Thought, mirth and a change of pace

OK… Jake the Worldstopper has come to the rescue again. It is August, it is hotter than hell here where the bay meets the ocean, things have not slowed down for the summer, the pot is stirring out there in Anglican land and I have to preach the next four Sundays. My mind is fogged and palette dry. Too much going on, and not enough thought, mirth and other pacing. So Jake suggests a visit to the Allan Watts Theater. It is great…go visit. It will cleanse the palette.

Then The Episcopal Café caught this, on this week's Anglicans Online essay: the famous transmogrification of liturgical practice in what "what John Keble was pleased to call 'spontaneous evolution' in liturgy." This bit of mirth-full writing is tender, as are most AO essays, but also thoughtfully paced. It all involves replacing water and the spiritual cleansing with Purell and real kill-them-dead physical cleaning right there in the middle of the Liturgy.

And then I had a chance to wander over to a real change of pace – to a YouTube presentation of an artist friend of my, Norman Sasowsk on the subject "Pygmalion, The Artist's Story." Here thought and mirth were joined with the pain of real days and real struggles to make sense of vision. When I got finished watching I remembered just why it is that we go on trying to get it right.

None of these have much to do with Anglican land matters, but in very different ways they all have to do with the quirkiness of the human condition – we are all mixed in the presentation of self. We are both "Prickles and Goo." We are always getting spiritual and physical agendas mixed up. We are all trying to make sense of visions, artistic and otherwise.

Enjoy… and then back to work.