Monday, June 19, 2017

My Father, the Vegetable Farmer


My Father, the Vegetable Farmer

            Come April my dad was out in the back yard turning over his vegetable plot, a perfect rectangle positioned between the patio and the garage. The hose to the well he had drilled was conveniently hanging just outside the garage, and he was religious about proper watering.  His lawn chairs were positioned just inside the open garage door where he sat to rest, to smoke, to savor a bit of Four Roses, and to “receive.” Once that garage door went up in the early morning, everyone in the neighborhood knew that Doc “was receiving.”
            Geezers, young fellows, and little children came and went all day long. They got cokes and watermelon and cheese if they liked but mainly talk. I believe they came for the talk. Once Dad was rested enough to get back to his garden, often his visitors did not leave. They did not even get up from their lawn chairs. They watched Doc till or weed or water. The little kids, of course, wanted to help, to dig with the shovel or set the seedlings in. The men wanted to advise or compliment as appropriate.
Sometimes Dad and another fellow would disappear for an hour or so and come back with fertilizer. When the circus was in town, they would go and ask for elephant manure and bring home buckets-full. Dad would find someone in the family, usually me it seemed, and thrust the bucket in my face. “Smell that. We’ll have some good tomatoes this year.” He loved to watch me cringe and turn my head. What would he do now that Ringling Brother got rid of their elephants and then even had to close down.
            Dad loved dirt and talked about his dirt all season long. He was so proud of the soil he gave to his vegetables to grow in. It was black and loamy and luscious. All summer long it fed his tomatoes and peppers, summer squash and zucchini, cucumbers and occasional radishes. And all summer long they fed us.
What he did not grow, he bought from the farmers’ market. Our farmers’ market back then was not the sophisticated affair that many farmers’ markets are today. A permanent semi-circle of shelters, a roof and a table, gave the sellers some shade through their hot day. All of the sellers were very small farmers, some even backyard farmers, who came to town each Saturday.
            Dad was a frequent enough customer that folks knew him, and he knew which growers had the best value for the price in his opinion. They did not know each other’s names, but they spoke with the familiarity of people who get together once a week. At the farmer’s market, Dad wanted corn, kale, collards, or mustard greens, and watermelon or peaches.
            Summer was tomato sandwiches on lightly toasted white bread with salt, pepper and mayonnaise for lunch, cucumbers every night for supper, summer squash fried down with heaps of onions and lots of black pepper every Sunday dinner along with some of those greens from the market and maybe a peach cobbler for dessert. We enjoyed zucchini bread when Mama felt like baking, which was often. And there was watermelon in the backyard, cold from the refrigerator Dad kept in the garage for entertaining when he was receiving.
            We did eat protein. But in the summer meat seemed merely a compliment to the vegetables, except for pork. Dad would drive into North Carolina with a friend for pork that the farmer made available from the poor pig on that very day. And Dad fished for spot and croaker or bought them from the men who brought their boats in at Harrison’s Pier. Summer pork and fish out of the bay have almost nothing in common with a pot roast in winter. They are more like ripe tomatoes fresh off the vine.
            Mama took care of the flowers and of food in the winter. But food in the summer was my Dad’s. It was not his responsibility but his great enthusiasm. When spring arrived, he donned his warm-weather uniform, a horizontal striped tank top, plaid Bermuda shorts, and bare feet. He died on April 23, 1991. It was sudden and merciful. His heart played out as he tried to rise from his bed, and he was gone. He had already turned over his vegetable garden. I flew down to Norfolk that morning when I got the call, cried with and tried to console my mother, took care of some of the funeral business, what Emily Dickenson calls “the solemnest of industries enacted upon earth,” and then went out back for a quiet moment alone. There in the soft dirt of Dad’s vegetable garden, in his beloved dirt, were his footprints, probably from the day before. Mama set in the plants he had bought and bravely harvested his vegetables that year.


Jenny Sullivan
Father's Day 2017


Saturday, June 10, 2017

Beachhead Established in Europe by Orthodox Anglicans

BEACHHEAD ESTABLISHED IN EUROPE BY ORTHODOX ANGLICANS

Author: Woody Norman

EDINBURGH, Scotland, U.K., June, 2017 – Within sight of the mouth of the Firth of Forth, an archbishop of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) introduced the conference's to-be-consecrated missionary bishop to Europe.

The Most Reverend Doctor Foley Beach, Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) made the announcement on June 8, 2017 following a vote by the Scottish Episcopal Church changing its canons allowing for same-sex “marriage.”

Canon Andy Lines will be Gafcon’s missionary bishop to Europe. The office - a new "North See" - provides Scottish Episcopalians who faithfully uphold traditional and biblical marriage episcopal oversight.  

Just days earlier the globe-trotting archbishop attended the convocation of the FreeChurch of England (FCE), an ecclesial body associated neither with the Church of England nor with the Anglican Communion. Beach's close proximity to Scotland at that time was not coincidental.

THE ARCHBISHOP
The young North American archbishop has been, since his election by fellow ACNA bishops, working diligently to shore-up orthodoxy around the world and not just within Anglicanism.

Foley Beach has developed a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, especially a good relationship with the Metropolitan Hilarion of the Department of External Church Relations. Beach has also entered into talks with American ecclesiastical organizations such as the LutheranChurch-Missouri Synod. ACNA is in communion with the North American LutheranChurch (NALC).

Since its founding in 2008 by Gafcon, the Anglican Church in North America has been planting churches across the United States and Canada. Indeed, there are many “store-front” churches within ACNA. One can argue that ACNA exercises The Benedict Option.

CANONICAL RESIDENCE
What might have gone unnoticed in the announcement by Archbishop Beach of bishop-elect Andy Lines is that Lines’s canonical residence has already been moved from a diocese in a South American Anglican province to ACNA’s Anglican Diocese of the South, Foley Beach’s diocese.

To be sure Archbishop Foley Beach does not act independently of his Gafcon brother Primates, however, he appears to have been charged by them with pulling together any and all remnants of orthodox Christianity throughout the world. Beach is a person with strong, biblical convictions and has continually demonstrated his highly developed organizational skill as "captain of the ship."


Placing Canon Lines within Beach’s own Anglican Diocese of the South promises, to a degree, an implementation of orthodox Anglicanism - under Beach's oversight - throughout a dying Europe.

Canon Andy Lines will be consecrated a bishop on June 30, 2017 at the ACNA’s triennial assembly at Wheaton College in Illinois.


Worth Earlwood "Woody" Norman, Jr. is a biographer , historian, poet, and publisher. A community chaplain, Norman is a deacon in ACNA's Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy and is an assisting clergy at the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Pelham, Alabama.



Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Separation

Separation

Forty years my acquisition
Of books have numbered
In the hundreds. A new condition
Now tasks me; I’m encumbered.

All or some?
Which shall I pack?
This or that one?
It’s a huge stack!

It’s not the amount
Of books to flee
Into boxes that’s tantamount.
It’s their departure from me.

But, no. The change in my reality
Is actually my own departure, my leaving.
Not to depart is my plea.
Packing, the gateway, began my grieving.

I must now stop
And catch my breath.
On the holy hill atop
I should not fear death.

Endings, for sure,
Come closer every hour.
Many deaths I endure
Like the life cycle of a flower.

Where went time,
The gift coupled with space?
They, our temporal clime,
I live within that divine grace.

Time and space,
Chronological.
Life lifted from that place,
Eschatological.

Dare I say
“Woe is me.”
No pity in play.
Grace is free.


Monday, May 29, 2017

Two Prescient Books by French Writers

Considering both immigration and toleration by the secular left, these two books have much to behold for unchecked challenges to Western civilization.

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail projects what types of immigration are possible, including unexpected and rapid confrontation by the unprepared and unsuspecting.


The book Submission by Michel Houellebecq, is a more recent publication. This novel expresses the transformation of a nation (in this case, France) by ideological/political Islam.





Submission

Submission

The secular has no clue.
Nominal Christians are nice.
Both see what Submission will do,
But are scared to fight.

Read the Prophet’s book
Just once,
And you will forever not look
And talk like a dunce.

It’s not a fight
With Submission’s so-called “Radical.”
That “Radical” is actually its pure light,
The Prophet’s binding manacle.

The real radicals of the “pure light”
Are misnamed as moderates.
If they speak up they might
Have their heads removed in their habitats.

Vast numbers of followers
Of the Prophet are not fanatics,
Neither total swallowers
Of sura dogmatics.

However, those followers are weak
And frightened by their throat-slicing minority.
Hideouts are what they seek,
They have ceded their authority.

The West then must assume this fight
And call a spade a spade.
It must recover its true grounding,
Or submit to the blade.


Friday, May 26, 2017

Coming to Terms

Coming to Terms


What’s so radical
About misuse of a term?
Words classical,
Once healthy, now deadly germ.

Radical Islam is a misnomer.
Its practice, Koran pure.
So-called moderates, the sarcoma,
The real radical offers no cure.

Radical is not
Pure Islam.
Its principles, its thought,
No peace, no balm.

Pure Islam is
Commitment, conviction.
On infidels quiz
Belief, impose affliction.

+++

The secular west
Did its best
To rid its root
Of Christian fruit.

First in Europe
Began to stir up
Old convictions
Creating frictions.

No need for tradition
With the Enlightenment mission
Of thinking the rational,
Being one, killing the national.

Fluid thinking,
No principles linking
To past truths.
 The secular requires no proof.

+++

Pure Islam and the secular
In strange alliance
Make spectacular
A frightful compliance.

The secular so blind
With no principles at all
Must resign
With submission, withal.

+++

"Radical," you see
Really are the "Moderate."
The rational and secular plea
Have succumbed to the pure threat.

Is it too late
To come to terms?
How long will the secular wait
Before western culture burns?



Saturday, May 20, 2017

Common Curia

Common Curia

It was the last day
In February
Of the year 2013
Which gave us worry.

Why depart
From Office before death?
It was not physical loss
But political breath.

In the 2005 election
Joseph always led.
Jorge always second.
Ballot 4 made Joseph head.

The Curia incensed,
Plotted to change course.
Aided by red hats
Moved with no remorse.

The losers finally won
When Joseph stepped down
Unable to calm insurrection,
Relinguished the papal crown.

The Iago-like process
Took 8 years to complete.
An un-godly subterfuge
The legitimate one they unseat.

+++

It was the
Eighth day in November
Of the Year 2016,
An election to remember.

The legitimate process
Rendered no win popular vote.
It was a college
The Constitution wrote.

Similar to the Roman,
The D.C. Curia incensed
At the unfit candidate
Plotted against.

The agitation seemed organized,
At least that was the rumor.
Certainly the attacks were politicized,
Perhaps by Senator Schumer.

But no!
Chuck’s activity too obvious.
The real source
Is silent and devious.

Who then rakes Executive-45?
Perhaps someone next door.
Someone who never left town.
Yes! Iago-44.

+++

It has been said
Common to Benedict
And Executive-45,
The same to undercut and interdict.

The one who wants to
Close the world’s door
To true liberalism and freedom,
Is the same Iago-44.