Still On Visual

I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago. It's a portion of the Jamestown Window at the National Cathedral.

Saturday Morning

Sitting in bed, surrounded by books on the Muslim hajj, trying to make sense out of a paper that has to come together too soon.

At the computer, still in my pjs, editing the school yearbook online. The kids have done an incredible job. If only they had pulled all of this creativity out of a hat BEFORE the deadline instead of two weeks after.

Standing in the pulpit in jeans and an oversized and very long Ohio State sweatshirt, practicing my be-brave-in-the-face-of-doubt sermon for tomorrow. A couple of the guys who are at church for a spring (winter) workday saw me in the hall and threatened to come in and laugh and snicker, but fortunately they are completely absorbed by gutters or plumbing or something. Another guy friend is upstairs hanging an art exhibit. When I go up to visit with him later, he starts talking about the need to prepare something and then prepare to put all your preparation aside. I think he is talking about oil paintings but it turns out he is talking about sermons. I think he is trying to be supportive.

I have been looking for the foxes in the cemetery for weeks and I am about to go out again. It is cold and gray out there, and So Not Spring. The image is from the National Cathedral, where it WAS spring ten days ago. If you enlarge it, the reflection of the stained glass on the floor looks very cool.

Happy Easter I !

This morning in the midwest doesn't look anything at all like Washington National Cathedral did a week ago, with the trees about to burst into bloom and the sunlight through the stained glass casting color upon stone. My daffodils and tulips are completely ~ and I do mean completely ~ covered by snow which, when I let the dog out a few minutes ago, I discovered to be still falling in some strange form. I am off to the Sunrise Service, which I wouldn't miss on a day like this for anything, although I admit that since the cemetery is only a couple of blocks away, I am spared the dilemma of whether to clean off a car and risk getting stuck in the driveway to get there. I can just walk over, and hope that others find a way to make it, too. I'll post an image or two later. Thick socks, snow boots, and fleece everywhere ~ Happy Easter!

Holy Saturday

Space Window, Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (Washington National Cathedral)

"Is the Christ of the Gospels, imagined and loved within the dimensions of a Mediterranean world, capable of still embracing and still forming the centre of our prodigiously expanded universe?"

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Trip Summary

Sun's Up Willet, Assateague National Seashore, April 2007

DC, Chincoteague and Assateague with Windy City Son. Quick trip before he vanishes into the corporate workforce.

Washington National Cathedral on an overpoweringly spring-like day. Organ concert around which we had planned arrival cancelled with no explanation. Lunched in the garden. Splurged in the bookstore.

Full moon rose a fiery red over western coast of eastern shore.

While we drove across the Delmarva Peninsula from Blackwater NWR to Assateague, the skies darkened and the temperature dropped thirty degrees. As we rode our bikes across the Chincoteague NWR the next morning, the skies opened up and within seconds we were drenched to the core. But by late that day, we were getting sunburned on the beach.

Birding count:

Numerous:
Eagles
Osprey
Gadwall
Shovelers
Sanderlings
Willet
Great Egrets
Snowy Egrets
Great Blue Herons

Some:
Cattle Egret
Marbled Godwit
Red-breasted Mergansers

Uno:
Tri-Colored Heron
Oystercatcher
Loon


Sunlit Sika, Chincoteague NWR, April 2007

Glasgow Cathedral (1197) ~ July 2006

Raised and/or befriended by agnostics, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, it has forever been my fate to stand amid the tensions linking disparate faith communties. On Iona, I was constantly aware that I prayed in the ruins of a Catholic community destroyed by Reformation Presbyterians and then 500 years later recovered and rebuilt by a Protestant community. The Glasgow Cathedral is the only one on mainlaind Scotland left completely intact in the wake of the Reformation chaos that produced my own Presbyterian church. (The Glasgow Cathedral is Church of Scotland today.) In the cemetery above it, the words below a towering statue of John Knox, Reformation leader of the Protestant church in Scotland, attest to the torture and incineration of Protestants by Catholics during that period of unrest. Neither side, to put it mildly, emerges without blemish.

A cathedral, on its best days, is a haunting blend of light and shadow, reflecting perfectly, it seems, the community of Christ both then and now.