Roomin' House Blues

It is Lent and I have to ask - am I walking with Jesus?  Can I walk with Jesus?  In Pier Palo Pasolini's  masterpiece,   "Gospel According to St. Matthew" Jesus moves, talks and works with relentless intensity and sense of direction, and from that film I have formed a sense of how Jesus moved in the world from his Baptism until his crucification.  In this film he often preaches to those he passes while he continues walking in his single minded direction.  He gives people sometimes just a one line chance to consider the Kingdom of Heaven. While the language of this film is faithfully and exclusively from Matthew, it's relentless motion reflects Marks tersity and drive. but certainly in every Gospel Jesus is always on the move.  He tells us himself that "Foxes and birds have nest and lairs, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head."  Last Friday night at Stations of the Cross , language out of the pr...

Friday, the second Friday in Lent, I again went to Stations of the Cross.  The prolonged period of worship and church community on Lenten Fridays --Mass, soup supper, Stations, Benediction is a means of turning us inward, in reflection, for the purpose of repentance. As we came up stairs from soup supper in the parish hall to assemble for Stations of the Cross, Jesson Mata, the Blessed Sacrament parish liturgist, was disbanding a rehearsal for a Saturday wedding.  As we took our seats,  in  a typically teasing Jesson comment, our liturgist instructed us not to spill the wax from the little candles we would use to read the stations booklets onto the pews.  I sought out Jesson to assure him that if I spilled any of the wax on the pews, I would let him know where so he could polish it off the next day.  (Such a response is typical of this blogger.) And in typical Jesson fashion, he let me know whom he would be polishing it with. Catholicism is fu...

Earlier this week I awoke uneasy after an unusual dream, feeling my human weaknesses and limitations.   I had a dream of an inability to hear and an inability to get something articulated properly.  It sometimes happens to me that in a noisy room, or when I am talking on my cell phone on the street, I sometimes cannot here the person I am talking to.  Efforts to get the person to speak louder or otherwise make it easier to here are sometimes frustrating, making me identify with my brother Thomas, and my sister Ellie who are both deaf.  In this dream I was in a meeting where people were voting to undo something I had done.  Three statements were made, the third a garbled  low volume mumbling collectively by all those present,  with the result that my prior actions were voted down.  Believing I had right to hear what was said I demanded several times for it to be repeated, but only heard more low tone mumbles.  I felt isolat...

While on Tuesday, Mardi Gras, I went to the first in a Lenten series on the Beatitudes and on Ash Wednesday I went to mass and received ashes, swearing myself then as a penitent, on Friday I began really began my Lent.  Friday I went to mass and then a soup supper.  I stayed at church and went to a Stations of the Cross and a Benediction.  I contemplated the exposed Eucharist for a few minutes and I returned home to do my daily bible study.   As a child in Catholic school on First Fridays and all Fridays during the 40 days of Lent, with my classmates I did the Stations of the Cross.  I complained silently to myself as the hard floor seemed to hurt my knee caps as a genuflected at each station I felt a bit of boredom at the length and repetition of the stations. But many years later, when I returned to Seattle and visited the church I did the stations in, I felt disappointed that the hard aisle...

It is the 4th day of Lent, the first Sunday in Lent.  Lenctentid  (spring-tide) in the Anglo-Saxon Old English was the name of March, because the first signs of spring came forth, and the days grew longer.   The fast period from Ash Wednesday up to Easter was therefore: L encten-fœsten.   For the ancient Anglo Saxon's time was measured in seasons, by the sun, the weather, the moon.  Noon was whenever the sun was highest where you lived.  The regulation of lives by the clock, which in the modern sense did not yet exist, was unimaginable.   Outside, while still the same grey, luke-cold, rain that is the curse of Seattle's "mild" climate, shoots are greening up and buds are breaking open. My winter blues is waning, although my rooming house and hard times killing floor blues still hums along.  It is also the first day of daylight savings time, a modern artificiality that plays havoc with our health, through sleep deprivation, our...