He leadeth me beside...
Stillwater, MN; Mile 2017
Babe, Paul Bunyan's blue ox, in Bemidji
Greetings from Stillwater, MN, on the banks of the Saint Croix river! I've taken a southern detour today to visit a good friend from seminary, someone I haven't seen in three years. It's been a huge blessing today to see her again, an unplanned gift to the gift of time I've been given on this journey. Just past the half-way point in this eastward journey, it's also wonderful to have sabath from solitude to spend the evening talking with an old friend.
Driving today has also been very different; for one thing, the rainstorm that has been travelling eastward with me decided to spend the entire day in my company :) Here's a picture of what it was like at noon, when you would normaly expect dazzling summer sun:
The driving rain and darkness was quite claustrophobic after several days on the wide open plains. It was cold and slow and dim; welcome solace from the rain came in two forms. The first and most immediately satisfying was having a hot meatloaf -- a sandwich specialty of Minnesota, an incredibly good and thick slice of hot meatloaf between two slices of white bread, swimming soaked smothered drowned in brown gravy, with mashed potatoes. It is white-people food at its best -- rich, heavy, warm, soft, and subtle (not flavorless; subtle...) Perfect for the weather. Just writing about it makes me hungry. There was a tang to the meal, probably from the gravy, but also from the homemade meatloaf. Probably a fair bit of pork in the meatloaf as well, helping fill up my usualy vitamin P deficiency.
The other comfort was listening to John Bunyon's (not to be confused with Paul Bunyon -- see above) The Pilgrim's Progress. I don't know if any of you struggled through the book in high school -- it seemed to me back then as pompous and transparent (charachter names like Christian, Faithful, Sloth, Superstition...). Read out loud it is a much better book -- most books written before this last century are improved by being read outloud, and the older the works are the more likely that they were intended for an oral/aural audience as much as a reading audience. But this time around -- maybe because of the rain, maybe because I'm older, maybe because my own faith journey is moving, slowly, from head to heart -- this time around I've been noticing how beautifully he alegorizes the emotional challenges of faith: dispair, depression, self-justification. He opens up in story the mystery expressed so perfectly in that one brief line of Amazing Grace: "'twas grace that tought my heart to fear, and grace that fear relieved..."
And yes, there are the parts that are grating -- the gratuitious sermons against Popery, the weird anti-semitism, the self rightousness. And, in his prologue/apology, an odd belief that pearls can be found in the heads of toads (that would be a great paper topic, wouldn't it?). Speaking of toads, I will close tonight with a bit of a gruesome picture, a reminder of the insecticidal consequences of summer traffic through the land of 10,000 lakes:
Land of a Billion Mosquitoes
Babe, Paul Bunyan's blue ox, in Bemidji
Greetings from Stillwater, MN, on the banks of the Saint Croix river! I've taken a southern detour today to visit a good friend from seminary, someone I haven't seen in three years. It's been a huge blessing today to see her again, an unplanned gift to the gift of time I've been given on this journey. Just past the half-way point in this eastward journey, it's also wonderful to have sabath from solitude to spend the evening talking with an old friend.
Driving today has also been very different; for one thing, the rainstorm that has been travelling eastward with me decided to spend the entire day in my company :) Here's a picture of what it was like at noon, when you would normaly expect dazzling summer sun:
The driving rain and darkness was quite claustrophobic after several days on the wide open plains. It was cold and slow and dim; welcome solace from the rain came in two forms. The first and most immediately satisfying was having a hot meatloaf -- a sandwich specialty of Minnesota, an incredibly good and thick slice of hot meatloaf between two slices of white bread, swimming soaked smothered drowned in brown gravy, with mashed potatoes. It is white-people food at its best -- rich, heavy, warm, soft, and subtle (not flavorless; subtle...) Perfect for the weather. Just writing about it makes me hungry. There was a tang to the meal, probably from the gravy, but also from the homemade meatloaf. Probably a fair bit of pork in the meatloaf as well, helping fill up my usualy vitamin P deficiency.
The other comfort was listening to John Bunyon's (not to be confused with Paul Bunyon -- see above) The Pilgrim's Progress. I don't know if any of you struggled through the book in high school -- it seemed to me back then as pompous and transparent (charachter names like Christian, Faithful, Sloth, Superstition...). Read out loud it is a much better book -- most books written before this last century are improved by being read outloud, and the older the works are the more likely that they were intended for an oral/aural audience as much as a reading audience. But this time around -- maybe because of the rain, maybe because I'm older, maybe because my own faith journey is moving, slowly, from head to heart -- this time around I've been noticing how beautifully he alegorizes the emotional challenges of faith: dispair, depression, self-justification. He opens up in story the mystery expressed so perfectly in that one brief line of Amazing Grace: "'twas grace that tought my heart to fear, and grace that fear relieved..."
And yes, there are the parts that are grating -- the gratuitious sermons against Popery, the weird anti-semitism, the self rightousness. And, in his prologue/apology, an odd belief that pearls can be found in the heads of toads (that would be a great paper topic, wouldn't it?). Speaking of toads, I will close tonight with a bit of a gruesome picture, a reminder of the insecticidal consequences of summer traffic through the land of 10,000 lakes:
Land of a Billion Mosquitoes
posted by tetracontadigon at 6/21/2005
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