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.

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How Do Hyenas Celebrate Lent?

"Hyenas can eat almost any organic matter, even putrid carrion and anthrax-infected carcasses," study researcher Gidey Yirga of Mekelle University in Ethiopia said in a statement. "They are capable of eating and digesting all parts of their prey except hair and hooves. Bones are digested so completely that only the inorganic components are excreted in the hyena's droppings."

Knowing that hyenas scavenge from human garbage, Yirga and his colleagues investigated whether human diet changes influence what hyenas eat. They focused on Lent, collecting hyena droppings from three sites in Northern Ethiopia on the first and last days of Abye Tsome, or Lent, and then again 55 days after the fast ended. The result was a collection of 553 individual droppings.

An analysis of the scat showed that hyenas turned to a diet of donkey as humans gave up butchering meat. Before Lent, 14.8 percent of hyena droppings contained donkey hair. During Lent, that number increased to 33.1 percent, dropping again to 22.2 percent once Lent ended and butcher scraps again appeared around human settlements.

The results, published today (April 4) in the Journal of Animal Ecology, illustrate how adaptable and opportunistic hyenas are, according to the researchers. They also show how intertwined the lives of humans and hyenas really are — a fact that could have implications for how hyena-human conflict should be managed.

"Understanding details of the foraging behavior of carnivores in an anthropogenic environment can help reveal specific causes of conflict, leading to better strategies for reducing availability of anthropogenic food and preventing conflict," Yirga said.

Buechner Quote on the "Company of Saints"

At the Altar Table the overweight parson is doing something or other with the bread as his assistant stands by with the wine. In the pews, the congregation sits more or less patiently waiting to get into the act. The church is quiet. Outside, a bird starts singing. It’s nothing special, only a handful of notes angling out in different directions. Then a pause. Then a trill or two. A chirp. It is just warming up for the business of the day, but it is enough.

The parson and his assistant and the usual scattering of senior citizens, parents, teenagers are not alone in whatever they think they’re doing. Maybe that is what the bird is there to remind them. In its own slapdash way the bird has a part in it too. Not to mention “Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven” if the prayer book is to be believed. Maybe we should believe it. Angels and Archangels. Cherubim and seraphim. They are all in the act together. It must look a little like the great jeu de son et lumière at Versailles when all the fountains are turned on at once and the night is ablaze with fireworks. It must sound a little like the last movement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony or the Atlantic in a gale.

And “all the company of heaven” means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did – or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will – come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.

Whatever other reasons we have for coming to such a place, if we come also to give each other our love and to give God our love, then together with Gabriel and Michael, and the fat parson, and Sebastian pierced with arrows, and the old lady whose teeth don’t fit, and Teresa in her ecstasy, we are the communion of saints’. – Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 30–1.

“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.”

Bob Marle

To sing is to begin a sentence
like “I want to get well.
I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:
Heaven never wept
over nothing."


~ Thomas Merton
from an untitled poem

I believe in Thich Nhat Hanh's theory of inter-being. I believe we are transformations of the energy of the universe. I don't believe in a god as a puppeteer. The universe is like the sea, we are the drips, and life and death is like the waves. When our body dies, our energy goes back to the sea. So death is an illusion.