A Litte Mercy Now and Then. 2000 Blog Entries and Forward.

I'm in Oakland, California in a Live/Work studio and apartment, visiting my daughter and her loved one.

A friend sent me a text message yesterday. It read, "Traveling Mercies." 

"Traveling Mercies." I don't know where the phrase came from, but I know mercies, traveling and otherwise.

Thankfulness expressed...Mercy, Merci.

So I am thankful for all sorts of things these days related to travel, to life, to family, church, community, and on and on.

Among the things I give thanks for is the opportunity to think about, write about, and otherwise consider the life of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, and whatever else strikes my fancy.  

Here in blogland, on Preludium, I have now written 2000 entries, some of them no more than a paragraph pointing the readers of Preludium to some bit of the internet flotsam and jetsam that is of interest, some of them long essays either by me or by people I admire, but most are about Anglican land the years since Lambeth 1998.  

2000 entries since January 2005. As near as I can figure it, that means writing about one entry every 1.4 days.  

Under the heading of mercies, this effort involves I suppose "blogging mercies." 

I have almost quit several times, but have kept on keeping on, returning again and again to the Church local and global, to life in The Episcopal Church in particular, and its work in the wider Communion.  

I have written under constraint at times, knowing people in what is called "high places" and or being privy to conversations in Executive Council and elsewhere that were considered confidential.  

At other times there have been no constraints except those of what I suppose might be called the constraints of amistad, of friendship.  Among the mercies received have been the friendships that work across various boundaries, and I have worked at keeping those friendships (sometimes less successfully than others.)

So here I am seven years and seven months since starting Preludium, muttering on.  When I started doing this there were few bloggers from what might be called the progressive crowd. The biggies were of course Louie Crew with his site which was not a blog but a whole website of wonderful information and essays, and Fr. Jake, who on occasion shook the world, and Thinking Anglicans. Now with such wonderful writers as found on Episcopal Cafe, folk like Susan Russell, Elizabeth Kaeton, Mad Priest, the Pluralist who speaks, Counterlight, Eruptions of the Volcano, In a Godward Direction, and some good watchdogs on Anglican matters, and wonderful more spiritual offerings, there is less need for the mutterings at Preludium.

But then I think of mercy, mercies, thanksgiving, thanks - taking.  We all could use a little mercy now. So Preludium continues because I could use a little mercy now, particularly the mercy that comes from attending to the strange workings of the Church I serve and the people I love who are in it, or have left it, or have run away in disgust from it all.  It is time for traveling mercies as we move on to whatever God has next in mind for us. 

In all of it, we need, as Mary Gautier sings, a little mercy now.  Here she is singing. Mercy, it is wonderful.