Thursday, October 01, 2026
Blessing of the Animals 2026
For a long time I designed every year for the Season of Creation. For a long time that liturgical emphasis paralleled the 3-year Revised Common Lectionary with scriptures related to the RCL's featured evangelist: Matthew (Spirit series), Mark (Word series), or Luke (Wisdom series). After a while the Season of Creation website formally moved away from the 3-year RCL-related Sundays, though many churches still observe them.
Season of Creation began in the Lutheran Church of Australia; the Uniting Church in Australia (affiliated with the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the World Methodist Council) has the Season of Creation dot com website; Roman Catholics maintain season of creation dot org. The World Council of Churches makes note of it every year, as do many other church bodies and traditions worldwide.
The Lutheran Church of Australia offers resources based on this year's Living Water theme.
After four creation-focused September Sundays, churches and sometimes other organization often have a public Blessing of the Animals on the First Sunday in October, or close to the October 4th feast of St Francis of Assisi. This year the first Sunday is October 4th! Though I've included a critter blessing in several of my monthly rundowns, I haven't blogged my designs separately. I'm starting with the banner I designed for this year, 2026.
Five Minute Friday :: Sight
There's physical eyesight, there's insight, and there's a kind of vision beyond conventional ways of seeing. Regarding the eyes many of us thankfully have to see with, a few years ago during a spate of local temblors, southern California Earthquake Lady and composer Lucy Jones reminded everyone to keep your eyeglasses within easy reach beside your bed in case you needed to evacuate in the middle of the night. Because without vision you'll be lost.
Because without vision you'll be lost. The sight outside of everyday perception that lets us see beyond the mundane, that allows us to trust something better, bigger, more magical and kinder is possible. Vision that believes and acts upon the promise of scripture there's a new world coming. A world where wars have ended, everyone matters, and no one is hungry. Vision that claims us so we act upon God's call for justice and peace. Without that kind of vision the world is lost. Are you listening, are you seeing? Do you trust Isaiah's vision of swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks? Do you trust God's call and summons to you? Do you dream the vision will be fulfilled?
PS Regarding physical eyesight – with or without glasses or contacts – I really really enjoy taking pictures when I go places. (You can search this blog for my mostly photographic end of month rundowns.) However, with my hyperfocus on getting good shots I sometimes don't see the bigger picture. On that always there other hand, the intensity of my attempts to see often reveals details other people miss. And then when I look at the actual picture, I notice even more! How about you? What's your photographic vision? What's your vision for a redeemed world?
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The Broad Yoko Ono and MOCA
• In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCA
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Five Minute Friday :: Brief
The days and the summer nights
Berries from the brambles and the vines
Yearning for a future still not yet
Recalling how to dream…
• Five Minute Friday :: Brief Linkup
Let's go with brief in the sense of short. A brief meeting. A brief scripture commentary. A quick conversation. Kate wrote about the passage of time—that's something all of us know related to both loss and anticipation.
What more can I say? I fully trusted it was a brief intermission between the life I'd known and a similar life that soon would come by way. If you'd asked me then as in my grandma's expression "way back when," how would I have defined brief? That's easy! I'll quote what I said to a friend who since has gone on to glory. After she expressed concern about my future and wondered how it might happen in the wake of a string of unanticipated events I replied, "I'm not worried at all. Before I turn around – no, before I blink – my life will be full again."
Wrong!
My header collage is Dreams from Summer 2000. Twenty-six years ago. Not a brief stretch of time in any human's life. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd tell someone else in a similar situation.
As I've told people in person and online, I go through most days with a combination of optimism, hope, and denial. A facebook friend observed there's a fine line between hope and denial. Ya think so? And though I keep observing no one can change what they don't acknowledge, I don't admit to much of any loss or pain for even a brief moment.
I'd tell someone else to get mad. Feel the pain. Let the anger hurt the way it's supposed to. Those were serious betrayals. Add up the months and the years and the decades. List all of the lost expectations. Yearn again for a future still not yet. Put yourself back then and start over again. Amen? Amen!
Getty Center Gardens
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