Terrapin Station

Friday Five: Grand Tours

Over at RevGals, Songbird says:  One of our original ring members, jo(e), wrote yesterday about a trip she and her sisters are taking overseas with their parents, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Many other RevGals are headed for the Festival of Homiletics in the coming week (click here for information on a RevGals meetup!!). In honor of these upcoming trips, herewith your Grand Tour Friday Five.

Name five places that fall into the following categories:

1) Favorite Destination -- someplace you've visited once or often and would gladly go again:  As I have said many times in this space:  St. Teresa Beach, in NorthFlorida. 

2) Unfavorite Destination -- someplace you wish you had never been (and why):  don't mind if I don't get to Los Angeles again.

3) Fantasy Destination -- someplace to visit if cost and/or time did not matter:  New Zealand.  We have friends there and have been invited many times...but the time and $ have prevented us from going.

4) Fictional Destination -- someplace from a book or movie or other art or media form you would love to visit, although it exists only in imagination:  Narnia.  No question.

5) Funny Destination -- the funniest place name you've ever visited or want to visit.  How about Sopchoppy?  A Seminole name for a place not far from my Florida beach...my parents used to get their mail there.  There is a potter there whom I love dearly; he lives and works in the middle of the Apalachicola National Forest.  One of the local seafood dealers has a portable sign out by the road reading:

$hrimp, Crab, Mullet
Je$u$ i$ Lord!!

Bonus:  This is my grand tour for this weekend:

View Larger Map

Birds in the Thinking Place today

Here is the Blue Heron:

and the cattle egret (there were at least two dozen of these, huddled together):

plus others I can't name

working on it...

And a donkey shall lead them

Just one of me

so many of you

still you let me walk alongside

I am glad for the company.

We are all the same,

and somehow not

I am very much bigger

louder when I talk

I only want

to walk in the middle

one day to be a part of

to blend in with the group.

(the 18th Poetry Party from Abbey of the Arts)

Gratitude List

• Friend and valued colleague who took me out for a soda this afternoon, when it was becoming clear (to me anyway) that I was about to have a hissy fit
• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Going to see my mom and dad, sister and her kiddos this weekend
• Search for my new boss is over and decided
• Cooler weather following the rain
• Jazzercise
• Birds in the thinking place
• List to cross off "things done" and then say, "yeah me!"
• Choir rehearsal tonight.  We are working on Handel's "Zadok the Priest"
• Domestic goddess came today!

Birds in the Thinking Place

Went to the thinking place by the pond this morning.  It was starting to rain, but the birds were flying around busily over the trees.  Catching bugs, I would guess. 

When I was little, my mother told me that if the birds were calling during a rainstorm, it meant the rain was not going to let up any time soon...that the birds knew it and knew they had to get out and get their food, and that it wouldn't do for them to wait. 

I listened and what I heard was that I need to do some work first, and take some rest afterward.  Okay, got it:  Not all the work...not all the rest.  Went home, cleaned out one shelf of the laundry room. 

As Brandon would say:  Boo Ya. 

Join the Movement for Study Abroad!

Right now there is a congressional initiative to dramatically increase opportunities of study abroad for U.S. students -

The Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act.

However, the bill is currently being held up in the Senate.

Due to election year politics, this bill has been wedged into a difficult position. If the legislation does not pass by the end of this year, it will die.

The goal of this group is to send letters to your Senators to ask them to pass the Simon Act this year! To access a sample letter, please visit: http://www.nafsa.org/simonalert

DID YOU KNOW… that only 1 percent of American college students study abroad each year?

DID YOU KNOW… that 95% of the world’s population growth over the next fifty years is expected to occur outside Europe, yet four European countries dominate as the leading destination for U.S. study abroad?

DO YOU BELIEVE... the opportunity to gain the valuable global skills today’s employers are looking for is something that should be accessible to all students?

JOIN THE MOVEMENT FOR STUDY ABROAD...

ACT TODAY!

Send a letter to your members of Congress! http://www.nafsa.org/simonalert

Read more about the Simon bill at: http://www.nafsa.org/simon

Contact Info

Email:	grassroots@nafsa.org
Website:	http://www.nafsa.org/takeaction
Office:	NAFSA: Association of International Educators

THANKS!  :) 

Pentecost Shoes

We are encouraged to wear red for Pentecost, but I am in a choir robe, no hats allowed there.  So I thought I'd go with red shoes. 

If I was going to buy red shoes, I wanted to buy something I'd wear again. 

So I wore these with my black suit.  Classy, no? 

Come, thou Holy Spirit

Choral offertory this morning, with a wonderful text: 

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come,

And from thy celestial home

Shed thy light and brilliancy.

 

Father of the poor, draw near

Giver of all gifts, be here;

Come, the soul’s true radiancy.

 

Come, of comforters the best

Of the soul the sweetest guest

Come in toil refreshingly

 

Thou in labor rest most sweet;

Thou art shadow from the heat

Comfort in adversity.

 

O thou Light, most pure and blest

Shine within the inmost breast

Of thy faithful company

 

Where thou art not, man has nought

Ev’ry holy deed and thought

Comes from thy Divinity.

 

Sinful hearts do thou make whole

Bring to life the arid soul

Guide the feet that go astray.

 

Make the stubborn heart unbend

To the faint, new hope extend

Wounded souls, their hurt allay.

 

Fill the faithful, who confide

In thy power to guard and guide

With thy sev’n-fold Mystery.

 

Here thy grace and virtue send:

Grant salvation in the end,

And in heav’n felicity.

 

Amen.

 

Text: Stephen Langton (d. 1228)

Tune: The Dublin Troper

Pentecost: The Holy Spirit Our Mother

Reading 'round the RevGals Ring this morning, sermons and pastoral prayers and reflections, has been so interesting.  I read a wonderful sermon by Elastigirl (which I will hear preached this morning) that informed my writing below; and also a pastoral prayer by Songbird (from whence I snitched the graphic). 

As I have been thinking about the Trinity over the last several years (remember that I hang out with a lot of preachers and listen to them talk about this stuff), it's become clear in my own mind that the Holy Spirit is feminine. 

I'm so convinced of this that now, when we say the Nicene Creed, I refer to HS with feminine pronouns (quietly, not to trouble others...it's for me.)   I've realized recently that while the 1979 Book of Common Prayer has male pronouns in the Creed for HS: 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.

However, the 1928 BCP (on which I cut my liturgical teeth) uses NO pronouns for HS:

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the Prophets...

Today is also Mother's Day, an observance oddly troubling in the way it has been included, somehow by cultural imperative, into many church services on or near the day...similar to the Fourth of July.  Why these, and not Father's Day?  Veteran's Day?  As you probably know, Mother's Day was not even started as what it has become. 

Mother's Day...I have a wonderful mother, and I'm not just saying this because she reads this blog.  I am truly fortunate to have been unconditionally loved and accepted by her all my life.  Not everyone has this experience, though.  Stepmothering has had its challenges, and loving unconditionally is a big one.  So many of my friends have struggled with infertility.  If you have children, and if you don't, life is full of pain.

On this day, let's put our focus on all the people who mother us and who have done so in the past...who include men, in many cases.  People on my list would include Father Jeff, Keith Dixon, Anna Wilburn, Eva H.,  Mona the aforementioned Songbird & Elastigirl...I could go on. 

And our model for mothering needs to be the Holy Spirit, our Comforter.   So perhaps, from now on, Mother's Day needs to be Holy Spirit Day...and Pentecost could be Mother's Day.

Later...I'll post a picture of my red Pentecost shoes!!

You CAN Do Something about the Burma Cyclone...

Was horrified to read this morning that the embassies in Myanmar have closed due to a holiday...will not be open to issue visas for relief workers again until Monday.  MY GOD! 

Then, this came in from Barbara Crafton's Almost-Daily-E-Mo:

Perhaps For Just This Moment 

Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.
John 7:38 

The news from Myanmar grows worse every day. One would expect mounting casualties as deaths are confirmed, of course, but the increasing government frustration of international aid efforts is an unwelcome and distressing surprise. The United States today suspended its efforts to get aid to the people in the stricken areas of the country, its aid workers having been forbidden entry by the repressive government there. Nobody can get in.

The Church, though, is already there and already at work distributing aid. We have been able, through transfers of Episcopal Relief and Development funds to people already on the ground there, to do what national governments have not been able to do. Anglican churches have been in Myanmar for generations; there are five Anglican dioceses in the country. This terrible case of human need strangled by the harshness of human politics reveals the blessed power of the local faith community to do much good when much larger and mightier entities can do little.

90 percent of Myanmar's people are Buddhists. The living water that flows from the heart of the believer in that country has not transformed it into a Christian country. But the presence of the Holy Spirit is never measured solely by numbers of conversions. The Spirit does other things besides inspire religious belief; we hold that the whole of creation came into being by the power of the Spirit. This include plants, animals, water, the bright sun after a dreadful storm, the power to heal after a devastating blow. The Spirit hovers over the waters of chaos and waits for just the right moment. Maybe it was just for this moment that the church has endured in Myanmar.

+
To send emergency support to the Anglican Church in Myanmar, visit www.er-d.org. or telephone 1-800-334-7626, ext 5219.

from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2008 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

The Almost-Daily eMo

Or maybe your own denomination or church has an avenue to speed support to those people.  Thank God there is a way to do something.