Autumn 2016 Currents

Clockwise:
• Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Wilshire/ Vermont
• Milkweed window boxes on Santa Monica Blvd, West LA
• Grand Park DTLA
• NoHo Metro Red Line station art
music
What's more fun than making playlists and maybe even blogging them? Very slightly expanded, here's my Rev Gal Blog Pals Friday 5 for today:

1. group 1 because I love Bruce Hornsby's piano playing and for other reasons: Mandolin Rain; End of the Innocence; Down the Road Tonight; Look Out Any Window, Look Out Any Open Door; The River Runs Low; Every Little Kiss – "When the day goes down on Water Town." I lived in Watertown.

2. because I can't not pick up on the Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, S&G bandwagon: April, Come She Will; For All I Know; Bridge Over Troubled Water; Mother & Child Reunion; the Graceland title track of the Graceland soundtrack; Born at the Right Time from Rhythm of the Saints

3. Huey Lewis' Best for me: Power of Love; I Want a New Drug; If This Is It

4. Mary Chapin Carpenter because she's about the middle america of my mother's side of my family of origin; because we're exact contemporaries; because I love the wistfulness and realness of her music and her style. First songs that come to mind: Almost Home; Come On, Come On; Stones in the Road; I Am A Town; Something of a Dreamer; Quittin' Time; Only a Dream

5. Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 7. What? No Fifth of Beethoven? No Ninth? I'll leave it where I left it.

work
Still mostly appreciating the variety, feeling of competence, and sense of self that comes with freelance designing.

bebidas
Before moving to this section of town I'd enjoyed a large with whole milk Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Hazelnut Ice Blended most Saturday afternoons while I worked through final notes for my Sunday morning class. No nearby Coffee Bean or Starbucks, so I've been rotating mocha, caramel, and chocolate chip McDonald's frappes. Or a latte on a chilly day. Both options are very very good!

what is there to wear?
Preppy shorts and shirts, dresses, huaraches, and flip flops. Two brand new pairs of combat boots – brown and black – all ready to wear with jeans or dresses in the cooler months. A surprise find of black canvas high tops in my size when I wanted them. Good price, too!

theology
Continuing my Sunday morning teaching gig at Church in West LA. Loving Green Faith Team meetings at the judicatory offices and excited about getting involved in future creation care activities.

comida rapida
Here in the #SFV I've been lunching on subway samwiches a lot; Special K cereal with bananas or other fruit for breakfast. I've discovered Japanese-American Yoshinoya with only about a dozen menu items, all of them in plain, simple, semi-industrial (autocorrect said "neutral" and that's not far wrong) style retail restaurant settings, not overly expensive, and a change from the usual mexican, burger, or other.

hangouts
Wilshire & Western near Koreatown; Panorama Mall; big open air shopping center The Plant mall that used to be an actual GM assembly plant; #DTLA around Grand Park and Hill

re-creation
Still more digital versions of more of my analog art. Stay tuned for more additions to this blog's art page!

worship
Every Sunday at Church in West LA with SS before, brunch after; as many weekday 12:10 masses as possible at #DTLA cathedral.

wishlist
I still hanker after relocating to Detroit, still imagine i couldn't cut the winters, but locations like Sepulveda and Roscoe are gritty enough, sufficiently grungy maybe I can have it all where I already am. Most major wish? Longer term housing.

Green Team Talk: Friday of Pentecost 18

January 2017: I've tried to reconstruct my talk from my scant notes that were all I needed at the time... and I'm publishing this on the actual Friday of Pentecost 18 date.

Isaiah 25:6-9

⁶On this mountain shall the Lord of hosts
make unto all peoples
a feast of fat things
a feast of vines on the lees
of fat things full of marrow
of vines on the lees well refined

⁷God will swallow up the covering that hovers over everyone
the veil stretched over all nations

⁸God will swallow up death forever
God will wipe away all tears
God will remove the remove the reproach of the people from the earth
For the Lord has spoken

⁹On that day we will say,

"This is our God we've waited for
so he could save us.
"This is the Lord we've waited for.
"Let's rejoice in God's salvation."

This passage the canon places in First Isaiah is the appointed text for Easter Evening RCL years A, B and C. We find it amidst writings mostly from Isaiah of Jerusalem, yet it's probably at least a century afterwards—with its sense of optimism, probably exilic or later. This is the Hebrew scripture reading for Easter evening, but six months have gone by since we celebrated the Day of Resurrection, over four months since the Great Fifty Days concluded.

Here in the northern hemisphere the wheel of the year has been in meteorological autumn for close to a month; in a couple days we'll be in astronomical fall. Ripening root crops, leaves falling from trees then decaying on the ground, shorter days, longer nights, all remind us of God's gift of the agricultural cycle, God's gift of land. These natural events in the browning time of autumn anticipate the arrival of the apparently quiet, still, and silent season of winter that in many respects is similar to the stillness and quiet near-silence of the surface of the desertscape.

These imaginative words we find in First Isaiah remind us the God of Israel is God of all people, God on the side of everyone. They promise God will swallow up death and the shroud of death – a veil that hides the light of life, anything that lessens our joy – into God's own being. God will obliterate tears of grief; God will prepare and serve an amazing spread of a covenant meal shared by God and people. That eschatological feast – as we called our extravagant potlucks in divinity school – will be God's sign that death and dying are no more!

But six months have gone by since we celebrated the Day of Resurrection 2016, over four months since the conclusion of the Great Fifty Days. We look around us and still see, still experience hatred, poverty and injustice. Illness, death, and dying. Grief. Tears. We know the agricultural seasons' periods of tilling, planting, growing, and harvest keep cycling continuously, yet our theology tells us how Easter, the event of Jesus Christ's resurrection, that eighth day that's also the first day of the new creation, marked the end of death and dying, concluded ongoing cycles of poverty, illness, injustice.

These promises we find in First Isaiah describe God's action of new birth from death, the start of the new creation. Despite the dawn of the new creation on the day of resurrection two thousand years ago, that renewed, restored natural creation and righteous society has only begun, still waits for us to help finish it as God's hands doing God's work. Theology of the cross emphasizes Saturday, the interstitial time of winter-like quiet when apparently nothing happens yet everything happens, yet God calls us to live as people of the cross who now are fully alive, resurrected, and redeemed. The third day aligns and unites nature and history; filled with the Spirit of the Day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Easter, we become God's hands, God's voices, agents of God's justice, inclusion and freedom for all! Let's all follow Jesus into the resurrection, into the next six months!

Can I get an "Amen"?!

Five Minute Friday: Path

Kate Motaung's hosts this week's Five Minute Friday with path as our prompt.



"Caminante, no hay camino; se hace camino al andar."
"Traveler, there is no road; one makes the way by walking."

Antonio Machado, Cantares



Taking 5 minutes to write...

En español, "camino" can be road, street, way, or path. The university city rowhouse where I lived was on Camino Raposa. Camino can refer to our journey, our road through life. As you may notice from the quote, Spanish derives the noun for traveler, walker, hiker, wayfarer from caminar. I've long had this famous quote from Antonio Machado as part of my blog footer! Then only yesterday evening, I did a meme via Facebook from a non-facebook site that informed me my life motto was "A path emerges when we walk on it."

To carry that idea further, when we walk on an existing sidewalk or trail, when we drive on a paved surface, our shoes, boots, sandals, or tires change what's there, alter it for future travelers, so in some cases the next person or vehicle, or the 2,000^th or 51,000^st traveler encounters a different surface that may be harder to tread or maybe smoother and easier. When someone does a job or task, they can make everything easier for those who follow, or they can make it harder, inadvertently or sometimes intentionally. Known as "paving the way!"

First Time Ever Friday 5

First Time Ever Friday 5 on Rev Gal Blog Pals central.

Did I need to play today because it's the last Friday Five on the Rev Gals main site rather than on their Facebook? I usually enjoy significant lasts and important firsts, so that might be. Or do I need a reason? That also could be the case. After mentioning how parents often record their kids' first of almost everything, our host 3dogmom said, "but as we get older we often just absorb 'first times' into the rhythm of our days." I'd never seriously considered that, although I know my list of four firsts for today excited me when they happened. Most likely I played today because 3dogmom asked for "...some firsts that you recall, experienced recently, or anticipate?" Anticipate totally hooked me in... yes. it did.

Four recollections:



1.
This one's my classic endlessly looping 8-track tape, so it's probably already on this blog a few times: my first solo flight as a passenger in eighth grade, to Detroit Metro/ DTW.

2.
Not far behind: first MLB baseball game ever on that visit to aunt, uncle and cousins: Detroit Tigers at the old Tiger Stadium. Don't remember who they played, but Tigers won.

Thanks to google image search for Tiger Stadium photos with legal reuse rights from 2006 and 2011.



3.
The first time I took communion in a Roman Catholic Church—the Cathedral of St Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands. That morning we sang a hymn to the tune of Kremser, so beloved in the USA as "We Gather Together," a special favorite in churches throughout New England. Just this noon I received HC at the local RC cathedral for the sixth time in fifteen days, countless times over the past six months.

4.
For a pair of simple yet unforgettable teen milestones, the first time my vehicle was first in line at a red light, and the first time I passed another vehicle. Unlike (probably) most people, I don't remember the first time I drove all by myself.

5.
Anticipation! is making me late, is keeping me waiting...
Because I've no idea what brand new first, or second first – in the wise experience of Christina Rasmussen's grief website – God has in store for me, or when.