A Hundred Messages

Another Buechner Quote

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
All-wise. All-powerful. All-loving. All-knowing. We bore to death both God and ourselves with our chatter. God cannot be expressed but only experienced.
In the last analysis, you cannot pontificate but only point. A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, "I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross-the way he carries me."

KFC & JC

Maker of All Things

My "Our Father"

Buechner post

Quote of the Day: Suicide

The most famous suicide in the Old Testament is King Saul's. He was doing battle with the Philistines. The Philistines won the day. They killed his three sons, and he himself was wounded by archers. Fearing that he would be captured by the enemy and made a mockery of if he survived, he asked his armor-bearer to put him out of his misery. When the armor-bearer refused, he fell on his own sword (1 Samuel 31:4).

Judas Iscariot's is of course the most famous one in the New Testament. When Jesus was led off to Pilate and condemned to death, Judas took his thirty pieces of silver and tried to return them to the Jewish authorities on the grounds that Jesus was innocent and he had betrayed him. The authorities refused to take them. They said that was his problem, and Judas, throwing the silver to the ground, went off and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3-5).
Taking your own life is not mentioned as a sin in the Bible. There's no suggestion that it was considered either shameful or cowardly. When, as in the case of Saul and Judas, pain, horror, and despair reach a certain point, suicide is perhaps less a voluntary act than a reflex action. If you're being burned alive with a loaded pistol in your hand, it's hard to see how anyone can seriously hold it against you for pulling the trigger.
~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

This was at theologian Fred Buechner blog today: "It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling."

In The Sacristy

I've become a sort of "Sacristan de Facto". (Actually they asked me.). Before several of the Masses, I get everything set up for the liturgy, the vessels, the wine, water and bread,  the lectionary and gospel book,etc. The great thing is I used to do this some 50 yrs. ago as a server, and before that when "playing priest," When I fill the plate with the unconsecrated communion hosts and carry it to the back of the church, I keep thinking::. The miracle is not so much the transubstantiation, but our gift of faith in this miracle.

Parish-Phrases

"Church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there."

Being in Church doesn't make you a holy person anymore than standing in a garage makes you an automobile."

A donkey carrying a load of books is still a donkey."

                                               --------H.L.Mencken

Music was the only proof he needed for the existence of God" (Kurt Vonnegut)

I have been anxious and depressed this last couple years, and in the midst of these feelings I have been searching my feelings above God. (I always believe in the "big ideas."
One of my great connundrums is not God's existence, but the quality of that existence. I want to believe in the persona of God, whether that means "He" or "She" or whatever. It's easier to address God as Father or Mother, rather than it.(Although if frogs or armadillos want to see God as their kind, so be it.) The love of God is around us everywhere, not faraway out there, but like silence in music. It's there even if we're tempted to say it's nothing.I believe it's called grace. It's amazing.