scarlet; and a number of the high-bush blueberries sported deep crimson leaves.

Walking back to the car, we both complained about how short the days are getting.

The church ate my homework?

I happened to be leafing through 25 Beacon Street, a memoir written by Dana MacLean Greeley, a Unitarian Universalist minister and first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association after merger in 1961. I happened across the following passage, which delighted me the first time I read it, and still delights me today:

I dream every once in a while that I am still faced with taking high school graduation examinations, or that I haven’t completed by work. I did complete it and was graduated, but I had devoted myself probably too much to church work, and to athletics, and to being president of my high school class, and never was as brilliant in my studies as my brothers and sisters. One of our daughters once wrote in an autobiographical sketch for college admission (we didn’t see it until it came back) that her grades in school were not as good as they might have been because always when she was going to study her father said that there was a young people’s meeting at church, and that that was just as important. This seems to have been the theory in my own youth….

That seems to me to be a sound theory. Generally speaking, the young people I know who have spent a lot of time at church tend to be caring people who are more highly motivated than most to make the world a better place. Of course young people need good schooling, too — but seems to me it’s equally important to learn how to be a good person.

Busy

This was one of those days where I simply didn’t have enough hours in the day to do all that needed to be done. Meeting first thing this morning, then a church work party, a lunch appointment, an hour and a half off in the afternoon (I used some of that time to start reading in preparation for this week’s sermon), meeting with the building committee and building engineers this afternoon, which I had to leave early so I could drive out to make a visit at a rehab center. Got home and immediately left for the laundromat (and no, laundry could not be put off for another day or two), did a little grocery shopping while the clothes were in the washing machine, took a walk (for exercise) while the clothes were in the dryer and made some phone calls while I was walking (thank goodness for cell phones). Got home at quarter to eight, made phone calls to try to track down Sunday school teachers for Sunday, ate dinner, and wound up with a pastoral phone call after dinner. Still haven’t put the clean clothes away. Still dirty dishes in the sink.

Whew.

And somehow I remembered to notice the beauty of two Ring-billed Gulls in Buttonwood Park at dusk, and somehow dark clouds moving through in the middle of the day reminded me of higher matters. The busyness can only take over if I let it.

Conversation

This afternoon, I drove out to a nearby nursing home to visit with a long-time member of the congregation who has Alzheimer’s disease. He just recently move into the nursing home.

He was quite talkative today. When he talked, some of the phrases made sense, and sometimes even whole sentences made sense. Mostly, though, I paid attention to his body language and his facial expressions and his hand gestures, and I paid attention to the rhythms of his speech. Maybe I couldn’t quite understand what he was trying to say — maybe he couldn’t quite piece together whatever it was he was trying to express — but you could get a sort of general sense of it.

I will readily admit that I glanced at my wristwatch while he was talking. It’s been a difficult week at church this week. Our new Director of Religious Education called me Sunday to resign for health reasons. A key member of the congregation died on Saturday night. I have a memorial service to plan, I have to scramble to put together a church school program for this Sunday, I don’t have any time. I glanced at my wristwatch, saw I had been there in the nursing home for twenty minutes.

But I didn’t leave. I was enjoying this conversation. I like this man, he’s a sweet, gentle guy. Many conversations don’t make much sense, if you consider the content of the words alone. In many conversations, what’s really important is the simple fact that two human beings are paying attention to each other; and that’s something that isn’t carried by the words of the conversation.

We continued having that gentle conversation there in the nursing home for a full hour, and then I really did have to go. It was a good conversation, even if we didn’t say much in terms of words.

Philosophy comments

Thanks to Rex and Jay, a good discussion on philosophy and religion has developed in the comments for the September 7th entry [link]. After spending a couple of hours reading, pondering, looking up texts in Peirce, Rorty, Habermas, and West, and writing and responding, I didn’t have time to write anything else today except this link directing you to those comments!