the sounds of silence

maybe the reason that this song resonates so much is that the people who wrote it were New Yorkers.

There is no silence here. Instead of Oxygen bars there should be little places where for $5 you could just have 15 minutes of silence, pure and complete. Because there is no time at which this city even approaches silence, it’s never even quiet here.

How can you hear the Word? How can you listen for the spirit above the honking of horns and the rumbling of buses and those are just the ones that are obvious, the rumbling of the subway is so far to the background that you’d have to eliminate 90% of the other noise to even hear it, but it destroys the very possibility of quiet.

OTOH, there is a lot of cool stuff in this city. Caitlyn wants to see the statue of Liberty so we’re taking the Staten island ferry today, checking out the place where Debbie gets her flute work done and maybe have a reuben in this nice deli across the street, and then szechuan in Queens this evening with friends. All in all not bad, but this place really never sleeps . . .

Streetcorner Preacher

I remember a time when, in seminary, we had gone as a group with a professor as a facilitator into the various contexts to which we had each been assigned as students. Debbie and I lived in a challenging neighborhood called West Phillips in Minneapolis and our contextual “cluster” visited with a pastor not four blocks down the street.

We were discussing the needs of the neighborhood and where the church might fit in and somewhere in the midst of the conversation (more of a lecture really) this pastor mentioned that he had some competition in the neighborhood, (not meaning the church where I was assigned, less than a quarter-mile away, we were no competition) a street preacher named Brother Bill who preached up and down the block.

He then sighed and shook his head and said that it wasn’t really much competition, Bill didn’t have a church to call home so there wasn’t much to his preaching.

I don’t think that it occurred to me at the time what an incredibly pompous thought that this was. Looking back I have a hard time not thinking of this devoted servant of Christ as a sadly insulated soul, stuck thinking that the trappings contribute to the Word, or that their message is not valid without them. While I understand that given a replay of his comment he would deny that this was the gist of the comment, you still cannot get it back into the tube, so to speak, like toothpaste. It is the defining thing that has formed my thinking of this man and I wonder how many stupid, conceited, self-righteous things I have said that have formed the central nugget of peoples’ thoughts about me?

In any case, Debbie heard Amos Lee on NPR the other day and heard him perform his song Street Corner Preacher and it made me think of that. Nothing special, just wondering how people would react.

garden update

so we’re going on vacation in a couple of weeks, apparently just as the garden begins producing in earnest. We’ve gotten some radishes and some sugar snap peas, but now we’re getting squash, and tomatoes will be ripening soon, and tomatillos will be coming along (Yayyyy! Salsa!) it is an amazing thing to walk into every day.

here’s a peek:

quite a bit of growth since the past picture, I’m actually cutting two tomato plants back so they don’t tip over.

and these cute little variegated eggplant, aren’t they adorable?

and little, tender Mediterranean cucumbers, so tender you don’t have to peel them.

It is a wonder and a blessing amidst my fatigue and everything else, to have this little patch of wonderful to retreat to, to fuss over, to feast from.

Man is it smoky!

Caitlyn and I foolishly drove up north to try and get away from the smoke this past Monday (23rd) because the only fires on the news were in Napa and Santa Cruz.

What they didn’t mention was that there were over 100 fires in Mendocino County and so instead of driving into the clear blue sky we were driving into a scene from The Fog.

so we went, and later found out that the place we were going (Caitlyn has a favorite place to get her Carhartt overalls) was on the border of the areas being evacuated in front of the fires.

All in all a failure if the end of the adventure was to avoid the smoke, but a pleasant day with my daughter. And what could be better than that?

Each day is a blessing beyond compare. let us stop trying to compare them with other things.