The February 2 edition of Style has, as its cover story, the first in a five-part series on the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War & Emancipation. This installment in the series is an interview with U of R's Ed Ayers and it's well worth a read. My favorite lines, an Ayers quotation, are as follows,
"The Civil War is woven into all the hard questions about American Society...The sesquicentennial gives us a way to see that this is all part of the same story."
Yes, indeed. As Dr. Ayers says, "History never stops."
May God give us the patience and the courage to attend to the hard questions, the hard questions of our day.
In December, parishioner Chip Jones took a moment to fill out our Good News form online - a new initiative St. Paul's launched last year to help spread the good news in parishioners' lives with one another.
From Chip: My third book will be in bookstores by early January, with a signing to which ALL my friends at St. Paul's are invited at Fountain Books, Jan. 8, Saturday, Noon. It's called War Shots: Norm Hatch and the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Cameramen of World War II, and tells about the life and times of the brave Marines who filmed combat from Tarawa to Iwo Jima. So I celebrate another chapter in my writing life, and hope anyone who enjoys history, Hollywood, or just a good story will come to Fountain Books on Cary Street at Shockoe Slip to join Debbie and me for the book's launch.
You can contact Chip directly at charlesvjones@verizon.net or (804) 747-7722.
Click to read more information from the publisher.
A Tuesday NYT article on the Sesquicentennial is well worth a read. My favorite line is from Mark Potok, Director of Intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, "These battles of memory are not only academic. They are really about present-day attitudes."
May God help us to have the courage, compassion, and good judgment to take this opportunity (the Sesquicentennial) to do something authentic and something for the common good.
Amen, amen.
Pictured: A depiction of the battle at Fort Sumter (The New York Times)
I commend to you, for the general Episcopal purposes, the Web site Episcopal Cafe. And, in particular, I recommend this five-minute take on Episcopal history by the Reverend Chris Yaw.
Tony Horwitz's Sunday NYT column, "The 150-Year War" is superb: he writes about the Civil War as
"a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds."
Amen, man! Beautiful!
And he goes on to speak of the land (our land) itself as "a vast and accessible Yosemite of memory."
Wow!
Above is a picture I took at Malvern Hill just yesterday. As Horwitz says, "In an electronics-saturated age, battlefield parks also force us to exercise our atrophied imaginations."
As we lean into the Sesquicentennial, let us pray, indeed, that the Spirit helps us exercise our imaginations, for the sake of our country, and, for that matter, for the sake of the world.
And, let us pray, may this season of reflection open us to fresher and more courageous ways of being Americans.
In today's Word from Grace Street, Wallace+ tells the story of "the first known contact between Europeans and Australia's Aborigines," in which the Aborigines ignored the approaching British ship.
"Only when the British sailors lowered their landing boats and began to paddle ashore did the Aborigines react, recognizing the British sailors as part of their reality--men."
This story prompts Wallace+ to wonder:
When do we fail to see something that is right before our eyes?
And when do we not see something because we are not looking for it, or because we have never even imagined it?
In August, I began a Word from Grace Street by quoting one of the desert mothers, Amma Syncletica. The words of another eastern Christian ascetic, influenced by the desert fathers, caught my attention yesterday. Dorotheus of Gaza said, beautifully:
Each one according to his means should take care to be at one with everyone else, for the more one is united to his neighbor, the more he is united with God.
Which is exactly what is meant, in the Outline of the Faith (Book of Common Prayer, 855), when the mission of the Church is given: "to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ."
Finally, it's all about a loving unity, one loving unity: us and God, one Love.
I commend to you a NYT column from Friday
about Japanese and American soldiers finding peace and friendship in
the immediate aftermath of World War II. If then and there, then
anywhere.
As the German Blitzkrieg rolled into Poland, and World War II began, on the morning of September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden sat in a New York City dive, writing the poem that would take for its name simply the date itself, "September 1, 1939."
In what would become one of the most-widely-known lines in all modern poetry, Auden wrote, "We must love one another or die."
I have lately been listening, for, a second time, to The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I recommend it HIGHLY. While Dr. King did not in fact write an autobiography, Stanford's Clayborne Carson has taken Dr. King's written and spoken words and woven them together into a single and stunning piece. While it is available in paperback, the audio version is my recommendation, with many recordings of Dr. King being incorporated, including his "I Have a Dream Speech," naturally, as well as, for instance, his reading of his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. From the latter, I was especially struck (again) by what he says about the "white moderate," in answer to those who urge patience in the face of injustice.
Thanks be to God for Martin Luther King, Jr., and may God bless us as we carry on the brave and faithful work of his life. Indeed, may God help us to be both brave and faithful.
And, of course, this Christmas, tonight, and tomorrow, new memories are being made; a Carol sung, pure and exquisite; an old friend; warm, endearing words exchanged; a first Christmas for a new grandbaby; a candle lit, a face aglow, eyes agleam.
More than fifty times, in his published writings, Barth refers to the Grunewald image; and, indeed, usually, it is precisely in reference to John, and John’s relation to the figure of Christ; as he points.
Barth (and Grunewald before him) understood John’s sole purpose to be to serve as a pointer to Christ, a reference to Christ, a witness to Christ.
On any given day, there are those things that would get our attention; those things that would bring fresh perspective; those things would remind us of what is most important, what is most true. If, that is, if we but notice. We never know when those things, those experiences, those people might come. And so it has always been, so it has always been.
The Rule of 72, they call it. It’s a rule of thumb to figure how long it’ll take to double your money. If you know you can get 5%, on your investment, then you divide 5 into 72 and that tells you: it’ll take roughly 14 and ½ years to double your money. That’s the Rule of 72. Now, sometimes an investor doesn’t want to wait 14 and a ½ years, or however long the Rule of 72 tells you that you have to wait and so increased risks are taken. And sometimes you win, and sometimes you loose.
We all want, in the words of St. Paul, to “lead a life worthy of God.” A life worthy of God. Un-like the lives of the false prophets, of Micah’s day, or the false teachers of Jesus’ day, the scribes and the Pharisees, teachers of the law. Their lives are un-worthy of God, we are told, in no uncertain terms. In their hypocrisy, they serve, not God, not God’s people, but themselves.
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The February 2 edition of Style has, as its cover story, the first in a five-part series on the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War & Emancipation. This installment in the series is an interview with U of R's Ed Ayers and it's well worth a read. My favorite lines, an Ayers quotation, are as follows,
As the German Blitzkrieg rolled into Poland, and World War II began, on the morning of September 1, 1939, 
I have lately been listening, for, a second time, to 