in review

2006. It’s gone. Gone like a year on January 1. Gone like the day when it gets dark. For that matter, gone like the night when the sun comes up. Gone.

It was a year, all right. 365 days, it was. Started at the beginning and finished at the end, it did. Life toiled and spun like so much toiling and spinning. And then it ended. The year, that is. Truth is, tomorrow will feel no different and the toiling and spinning will go on unaffected. Most likely. Barring some miracle or major catastrophe. Either way, life might stop toiling and spinning.

It was a big year for me. I spent a week on a tiny Caribbean island with a beautiful girl. Brought her home with me too. Yeah, that was a good thing. I started a Flickr site too. Had to have someplace to put pictures of the island week.

Back in October, my 3rd blogiversary passed without my notice. Actually I noticed it a few weeks later, but felt kinda silly celebrating online at that point. So I just let it pass. The New Year is harder not to notice though. There is a lot of noise outside what with all the kids blowing stuff up and all. So it occurred to me, must be the New Year or something, I should probably give a 2006 blog retrospective in lieu of my missed blogiversary blog. Thought maybe I could link to my ten most favorite ramblings from the past year.
So I skimmed through this years blogs and I gotta tell ya. Slim pickin’s. Indeed. Not much there folks. Even so, I had a hard time sorting through a year’s worth of mediocrity and coming up with only ten. So I allowed myself a few extra, and came up with these, the best Rod had to offer in 2006. It's possible that some of these don't belong on the list. It's possible that I might have missed some worthy mediocrity. But these are the ones I noticed as I browsed.

I really don’t expect you to click any of these links. Honestly, I don’t expect anyone to come here and find them, but you never know. So I thought I put them out there anyway. You never know what will be of interest to your grandkids.

So here they are – the 2006 cyberdeck dialogue retroblogspective. In no particular order. Read it and weep.

Paul and the Areopagus
Music of the spheres
Expression of What?
Tourist, Pilgrim and Traveler
Creating, Accumulating and Chipping Away
Agnus Dei
Cat Tale
Reaping Songs
Daddy’s Thoughts
14th Night of the Purple Moon
On Being One at Sunset
Space
Warmth
Dag Yo!

Technorati Tags: life, love, marriage, moon, parenting, photography, photos, seasons, spirituality, thoughts, worship

fambly

For some reason, Molly and I both woke this morning with the same blog in our heads. I typed mine up to a quasi-near-post-ready form, and came out to the kitchen. Molly said, "hey Dad, did you read my blog?" "You blogged?", I said. "Yep, made Mom cry." So I read it. Doggone it, it's the same thoughts I was having. So now, I'll never convince anyone that mine were original. Oh well, evidently great minds think alike.
I'll post mine later this evening, but first you need to read this.

Technorati Tags: community, family, home, kids, life, love, parenting, scripture, spirituality, thoughts, worship

ero cras

"I'll be there tomorrow"

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, christmas, december, discipleship, scripture, seasons, spirituality, theology, winter, worship

Emmanuel

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
-Isaiah 7:14

O EMMANUEL, God with us, our King and Judge, the One the people await, and their Savior: come to save us, O Lord our God.

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, christmas, december, discipleship, kids, life, seasons, september, spirituality, theology, winter, worship

Rex

I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,' says the LORD Almighty.
-Haggai 2: 7-9

O KING OF THE GENTILES and their desired One, the Cornerstone that makes us all one: come, and deliver man, whom You formed out of the dust of the earth.

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, christmas, december, discipleship, family, kids, scripture, seasons, spirituality, theology, winter, worship

Oriens

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
-Luke 1:78

O RISING SUN, brightness of the light eternal, and Sun of Justice: come, and enlighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, christmas, december, discipleship, seasons, solstice, spirituality, theology, winter, worship

Clavis

I will place on his shoulder the key to the house of David; what he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.
-Isaiah 22

O KEY OF DAVID, and Sceptre of Israel, who opens and no man shuts; who shuts and no man opens: come, and bring forth the captive from his prison, he who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, christmas, december, discipleship, scripture, seasons, solstice, theology, winter, worship

in the bleak mid-winter

Tonight Allison made a wonderful supper of broiled salmon with rice and sugar snap peas. Mmmm. Mmmmm. After we’d eaten, and while we were still around the table, winter arrived. I felt the chill.
As I’ve said many times, I’m always surprised when it actually gets a bit chilly here, because it stays warm through Christmas. The temperature has been in the mid 70s here for over a week. Today it’s been chilly and dreary. Apt.
Above the rainy clouds tonight, there was a spectacular, hidden solstice party. At sunset, (also hidden) the thinnest, slivery, eerie, fingernail of a baby moon set behind the clouds as a newly returned Venus followed suit to kick off the year’s longest night. But it was not to be seen.

Sometimes, I’m bothered by the winter solstice. Those times, I’m pondering the beginning of the long, cold winter. But sometimes I consider that the longest night means that tomorrow night will be shorter. The sun will set just a little later as it begins it trek northward. It’s the beginning of the trek toward spring. In the darkest, coldest, barren times, hope is kept in the surety of re-birth.

So I’ll shut up about it until spring arrives.

Technorati Tags: advent, moon, solstice, seasons, venus, winter

Radix

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
-Isaiah 11:1

O ROOT OF JESSE, who stands as a signal to the people, before whom kings shall keep silence and unto whom the Gentiles shall make supplication: come to deliver us, and do not delay.



(Note: I have wanted all week to include a sound file for each day of advent antiphons - alas, no time. But I'm caught up now, so I've gone back and added them to Monday and Tuesdays, if you so wish to listen...)

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, december, discipleship, spirituality, theology, winter, worship

Adonai

O LORD AND RULER of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the flame of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: come, and save us with Your mighty power.

Technorati Tags: advent, antiphons, seasons, spirituality, worship

it's beginning to look a lot like ?

The fam and I spent the day on Edisto island visiting with Uncle Joe and Aunt Brenda and just moving very slowly. After a wonderful lunch of lasagna and green beans and garlic bread and salad, we spent the rest of the sunny, 76 degree day on the beach and beside the Ashley river watching a dolphin roll away the hours in the shallow water by the shore.
It was a gloriously wonderful day. I’ve uploaded a BUNCH of pics.

Technorati Tags: advent, beach, busyness, ocean, photography, seasons

Sapientia

O WISDOM,who came from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly:
come, and teach us the way of prudence.

Technorati Tags: advent, december, discipleship, worship

epistemology

For many of my friends and colleagues, this must be what a conversation with me looks like. It is the picture of post-modernity described to me by so many ingrained modern thinking Christians. Switch tracks, confusion, uncertainty, and then off the rails the end of the line. None of the decisions were right.


What's more, the whole thing is a siding, going on just beside the mainline, gently curving around the bend in the distance.
What could be more sure and safe than a gently curving path around the bend?

Technorati Tags: epistemology, post-modernity, spirituality, theology, thoughts

pivot point

Today turned out to be a bit of a pivot day for me, a turning point. I don’t know if I can explain it. In the stress of life, I tend to take my breaths based on clicking stressful responsibilities off the list. As deadlines pass, I’ll inhale and exhale and inhale and then hold it until the next deadline passes. Sometimes I’ll anticipate a period of less stress and look forward to clicking the last check box so that I can enter that period. Something always gets in the way though, of that last check box being the end or beginning of anything. It’s just another in a series.
Today, though, was different. I hadn’t anticipated today even being a check box. I’ve still got tons of grading and submitting left to do before the semester is checked off for me. I’m not adequately prepared for Christmas in that I’ve not yet braved the wilds of Harbison Boulevard.
But this afternoon, while driving west on I-26 from downtown to home, something fell away. I had Molly in the truck with me. I was bringing her home from the last Nutcracker performance. Jack’s illness meant I didn’t have to accompany him in his recital today, and since I don’t have to take Molly to school tomorrow, Allison was able to drive herself to work tonight so that I didn’t have to make my 3rd trip downtown today.

Today is the third Sunday of Advent. I led worship this morning. I spoke much more than usual, which still wasn’t much, and saw faces of recognition, solidarity, shared desires and frustrations. We sang of our desires and frustrations and impatience, and then of our trust in yet to be fulfilled promises. It was very purging. At the end of the service, I improvised a long stretch of music during a prayer time and prayed through my fingers.

So just in time for the final week of Advent, the stress seems to have broken. I’m prepared to sing the antiphons each day. Will you join me as we quietly invite the promises to be kept? As we invite the Wisdom from on high, the Dayspring, the Root of Jesse’s tree? Immanuel.
We are expecting you, come be born in us.

Technorati Tags: advent, christmas, december, discipleship, spirituality, thoughts

moldy leftovers

When left-overs get left in the fridge for too long, eventually they get a bit nasty, one begins to avoid opening the fridge door in lieu of actually cleaning it out. In the same vein, often when a blogger allows mold to grow on his cascading style sheets, and his content goes stale, folks stop opening the door to see what there is to nibble. Problem is that once people have stopped opening the door, they will not know when the contents have been re-stocked.
Such has been the case in a lot of blogs of late. But you might be interested to know that Jack has recently updated his blog with a timely Advent lesson.
Go on. Click the link.
Now if we could just get some others to clean the fridge.

Technorati Tags: advent, family, kids, marriage

advent bugs

60% (I’m knocking on the kitchen table as I type) of our family has been afflicted with some nasty illness this week. Molly started feeling tough on Tuesday night and didn’t sleep much. She stayed home from school on Wednesday and Allison got called in to work. So I worked from home most of the day until I had to go in to administer a final exam. Molly stayed home by herself until the boys got home.
While at work that same day, Allison began to feel the affects of the same, and came home with a fever and crashed. She and Molly spent the next 36 hours together in the living room floor under piles of blankets.
Jack, who never manages to get sick on a school day, came home with a fever on Friday evening and thus missed his basketball game this morning and will miss his fiddle recital tomorrow afternoon. His fever was 103 today.
Molly managed to muster just enough energy to dance her two performances of the Nutcracker this afternoon and this evening, and Allison sucked it up and helped in the dressing room before going to work tonight. Both are weak and exhausted from such exertion.
Will and I enjoyed Molly’s performance tonight and brought an exhausted bon bon home afterward. Allison with a messed up stomach and absolutely no energy, is up all night caring for sick wee ones at the hospital.

This is the stuff of which Christmas is made. Hurry, bustle, practice, perform, work, run, attend, get dressed, bake, speed, sing, play, shop, worry, read, recite, smile, stress.
Sometimes it seems the waiting in advent is waiting for it to all be over. The hope is that it will not find us depleted. The mystery is that we’re still alive on New Year’s eve.
Pray for quiet. Pray for health. Pray for intimate family time. Pray for contemplative, prayerful solitude. Pray for salvation. It has come – have we noticed?

Technorati Tags: advent, christmas, famil, life

honor your father

Way back in the day – I must have been less than 8 years old – I got into the girl-scout cookies when no one was watching and emptied the box. I don’t remember if it was the cookies, or illness, but I did see the cookies again that night. They were those mint deals that the girls still sell. I have despised mint anything since that day.
But I don’t despise cookies. Au contraire, I love cookies. I have a cookie problem. There are cookies at faculty meetings, and all my colleagues make fun of me.
My children also like cookies, especially Jack. Jack gets angry with me when he goes to get a cookie(s) and there are none left. Evidently, he has shared this frustration with Allison, who apparently told him about my mint phobia.
Tonight, after everyone had gone to bed, I began to hear tiny, sweet-breathed cookie voices whispering my name. They even rolled the R. And the D was so soft as to be almost inaudible. The milk practically poured itself as I went to the cupboard to answer the call. Filled with anticipation, I opened the door to find… nothing buy mint cookies! What kind of family treats their ever-loving Dad like that? I provide, I chauffeur, I cook, I hold them when they hurt, I protect them when they’re scared, I pray over them when they can’t sleep, and they stock mint cookies. This is the respect I get? This is how you repay me?
I am not angry. I am not annoyed. I am not irritated. I am not disappointed. I am not outraged. I am just so so hurt.

Technorati Tags: cookies, milk, mint, puppy

daydreaming...

Sometimes the dreams that fill a night are formed of the thoughts of the day.

Sometimes the thoughts that fill a day are formed from dreams of the night.

Sometimes the thoughts that are dreamt are someone else's entirely.

Technorati Tags: bricks, cups, dreams, iPod, puppy, puppy, thoughts, walls

snapshots

A while back, I posted about humility found in true artists. My statement ultimately, was that artistry is dependent on humility. Humility is the single attribute found consistently among artists. This is in direct contradiction to the conventional wisdom concerning folks with an artistic temperament. Numerous books have been written to help understand artists, but the profile given in the books is precisely not consistent with a true artist. We’ve come to think of artists as high maintenance, extroverted, egocentric, megalomaniacs. I do know several high maintenance, extroverted, egocentric, megalomaniacs, but none of the artists I know are any of those things. The problem is that we’ve too broadly applied the term artist. But I’ve said all this before, I’m repeating myself redundantly.

I thought about this all again today when I read a comment on my photo of last night’s moon rising over our house. The comment said, “His beauty leaves me breathless…” I began to think about being left breathless by beauty that can’t be comprehended. We try to capture that beauty and fail. But the embraced failure could possibly be the definitive factor in art. Perhaps every work of art contains an ellipsis. There is more than could be captured, contained, or understood. The purpose of this meager representation is merely to cause you to ponder what is there, but couldn’t be captured. This work is a glass through which we see dimly, but piques contemplation and hope for what can’t be seen and provides clues to the greater picture.
The striving of an artist to capture the beauty of God is doomed to failure. This is a very humbling endeavor. Artists are constantly reminded of their limitations. Artists have the ability to create a box with an open lid and show us what it can’t contain.
I believe this is why the written Revelation is so full of poetry. God can’t be contained in profiles and information. The complete and adequate revelation shows us how incomplete our understanding, and inadequate our language.
Sadly though, (and I’m know I’m restating again) it seems as if the poetry and art has been dissected and explained to the point that it no longer serves to point to something more, but rather it becomes the very box to contain God. This causes the opposite of humility. We become arrogant when we think we’ve got it all figured out.
If a painting, or photo, or piece of music claims to represent the beauty of God, rather than celebrate what it can’t be, it is not art.
Perhaps this is why there is such a danger in our theology. We see it as a study, and study is academic, and so we learn but don’t see. When our learning ceases to make us aware that there is so much we don’t know we lose humility. We create boxes that are almost always smaller than ourselves.

Technorati Tags: art, discipleship, flickr, life, photography, photos, theology

warmth

Yes, my normally contemplative brain grows more so at season changes. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you’ll know this about me. The way I ramble on at the changes of seasons actually embarrasses me a bit. You must be thinking, “here he goes again.”
Of course my seasonal thoughts and emotions are contextual to our South Carolina climate, so if any of you would be willing to admit that you are also affected, perhaps your thoughts or emotions occur earlier or later than mine. Spring comes earlier and Fall comes later here than for many of my readers.
Yesterday was our first wintry day. Many of you would no doubt laugh at that adjective applied to yesterday had you experienced it, but when I walked outside between services to get a cup of coffee, it was at least 10 degrees colder than it had been when I got there an hour earlier. The sky was overcast and a chill hung in the air all day long. Last night, December’s “cold moon” was nearly full and shone brightly from behind a thin veil of broken, fast moving clouds.
I remember once riding in a van across the Pennsylvania turnpike on a cold winter day a couple decades ago. Allison looked out the window at the barren hillsides and brown grassy hollows and commented on its dreariness. I disagreed, and told her how I thought it was just as beautiful as any other season, but in a completely different way. At the time, there was little I enjoyed more than slowly walking through winter woods, looking for shape and line in the monochrome landscape, curiously following hollows carpeted with tall brown grass.
For years, I’ve not had time, occasion or opportunity to do that. As a result, it doesn’t excite me like it did back then. On the contrary, it rather depresses me. Long cold nights and short chilly days. One hunches over and moves quickly through the cold outdoors only to get from one building to another, from the house to the car or the car to the house. I seem to have forgotten how much different the experience is if you give yourself to it. For years, I’ve mourned as the colors of autumn flutter to the ground and the once shady trees expose us to the biting winds of winter.

I don’t know, I probably have the same thoughts and say the same things every year at the beginning of each season. But why do these thoughts seem so new and epiphanic every year? Change. It’s uncomfortable. It marks the passage of time. It’s the green light on a one-way street with all you’ve known in your rearview mirror.
Yesterday, as I drove home from church, chilled from the short jaunt to the car, I looked up into the cold, newly bare trees at the countless, huge, dense balls of mistletoe. Now that’s something that you don’t see in the summertime. Mistletoe.
I thought of warm lips. I thought of wintry, woodsy walks all bundled up with gloved hand in gloved hand and frequent pauses under those mistletoe laden bare branches. I thought of fireplaces, coffee, comforters, and Saturday mornings.
Winter ain’t all that bad.

Technorati Tags: cold, december, life, love, marriage, seasons, winter