Povey Prattle

I will be away from Dec 21 through Dec 25 - visiting friends in Pensacola FL. Look for the next posting on December 26th

My Dad, Henry John Povey was an only child, the son of Henry George Povey and Sarah (Sally) Bennett. Grandfather H.G. Povey, whom I never knew had a number of siblings, Dad’s aunts and my great-aunts. Grandfather’s family had grown up in some style on Ashley Hill, Bristol in a mid-Victorian housing area where up and coming business people could buy fine houses. I visited that house many times - more later. Great Grandfather was a plumber, as was his son and grandson. Three generations of plumbers. My four brothers and I did not follow in those footsteps. We don’t do shit! I think that my great grandfather was named Samuel George, or maybe George Henry Povey, but of that I cannot be sure. Family lore has it that he was an experimenter and dabbler in new ways of plumbing, and was known in a moment of frustration to have thrown a pot of hot lead across his workshop. We had in our family papers his contract with Bristol Corporation to do all the plumbing at the new Sefton Park School ...

Dear Gene I am so pissed off at the way you and Mark are being treated in the Episcopal Church, and in the Anglican Communion. It offends me that the Bishop of South West Florida (where I am licensed to serve, but happily am not canonically resident) has nixed the plan for your visit to St. Boniface Church in Sarasota. I am angry and appalled by his cowardice. He has surrendered to conservative bullies. He has not, as far as I know, had the courtesy to reply to those who have written him (including me) to protest his decision. It offends me that the Archbishop of Canterbury will not invite you to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Bishops. Does he not understand that your election and consecration was canonically proper in the Episcopal Church, unlike the consecrations of Bishop Minns and other conservatives. A nixing of Bishop Minns as a quid pro quo of a nixing of you does not make for Gospel math. He was chosen and consecrated without reference to any canonical law! You were...

“Of course I am a liberal” “Yes, I’d figured that out”. The first statement was mine. The reply came from a lovely older man at St. David’s in Englewood. We were chatting this morning over coffee at the 8:00 a.m. service. He is from Newton, MA. His wife is from New Bedford, MA. They lived in Holliston, MA, and were founder members of the Episcopal Church there. But there hearts were, and are, at the Church of the Advent in Boston, a bastion of Anglo-Catholic worship and practice, “smells, bells and all”. I preached there on Ascension Day a couple of years ago, and I was happy to tell them that the parish is flourishing and healthy. They told me of their hay-days at Advent when Whitney Hale was Rector. I never knew Whitney, but I met his matrician wife “Bootsy” in her later years, and I knew Whitney and Bootsy’s son Sam and daughter Margee. This couple were shocked when I told them that both Sam and Margee had passed from this life. They remembered Sam and Margee as y...