Advent 1

At some point during Advent I have been wont to write a family message to all the friends on my list of friends and acquaintances so that they may be up to date on this family's doings. And thus, again this Advent, I am working on THE message, knowing full well that it will be a labour of love that will hardly be read in its entirety by all recipients. Ergo: a posting to tell everybody in one fell swoop about my family.

Point 1: I love my family. They are a mighty good bunch that shows when we are together. Then we joke, tell funny stories, and show our love for each other in many different ways.

Point 2: Thankfully they all have employment. That helps with the jocularity when we are together.

Point 3: Thankfully all of us have a solid foundation in the teachings of the Christ as found in the pages of the New Testament.

Point 4: We are all healthy, not counting an occasional cold that I consider to be caused by forgetting the daily intake of a large quantity of vitamins.

Point 5: Every one branch of the family can point with a sense of pride to one or more stellar achievements reached in the past twelve months.

Point 6: Because of the contents of these five points I, as the father and grandfather of the flock, I am very proud of this bunch of people even if most of them do not share my great enthusiasm for a hefty helping of Christmas Stollen and pressed almond bakery products. Oh well, you cannot be perfect all the time!

So to all my children and grandchildren and spouses my thanks for your great contributions to the wellbeing of this our family. I love you.

Dad/Opa

Thanksgiving Redux

We've had the family Thanksgiving get-togethers. Two of them this year. Most family members were gathering except son Steve and wife who needed to be with their Marine son in Key West. and grandson Daniel Kirk who with family lives in San Francisco and is unable to fly across the country at a moment's notice with his family.
I miss Daniel and Steve but I understand. It is the way it is.
Steve is a man and as men are constructed he does not keep up with his Dad by visiting and/or calling on the landline but he does the next best thing which is he and his wife moved into a house across the street from me so they can keep tabs on dear old Dad from afar.
Daniel, well that is a little more complicated, or it would have been without his daily contribution to the world of deep theology-writing under the title of Storied Theology. I am told that grandson Daniel Kirk has a following of around 500 souls who read his writings (I am one of the 500) and I must say I am impressed with the vast territory he covers and how well he does it.
Blogging seems to run in that Kirk family and I say that because his wife Laura Kirk is a blogger too, albeit not on the same quantity level as her husband. She writes about wonderful, glorious creations of culinary origins that make me wish she were still living here on the eastern Seaboard, in close proximity like across the street from me but for now that seems to be wishful thinking. Sorry but I just cannot get that gorgeous lamb dish she prepared this past Easter out of my mind. By the way, look in my bio for the title of Laura's blog.

Now to come back to where I started, those of the family who live rather close by in the Eastern part of the States, we had a great two days of feasting. One the more traditional version, expertly prepared by the youngest daughter, the other equally expertly prepared by the older daughter whose spread included breakfast dishes like bacon and eggs and the Dutch delicacy called "poffertjes" that resemble small yeast pancakes eaten with a true dollop of real butter and covered with a hefty bunch of 10X sugar. On Thanksgiving with a cold wind blowing you do not mess around with dietary considerations.
And now, getting closer to the time that this batchelor needs to make decisions about what to eat for supper, or if he should eat supper at all because his stomach is still feeling nicely filled, this is becoming a real problem because if he wants to eat supper it is close to the time that he needs to dig in the freezer and pull something edible out to defrost.
And, frankly, having feasted at the tables of my daughters, and knowing full well the much lower level of my quality cooking, I may just eat a few oatmeal cookies, a bit of great tasting milk chocolate with hazelnuts, and wash it all down with a great homegrown cup of real black coffee.
Ah, a great idea for "supper".

Ravings on Beauty

In one of the groups I attend the talk came around to beauty. Now that is a topic we can get heated discussions about with various people representing various age groups, each being extremely loud and assertive in raving that their idea of beauty is the one and only.
It brings to mind something that happened in the days of Moses who went up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. Moses was gone for an exceedingly long time, something like possibly two weeks. and the Hebrew people were left to their own devices and became restless. Two weeks was an awfully long time to be without a leader, spiritual or otherwise, and they decided to build a thing of beauty that they figured would be a joy forever. When the golden calf was finished, this thing of beauty was inaugurated with much hoopla and given over to the masses for their use in addressing their God named Jahweh.
In the middle of all the great dancing and prancing and caterwauling and what else could pass for duly worshipping God, Moses appears with in his hands the rules of living Moses received from God Himself. Moses sees what is going on and is mightily disturbed. He acts just like your parents acted when they had been absent from home for a week and left the house in the hands of their son to safeguard and sonny-boy on Friday night invited his entire group of friends to come over and have fun with the stash of wine bottles and stronger stuff. These "friends" did not let this invite get stale and when Mom and Dad came home in the middle of the night.......well, it could have been forwarded to Shakespeare who would have fashioned it into a great sonnet.
The point is that the Hebrew people considered the calf a thing of great beauty that was supposed to be used in their worship of God and Moses looked at the same golden calf and considered it a piece of blasphemy. In our day and time we have sopmething similar going on, and for our example let's take music because I know more about music than about painting or writing poetry.
Church music was created 'way back to help in the deeper worship of God. It did so for those people back then (apparently because there came so much of it ad nauseum) so, thankfully, a new type and style of music for the church was introduced and brought to the glory of God through the works of Bach and a few others. It was good and glorious for a while until people had had enough of it and the music of the streets in the big cities came to claim ownership to a slice, resulting in a convenient weakening of the text and an accompanying weakening in the worship experience of the populations.
I belong to the older school. To me the praise music of Bach, Handel et al is glorious and I think leads me straight to the throne of God. Also the music of some 20th century composers such as Ralph Vaughn Williams (who started out as a church organist and found the traditional English church music to be a bore of the first order) can be for me an entrance to the throne of God.
But as I said I belong to the older school. I listen to the praise songs from the young generation and find them to be musically poor to the extreme, and their texts border on the nonsensical, a lot of syllables saying and meaning nothing. But I am told the young think differently of it.
Stay tuned. I may have opened a can of worms that might lead to a very worthwhile interchange of opinions and ideas. You are invited.

How Now Brown Cow?

The November 2 election has come and gone, the usual aftermath is in full progress and I am waiting.
Waiting for what you may ask, and in reply I submit to be waiting to hear the elected ones say, loud and clear. what positive changes they will bring to the table, and how they will go about making these positive changes into law and why.
Up till now I am hearing one of the top senators say his first objective in the next two years is to make sure that our President will not be re-elected. Another elected person says his aim is to cancel the new health legislation, and the tirades continue.
These quotes are uttered by elected well educated persons. Their negativity tells me their high school and college diplomas are a joke. What they say is not at all why they were elected (at least not by me). Grandstanding is for a different time. Now the time has come to present us with thoughts on how to finish getting the nation out of the mess the previous Republican regime has managed to get us in.
How now brown cow?
I am waiting to hear and I am not the only one.
Alex H.

The Day After.

Written the day before voting day - Nov. 1, and I just cannot wait for tomorrow to arrive. Tomorrow is the blessed last day that we will see those ads, especially those on the boop tube, that give us all manner of gory details about why mr. so and so is no longer grandioso with the party, and that miss so and so is a disgrace to the nation.
Who cares!
This is election time for our governing talking heads, for elected people who we elect to solve problems - real problems. Have we heard any positive plans for solutions? Once in a while I thought I detected a whisper of positivity but it was so faint I could never disitnguish it from the sssshhhh swishing types sound of the background.
My flat screen tv did its best to give me the latest but last night, in the middle of a right good program on PBS (you know which channels they use on your remote/tv set?) I heard a click and the screen turned Carolina blue and even the tv set gave up (well, we both know PBS does not carry ads in the middle of a program) but the set refuses to come back to life.
The cable company promised to send a techie to my house in the middle of the voting day, so I look forward to an evening of reports from the porch of Uncle Bob's house in Goose Hoppers Gulch switching off to reports from the hot asphalt lanes in the States' and Nation's capitals switching off to an ad about acidic indigestion causes and remedies.
It promises to be back to normal. We can sit back and watch our new leaders do what they said they would never. But yes, there will be a few who put their hands to the plows and who will make an honest attempt to make things right for mr. average of whose club I am a member.
May that tribe grasp the opportunity and assist in re-making our nation into the great country that I so well remember.

What Am I Doing Here?

One day, when I was in a pensive mood, I began to ponder the question "why am I here in this place at this time".
The question had been asked a few times in earlier years but with few or no answers. Now, on this day, I had the time and desire to figure out an answer that I could live with. And so I began with looking around in my belief system if the answer could be found there, in what I call the dim recesses of my brain.
Thus it appeared to me that the answer to the question could be found in the type of work I was engaged in before retirement, and that work was centered on music. Now you may think I am leading in to a killing tirade against present day pop and rock music but, surprise, surprise, I am not going that route.
My involvement with music (after getting a degree) was with choral music in a definitely old timey conservative setting. That period ended after twelve years when I changed to a church whose pastor told me one afternoon we needed to have a mini staff meeting and met me in a restaurant where he promptly ordered a beer. After all those years in a church where alcohol was worse than sin, here my pastor and I sit, talking church business, while enjoying a nice beverage in moderation, meaning one glass each.
There came a 27 year stint at the local College as head of the music department and now I am retired and liking it, and thinking the question of why am I here needs an answer.
I think I have found an answer. Working in churches was sharing the world of Christian choral music with the same congregation year after year, suddenly I found myself in the world of ALL music, sharing my enthusiasm for good music with groups of students who were no longer static but changed three times a year, two semesters and one summer session. This college is a state institution so I could not major on Christian principles and dogmas but much music had been composed by writers who were known for their Christian beliefs like Johann Sebastian Bach which showed in their works.
So I think the answer to why am I here comes because of my personal and church backgrounds that gave me a total overview of the great, wonderful world of music that over the span of 27 years was shared with some 27,000 students, a total number that makes me feel humbled because it shows the number of people I exposed to what my God in Christ wanted me to tell them.

Let's worry about worrying.

There is a worrywart in my family, one person who takes great pleasure in worrying about this, that, and the other. That person has certain days for worrying about certain things and that would be fine if the worries were about things that really matter. But they do not. They are the little things like at 6 o'clock in the morning when it is cool outside let us worry about whether this jacket would be warm enough to make the short trek to the curb to get the morning papers, or would it be better to wear a sweater, and if so, should it be the gray sweater with the picture of the dove or would the blue sweater be more like it.
Today is a great day. The sun is shining, temperature for the pm. will be in the low seventies if we can believe the weatherman who had said that two days ago it would be 80 and on that day it barely made it to 72. OK we all make mistakes once in a while. No need to worry today. Nor ever.
Even in the long ago there was the saying for unnecessary worrying not to be afraid that the man would fall out of the moon. Worrying takes too much energy that could be better spent on thinking positively which is what I would like for most of the political ads on the tube to do.
And for those worriers who would like to quit worrying but seem to be unable to achieve that blessed state of mind let me refer you to any of the four gospels in the New Testament that feature examples galore of leaving the worries behind and live a life of joy in making a contribution to the wonderful world that God created, a world that stands in dire need of getting back on solid ground.