First Sunday in Advent. Christ Church Episcopal. Shooting at Planned Parenthood. Obama. Media and Society. Pope Francis. Kampala, Uganda. John F. Kennedy. Erdogan. Putin. Climate Conference. Justin Trudeau. Queen Elizabeth II.
Christmas. Pandora.
It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I’ve been up for a while but am still rubbing the sleep from my eyes while sipping my second cup of good, strong coffee. It is a long, lazy day ahead of me.
The day is very grey and the deck of my house is wet with the results of light rain through the night. In other words, it is drear out there. The unseasonable warmth has receded and I am warming the interior of the cottage with the soft sounds of “Cool Jazz Radio” on Pandora.
Today, at 3:30, young Nick is coming over and we’ll do what we do every Saturday after Thanksgiving. We will put up the tree and decorate the cottage for
Christmas. I will begin to play Christmas music and the season of celebration will commence.
Tomorrow is the First Sunday in Advent. I enjoy the sense of community I get from attending Christ Church Episcopal. Back, a long time ago, a friend of mine described herself as “quite spiritually moist” when asked by her boyfriend, an evangelical Christian, if she didn’t feel something was missing in her spiritual life?
I guess I might describe myself as “spiritually moist” myself.
Yesterday, I almost started to write a blog but didn’t. The shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs affected me rather badly. What, ANOTHER shooting?
For reasons I don’t quite fathom, it rocked me; I felt broken in some way. Obama has said, “Enough is enough.” True but how to achieve it?
Today is better. I got up and wanted to write. The coziness of the cottage is alluring. I could sit here and do my best to ignore the world but how can I?
On January 20th, I will start teaching a class at the local community college called “Media and Society.” Can’t turn my back on the world while teaching that class…
300,000 people attended a mass in Kampala, Uganda offered by Pope Francis on his first trip to Africa. Another 150,000 young people attended a “pep rally” at an unused airfield. Francis urged Ugandans to be “missionaries at home” by attending to the old, ill and abandoned in that country.
For all his many flaws, John F. Kennedy was a beacon in his time. Francis is a beacon of hope in this time. In Argentina, he was known as “the bishop of the slums” of Buenos Aries. Now is the Pope to the slums of the world.
Paris, if it is even possible at this point, has increased security in advance of the Climate Change Conference coming there this coming week.
The young man who was the mastermind of the Paris Attacks on November 13th, planned more attacks, on Jews and on transport and schools. He had grand plans for terrorizing France.
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is hoping to have a private moment with Putin at the Climate Change Conference in Paris, hoping to tone down the tension that has been rising between Turkey and Russia since the Turks shot down a Russian warplane.
On his way to the Climate Conference, new political heartthrob, Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, stopped off at the Commonwealth Conference in Malta. He, of course, toasted the Queen of England, Elizabeth II and commented that she had seen more of Canada than most Canadians. She responded: thank you for making me feel so old, said with a smile.
Yesterday it was nearly 66 degrees. Today it is 37. I am tempted to curl up in the cottage and ignore the world but I won’t. I’m off to the gym after a Thanksgiving break and then to the Dot for food and this afternoon, the tree.
Despite the world’s woes, I am going to push myself toward my inner Christmas self and celebrate what is right with the world and not what is wrong.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 11 30 15 Stepping up to hope…
November 30, 2015Brian Gallagher. Joe Boardman. Amtrak. Hudson River. West Point. X-tra Mart murder. IS. COP21. Climate Change Conference. Producer’s Guild of America.“Tut” SpikeTV. Christ Church. Hope.
It’s a grey day, chill and gloomy. The train is crawling south toward the city. In front of me is Brian Gallagher, who is the sidekick of Joe Boardman, President of Amtrak, who is sitting across from him. Brian is by way of being a friend and I went up to say hello to Brian when I saw him, realized that Boardman was across from him and said hello to him too. He seems a very shy man, something Brian is not. Perhaps that’s why they seem to make a good team.
The Hudson River is smooth as a mirror, reflecting the muted colors on the banks above it.
With me I am carrying twenty pounds of textbooks from which I must choose the one I will use in the class I will be teaching at our local community college near the cottage. It’s challenging and I have to make the plunge by Friday.
That said, I’m excited about teaching the class.
Waking up around seven, I almost immediately plunged into emails and got lost in them. Before I drove to the train station, I organized all the Christmas presents I’ve purchased during the year in piles for the person for which they are intended. With Christmas carols playing, I found myself in a festive mood.
Which is the mood in which I intend to stay.
It was, as you know, a harsh weekend out there. Our local tragedy was that a woman, working at the X-tra Mart not far from my local grocery store, allegedly went into the restroom, gave birth to a baby boy, strangled him and disposed of his body in a trash bin outside the store and then returned to work.
She is currently in the hospital receiving a mental evaluation.
As is the man who shot dead three in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
We’re all a little crazy. I think it is part of the human condition but these folks are really crazy, in tragic ways.
Crazy zealous are the members of IS, who, I think, honestly believe they are doing what God wants of them. How you believe in such a crazy God is another question, but they do.
On a brighter note, COP21, the Climate Change Conference, has begun meetings in Paris. Out of this might come good news, of nations agreeing to work together to cool the planet, which was warmer last year than any other year in recorded history.
That’s important to remember that we’re talking about “recorded history.” The planet has gone through much colder and warmer times.
As I am a member of the Producer’s Guild of America, I get screening copies of movies and television shows to watch for judging purposes. One of them I got was “Tut,” the massive SpikeTV mini-series. As I was watching, it occurred to me that it is amazing how humans seemed to make a leap toward civilization about 10,000 years ago and haven’t looked back.
The time we have wandered the planet as beings you and I would recognize, has been an incredibly short amount of time.
As I am choosing to be joyous, nature has chosen to support me with a burst of sunshine. We have just sped past West Point and the sun is glittering off the river water.
Every Sunday that I go to Christ Church, I light a candle for myself, for a friend who is struggling with brain cancer and one for all the things I should be lighting a candle for, like world peace and the eradication of poverty.
I’m older now than I have ever been and will only continue down that path and as age piles upon me [with attendant wisdom, one hopes] I will continue to seek to be grateful for all the wonders of the world, those which I have experienced and the ones which lie ahead of me.
Tags:"Tut", Amtrak, Brian Gallagher, Climate Change Conference, COP21, Hope, Hudson River, Joe Boardman, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, SpikeTV, West Point
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