howdy today

It’s a cold morning on the hill. the grey sky above the bare trees. I light a candle for the world and smell the burning wax. Ann is pouring coffee in the other room and the sound of the metal spoon on the cup clicking enamel does for the morning bell to prayer.

murder in connecticut

It felt like a punch in the stomach. Ann texted me that there was a shooting in a school in Connecticut. I know I don’t do well with such events on an emotional level so I kept away from the internet for the rest of the day. When my Kensington kids left to return to their bad neighborhood homes where kids die one or two at time in great and gradual numbers and few people much care, I got on Yahoo just to look what happened. 26 kids and adults at an elementary school were dead at the hands of a 24 year old who was having an apparently very bad day. I talked to Juan the janitor by the door to the school yard where our mostly brown and poor kids ran around in ignorant Friday freedom. Juan is a grandfather who lets me practice Spanish on him and we talked about the kind of world where such things can happen and do. He asked me why and I said, “Diablo.” because that word seemed to fit best. Juan looked as sad and sick as I felt. I drove west on the expressway and turnpike toward the little house in the woods where there is no TV and not very good radio. The car radio talked about the motivation of the shooter and the need for gun laws and the president made a speech that made less sense to me than the conversation between two tired men in a school yard of happy oblivious kids. The traffic was slow and I turned off the radio. The picture of a grandfather from Connecticut with his white hair against the window of his SUV in the parking lot of the shot up school. I prayed. You send your 6 year old to school a couple of weeks before Christmas and some guy with a gun ends your world, though beyond the end of your world a man drives slowly with slightly greater patience than usual praying toward his house. Life continues. It offends me that a guy with a nice car should have to suffer such sorrow but I don’t know what to do about it beyond my bewildered prayers. I lost a child to death a long a time ago and there was no way then it would ever make sense but as time passed it either began to make sense somewhat or no longer had to. It can’t make sense but at some point it must.

reading on the end of the cities of the plain

The Lord is gracious and merciful. Psalm 103. Grace is a reward unearned; mercy is punishment earned but not inflicted. I read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah this morning and wonder how far I am down the path to damnation and fire from the sky. Did God’s mercy fail when fire came down from the sky on the cities of the plain? He warned Lot to get out but when his wife looked back she turned to a pillar of salt. He fled to cave in the hills to live with his two daughters whose husbands had ignored Lot’s warning to flee the doomed cities. His daughters got him drunk and had sex with him so they could keep his seed going and the tribes of Moab and Ammon descended from his incestuous drunkenness. Were Lot and his seductive daughters any much better than the Sodomites who died in the fire? The almighty Lord sent the city of Nineveh one unwilling prophet, Jonah, to warn them of their doom and to call for repentance. He did and they did. To Sodom and Gomorrah he sent two angels to warn one man and his family to get out of town before the end. They blinded the gang of rapists who wanted to rape them then killed everyone in the city except to future drunken incestuous father. The message is that God isn’t limited to working with perfect people because if he were, not much work would ever get done. Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh and Lot screwed his own daughters in a drunken haze. I have struggled against the same character defects for my entire life without much progress toward their eradication beyond not using drugs or booze. Anger, lust, sloth, and an overactive mind seem to be the biggest problems that still hold me in their thrall despite my own best efforts at progress in love and purity.