This week, hovering above a bubbling, caldron-like body of water in Hot Springs, North Carolina, God - The Supreme Being, The Creator of the Universe, The One Beyond All Telling, The All-Knowing - gave an interview to a select group of multi-lingual but English-speaking international journalists.

The obituary barely told the story.

It’s possible – no one will ever really know – that the news reports over simplified a complex issue.

And, at a time when a so-called “truckers’ convoy” was eating up news columns and minutes of airtime, a genuinely good story of a “truckers’ convoy” and some of its lessons were overlooked.

The Ukrainian grandmother was clear. While being interviewed minutes after crossing to safety in Poland, she was briefly interrupted by her grandson - speaking Russian. “No! No Russian! Russia, go to hell! Putin, damn him to hell!” Her hatred was visceral.

Despite all their hatred, vitriolic lies and anti-immigrant bombasts as they paraded through the streets of Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us,” many of those “good people” (and the insurrectionists of January 6) owe their American freedoms to some courageous Jewish refugee immigrants.

The February 2022 death of Patriarch Abune Antonios of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the world’s longest serving political prisoners, makes it difficult for to take seriously the claims of the terrorists and insurrectionist who invaded the Capitol of the United States in an attempt to overthrow results of the 2020 presidential election that they are “political prisoners” and “non-violent trespassers” who engaged in “legitimate political discourse.”

A widowed, single mother of eleven children has a word or two for politicians and parents who fear their children will “feel bad” if they learn about the murder of Emmett Till, the mob castrations and lynchings of Black men and boys, Bull Connor, the exclusion of Black athletes from professional sports, and the numbers of the nation’s Founders who owned slaves:

“Shhhhhh!

“Listen!

“Kids are resilient and it’s you adults who are afraid.”

A NEW REPORT WE WISH WE WOULD SEE!

(Vatican City. February 13, 12022) Two newly established Vatican commissions – one acting in conjunction with the Anglican Church of Australia - are sending icons and memorial medals to select members of the Congress of the United States as an expression of “prayerful hope” that recipients in the House of Representatives and Senate will “emulate the moral courage of these defenders of truth.”

Harold Keke was – is – a self-absorbed brute, as concerned only about his own fortunes as are too many American politicians. In 2004, Keke’s callous ruthlessness left Rev. Richard Carter, chaplain of the Anglican/Episcopalian Melanesian Brotherhood to observe:

“What I still find impossible to understand is the failure of imagination, or compassion, or heart with which people can commit atrocities without perceiving the suffering caused. Perhaps they do perceive and that is the horror of human cruelty, where pain is mocked, torture is sport and the inhuman takes on a diabolic logic of its own.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, American politicians should be required to visit Zhalan Cemetery and pray for the courage of six monks buried there – men driven to their knees and murdered but never broken.

Eighty-three-year-old Father Robert Terrence McCahill, M.M. (Bob Bhai - “brother Bob” - as he is known among Muslims in communities in which he has lived) began his life of service in Bangladesh in 1975.

Have you ever wondered about God?

I don't mean prayed. Or even thought about God the way that theologians do with their strangely abstract ideas such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But wondered - jumped into the awe and mystery of God, trying to sort Him out and make sense of God.

Born on the Fourth of August – some might say a month too late for someone who could appropriately be described as a living fireworks show – with blonde hair and blue eyes inherited from his grandmother and mother, Mikey was as All-Miami as picadillo and pizza, frijoles negros and hot dogs, Cuban coffee and The Hurricanes and The Dolphins. But he’s always been a puzzlement.

Where to begin? Where, oh where to begin?

Let’s start with Kindness and, for Kindness’ sake, we won’t use some names. But. Because others have been well publicized, well…

Dallas.

Willie James Howard was just like – and, in some ways, different from – many other fifteen-year-old boys in Live Oak, Florida in 1944. Because of his cheerful personality, his parents called their round-face, stocky son “Giddy Boy.” A classmate described him as clean, neat and always dressed nicely because he was an only child and his parents could afford to dress him well.

Because it doesn’t end with a zero, Thursday, December 2, the forty-second anniversary of the sexual assault and brutal murder – martyrdoms – of four “church women” will go unrecognized by too many Americans.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Winston Churchill

When the Universe tips back to balance, there will be a special place in a prolonged Purgatory for Andrew Wakefield.

Who are these people and when did The Almighty designate them “Divine Declarers?”

Yes! We said “Divine Declarers” - a whole new theological category, separate from priests, prophets and kings.

Next week marks the eighty-third anniversary of “Kristallnacht.”
We believe it is vital that we “Never forget!”
Father Roger and Father Skipper

In 2018, eighty years later, Ruth Winkelmann still remembered the night of November 9-10, 1938.

In a too-tired world, the death of David Amess, a married father of five who was stabbed to death in Belfairs Methodist Church, serves as a call to reflection for the people of a nation that never knew him.

“Whoever saves a single life,
it is as though he has saved the lives of all.”
The Koran

“Whoever saves a life,
it is considered as he saved an entire world.”
Yerushalmi Talmud