Faith Is Cold as Ice

I, along with everyone else, have been a little distracted this year so I had to look it up but as always it really did happen. 

On March 19, the Feast of Saint Joseph, as they always do, the swallows came back to Capistrano. From everything I've ever read, they've been doing this for quite a bit longer than it took us hairless apes to even notice. I refuse to buy in on the party line, 'no one knows why or how they know...' because I sincerely believe someone does and chooses to NOT tell the rest of us.

I was thinking of those swallows wondering about the bees who show up every spring to live under the wooden banisters of our front porch. I'm not sure if a bumble-bee is a real type of bee or just a made-up name but that's the way they look. They're black, with what looks like a yellow pullover on and they hover about eight to ten inches off the steps when you come out on the porch and dart away, right after they zoom in, directly at you (as if scanning their sector).

I'm not an entomologist, but I find it interesting they seem to drill or eat through the underside of the railing, leaving little piles of sawdust as they go and live, I have always assumed, snug in the holes they create. At the end of the season, they disappear as suddenly as they arrived, and Sigrid, my wife, goes out with wood patching goop and fills in their holes which then dries and hardens and in the next spring the cycle begins again.

We have no idea what the bees are doing-aside from playing what looks like chicken with one another on the porch during most of the daylight hours. Sometimes, someone going up or down the three stairs from the porch to the walkway that leads to the sidewalk will attract their interest and they'll hover practically in the person's face, undaunted by waving hands (even if they get hit) until curiosity sated, they go back to Ollie, Ollie Oxen Free or whatever they're playing.

I'm not sure that I'm not just a little jealous since they don't spend anywhere near as much of their time pondering me as I do them. They seem to be untroubled by questions such as Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones. Why does it happen? Because it happens. Roll the bones.

-bill kenny

Jokerman Dance to the Nightingale Tune

There is, preached Kohelet in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a season for every purpose it says in the Old Testament, seasons for everything and around the world today within the Christian faith we are within the Paschal Triduum. 

Monsignor Harding, wherever he is in all of eternity, would be wide-eyed with wonder that, of all that I have been given or taught, and of all that I have lost or had taken from me, that would be a term I would hold onto.

I know a lot of Christians who see the birth of Christ, Christmas, as the defining moment of their faith, and I guess if you work retail that's an attractive argument. As a child growing up in Holy Mother Church in the late Fifties and Sixties, I knew (and had plenty of nuns, Sister of Charity type, if I were to forget) for Catholics it was the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

I can still remember Sister Thomas Anne faintly smiling as she ticked off the three events on the fingers of her right hand: pinkie, ring finger and middle finger (how ironic is that? (I'm lying, third-graders had no concept of the significance of the middle finger not even Bobby D'Alonzo who was a pretty fast crowd all by himself)). 

She paused as she noted the similarity to the Holy Trinity, three persons in the One God. When I watched her do this same explanation, with the pregnant pause in the same place, complete with the slow smile of accidental recognition of her triad point for the next five years, there was still a sign, but the wonder was gone.

And yet, I suspect she, too, is smiling today. It is Good Friday, a day of such momentous import to so many disparate elements of our historical, philosophic and cultural identity where, no matter your belief, or disbelief, you can take solace from the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God who became the Son of Man and laid down His life. Even if you have hurts that can never heal, you can, if only for today, have hope, knowing there is a tomorrow.

-bill kenny

Today's Butt of Internet Jokes

Somedays I can do more than a little bit of drive-by snarkiness and still feel very good about myself despite my own lack of intelligence and ability (think Donald Jablone Trump but with my own hair, no tan, and normal-sized hands). 

This is probably very important for health-care professionals but that will not deter arrested adolescent development nitwits like me from giggling about it for hours and hours feeling very smug and sophisticated. Unless of course we ever are in need of the data such a research tool could provide and then we'll be smiling out of the other side of our faces.  

Perhaps I've made you now smile as well. 
See? We're about the same. I'm just sooner, that's all.
-bill kenny

Not Just a New Chapter, But a New Story

No man, I've heard it said, steps into the same river twice because both he and the river have changed. When, not if, this pandemic ends and we start returning to normal, let's agree that the normal to which we shall be returning will not be the one we had before this began.

For those who've been directly affected by COVID-19, that goes without saying, or should, but for all of us, from the sheltering in placers through the public health professionals who manned the barricades to those who stocked grocery store shelves, pumped gas and performed all the thousands of other tasks we never thought twice about in the "Before Pandemic" timeframe, the river of our lives Post Pandemic will, and must, flow differently. 

Chalk the Walk

Monday night's City Council meeting, with select alderman in council chambers, socially if not philosophically distanced from one another, while other council members were sheltering at home, was live on public access and on the city's website with citizens' comments via email (prior to the meeting) and telephone during the public comment portion. 

The City Manager's proposed budget was I suspect for nearly all of us the item of greatest interest and in light of the circumstances we find ourselves in, I'd suggest he was successful in his presentation. You can find all the budget information on the city's website. Let’s leave for another day the debates about line items and requested dollars. I'll return to that (that was a promise, not a threat), but not today.

Chalk the Walk

There were, as could/should be expected, some technical bumps along the way (after all the Wright Brothers didn't have beverage service or a movie on their first flight at Kitty Hawk) but everything starts somewhere and this was how we start to learn the language of how we may need to speak to one another not just about our next budget but all aspects of our community life together. 

Some of us I've encountered in recent days (it's hard to know who we are with the masks, scarves, and bandanas across our faces) seem to think we're in the midst of some kind of snow event and eventually, life goes back to the way it was (or the way we remember it was) before but I think that's not the lesson we should be taking away. 

Chalk the Walk

We pride ourselves on our inventiveness, adaptability, intelligence, agility, among other traits and it's those, along with perseverance, collaboration, and cooperation that will, I believe, allow us to emerge on the other side of this challenge, stronger and more able to continue to successfully define our future.    

National leaders have called what we now face 'the greatest challenge since Pearl Harbor and The Great Depression' but let me share some words President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his countrymen and women during The Great Depression. "Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. Yet ...(c)ompared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. This Nation asks for action, and action now... We must act and act quickly."

Chalk the Walk

Not talk; action. True then, and truer now. We need to realize we’re not starting a new chapter, but a new story.
-bill kenny

Just Add This to the Collection

It's entirely possible the only people who don't know Donald J. Trump is a talentless grifter with less intelligence, integrity, and scruples than God gave to a pile of dogshit are the ones who find it out.

Here's a recent bon mot that, twenty-four hours on, still has me shaking my head.

The light of which you speak, you tangerine-tinged Turd, is quite possibly nothing more than daylight peeking through the gap between your ears. As such, it fits nicely alongside some of your other timeless insights. 

Silence is a virtue, asshole. You should try it and soon.
-bill kenny 

Veni, Vinny, Vici

We've all heard the expression, "I had no shoes and felt sorry for myself until I met someone who had no feet." Thus endeth today's lesson.  

A visual metaphor and parable of and for our times
-bill kenny

Faith No More

A pre-COVID-19 memory.

As a child, this was a big deal Sunday in my house. And I have to be honest, I was almost a teen before I even fully grasped why--Palm Sunday was up there near, though not quite at, Christmas Mass and Easter, and when my first name still had a 'y' on the end of it, I never really followed the reasoning as to why. Behold the Man, indeed.

Palm Sunday always seemed to be the deceptive handshake. The New Testament has accounts of the triumphal entry of the Son of God into Jerusalem, being welcomed by those who (as John Lennon would offer later), were 'lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime' as part of the inevitability of a week that had Him crucified on Friday (a more excruciating way to die at the time was unknown) and resurrected on Sunday.

I never impressed any of the nuns at St. Peter's School (now called Saint Peter the Apostle I guess to distinguish him from the St. Peter who played shortstop for the Newark Bears in the middle seventies) in New Brunswick with my scholastic aptitude or ability to interpret scriptures (I was almost married myself before I caught on to the importance of 'for I know not any man' and Joseph not having Mary stoned and why) and yet I still experience a dryness in my mouth dreadful foreboding as the events of the Passion Week unfold.

I couldn't stop reading about it as a child and I couldn't look away. When Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber cashed in with Jesus Christ Superstar, if nothing else, they linked the inquisition of Christ forever in my mind with a jaunty little music hall number that I can hear even as I type this. Another reason I'm confident of my destination in the next life.

In years past, today would be a day for many to visit the church of their choice. Sidewalks would be crowded as families made their way to retrieve fronds of blessed palm (my mom's mother had a piece that never left its location, behind a framed black and white photo on the wall. Only now do I realize I have no idea of whom the picture was, nor any idea who I might ask). 

The blessed palm that doesn't end up scotch-taped to auto rear-view mirrors or suspended by a thumbtack alongside the front door would be collected after all the Masses today, at least in the Catholic Church of my youth, and then burned to become the ashes used on our foreheads for Ash Wednesday.

Intro ibo ad alteri Dei. I think I still know the words and know that I always will. I once had the faith to believe in their meaning but I lost that, or perhaps threw it over the side to help speed me on my way, and then I lost my way. I have the charts and maps spread out on the floor, but it's starless and bible black and I can't find my way home.

-bill kenny