I have come lately to suspect that I have largely wasted my fiftieth year. Here could commence a tedious recitation of the ways this might be so. We are in a pandemic and I have found it paralyzing. My intellect stalls in even routine work; my body is a wreck from months of accumulated stress; my vocabulary is thin because I talk to few and rarely; and my will to make any of these matters otherwise abandoned me some months ago. These, I expect, are just the stuff of life as we mus...| Pentecost Eye
“The Lord has commanded us to lay by and store.” That’s what Orville Hall would always say on Sunday just ahead of passing round the collection plate at church. His words were, ever and always, just this and just the same. I was but a child then and puzzled at why God’s wanting us to lay by and store should be remarked right as we were about to give up some of what we’d laid by to the church. It seemed to me that if we took this command seriously, we might want to give a...| Pentecost Eye
When I am working on the farm, I think of the ancient Confucians more than I ought. In early Confucian tradition, it was understood that the body and life you have is a gift from your ancestors. This of course explains much where Confucian expectations of filial virtue are concerned. After all, having a life and body constitute a significant sort of debt to discharge. Filial deference and gratitude seem a tricky business to me – hard to do when you’re the younger, nice to get ...| Pentecost Eye
May 28, 2020| Pentecost Eye
I grew up assuming my family was normal, that what we did was just the stuff that people in general do. But now I am old enough and traveled enough to realize that some of what I once considered “ordinary human behavior” belongs instead to family idiosyncrasy. It turns out that my kin did not always initiate me into standard human behavior, but something else. Some of what we do is just our own devising, the result of how our collective idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and even br...| Pentecost Eye
I grew up assuming my family was normal, that what we did was just the stuff that people in general do. But now I am old enough...| pentecosteye.blogspot.com