Reality is what you can touch and smell. If it is not real, you should not trust it. Smart, savvy intelligent people with much more money than you live in the Real World. Good looking and sexy people everywhere secretly mock you when you fail to live in this Reality.
“Inedible Ink” means to me, that my words are not authoritative and not gospel, I might even be a bad example, the Edible Ink, therefore would be the Word of God made Flesh, made edible in the Eucharist.
Faith and her stupid little sister Hope are refuges from the Real World for thumb-sucking idiots and the naïve.
Blogging is like carrying a camera with you everywhere you go, it makes you frame and focus.
No victim: no wrongdoing. There is no ultimate right and wrong, only competing oppressions, victimizations, marginalizations, torts, and violations of rights.
After the Blasphemous Chat Transcript, I set out to atone. I thought I’d review Mark P. Shea’s This Is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers The Real Presence
It’s a book about the real presence of Christ in the eucharist, the Catholic doctrine that I handled with possibly too much levity in the previously mentioned chat transcript.
I thought I’d start by finding the verse that is the source of the title “This Is My Body”. I clicked through the 6th chapter of John, no luck, hmmm, I thought it was in there.
I did a search on Blue Letter Bible… THIS IS MY BODY
It’s not in the Gospel of John, it is in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:
Mat 26:26
Mar 14:22
Luk 22:19
1 Cr 11:24
Then, John’s gospel (Jhn 6:51) says this: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
The latest of the Gospel writers, John might have thought his predecessors were wording it a little too easily with “my body” and he uses “my flesh”.
Book review: Proceed with caution, the truth can be very uncomfortable.
Shea makes the scriptural position clear, mostly by getting out of the way. He tells bits of his own story, it’s enough to help without distracting. He organizes and illuminates, but just enough to connect the dots present in scripture.
The weight of the implications in this 2 oz. book are burden enough to bend even the strongest at the knee.
I used to tell my Grandma that I wasn’t going to worry about her varied aches and pains while she was still winning at the bridge table. Even though she was in her nineties and every phone call included talk of ailments and or death, she was still fleecing her friends and neighbors at the card table.
About six months ago she stopped playing bridge. Earlier this month she passed away.
Before the memorial service one of Grandma’s friends pressed four dollars into my aunt Nancy’s hand. Nancy started to direct her to the memorial scholarship fund but was interrupted.
“Oh, I know all about that. This is Marion’s share of the football pool.”
Lizzie asked John: “Bubby, when you grow up and learn to talk, would you tell us the story of going for a walk without us?”
In case he’s forgotten by then, we think (for we do not know) we think it goes about like this:
Perhaps because the lawn waterers went off and gave him a fully dressed shower in the yard, or the sandbox, or perhaps because of some secret grand scheme, or perhaps on a whim, John let himself out of the backyard last week.
This required the two-year-old to defeat two gates. One, a folding kid-gate, is placed to keep him from wandering the west alley. Like the lock that keeps an honest man honest, a kid gate keeps an honest kid in the backyard. This gate succumbed to sheer force. I’ve seen him throw himself at it like a cornerback hits a tackling dummy. Properly installed, a brand new gate will hold up for no more than two or three of the more serious of these attacks. Knock it down and walk right over it. The second gate is a heavy latching monster that we really were counting on to keep him enclosed. The meter-reader has complained that he could not get it open. More recently it seems possible that the meter reader could not get it to latch closed. If this gate was latched, John would have had better luck climbing over it, so we’ll guess it was left closed but unlatched by a visitor.
Past the second gate, he’s in the front yard, or rather, the front yards, hundreds of thousands of front yards interconnected by miles of sidewalk and street.
Where were the guardians? I was at work, his mom was sleeping after a nightshift and his ’sitter was more concerned with the baby brother and accustomed to his spending considerable stretches of time hard at work in the backyard. We do not know how long he was gone or how long he was out of sight. That’s just the way these things are.
When John learns to talk he will tell us what he thought upon reaching the sidewalk, probably that he knew where he was headed and was undaunted.
He reached the sidewalk and turned west. As far as I know, no one saw his westward trek. If they did I’ll… well, they didn’t.
Another presumption that we will have to live with until he learns to tell his own story is that he went up most of the driveways and across the yards investigating all the front doors and landscaping features. (This is the other possibility for his being wet at the end of the adventure, someone else’s irrigation might have gotten him.) This is the way he tries to go for walks when he is in the company of adults.
He went one block west and crossed the street.
From here, we have a phone call and a report by the neighbor who helped him get home.
Our neighbor was on her front walk with a visitor who had just arrived. She noted the little boy in the garage across the street. The garage across from her belongs to a man who lives alone. She mentioned the boy to her visitor, who replied: “Oh, He’s not yours?, he just came out of your garage.” (Notice that this person allowed a two-year-old to cross the street alone.)
The lady from our side of the street picked him up. The across-the-street neighbor called our house to arrange for company on his walk home. He called to say “I think I have your son.” He did not know John, or us, or our phone number. He got the number off the dog’s collar.
The dog never left his side.
Note to Child Protective Services: This is all fiction.
The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, CA., home to the 3/4 Marines, is about fifty miles, and a world away, from the PGA Bob Hope Chrysler Classic at the Marriott Vacation Club in Palm Springs, CA.
Looks like the two camps had a neighborly little get-together.
thedesertsun.com | Marines honored at Bob Hope Classic
The Desert Sun
January 21, 2006
Bob Hope would have been proud.The late, legendary star and Palm Springs resident was renowned for entertaining U.S. troops through four wars and six decades. On Friday, his namesake PGA golf tournament, the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, continued the tradition.
Some 80 U.S. Marines and their families stationed in Twentynine Palms were special guests of the tournament and corporate sponsor Marriott Vacation Club International.
The Marines watched a who’s-who of professional golfers from a skybox suite overlooking the lakeside 18th green of the Classic Club, feted with food, drink and all of the amenities.
Many of the Marines are home from tours in Iraq. Many others are scheduled to go later this year. But on Friday, they put that aside and enjoyed themselves, Sgt. Maj. James Ricker said.
“It’s just a great way for them to kick back and relax for a day,” he said. “It means a lot to the Marines to know how much the desert community supports them.”
Cpl. Brian Gilmore of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines finished his third tour in Iraq on July 31.
Transitioning from the fighting in places such as Fallujah and Baghdad to life back home wasn’t easy at first, he said. In Iraq, Gilmore spent every day for months on constant alert, he said, watching for insurgents trying to kill him.
“You get home that first day and you realize you’re still doing it,” he said. “You think, ‘I don’t have to do this anymore.’ It takes weeks to adjust.”
It’s been a while since I bothered with webby Wednesdays, but I wanted to share these two:
GE has a web-based, multi-user whiteboard that looks like this:
Invite friends and colleagues around the world to pick up a marker and doodle along with you. It’s a nice companion to a conference call. Lots of drawing and sharing features. FREE.
Writely is a web based word processor. I’ve only used it briefly, but it appears to have all the MS Word features that get any attention from me. If you’ve ever tried to collaborate on a document using the markup-cut-paste-and-pass method you’ll appreciate that Writely has it figured out. Feature rich. FREE.
