Povey Prattle

“ There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true. ”   “ Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. ”   “ You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. ”   “ There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true. ”   “ I am easily satisfied with the very best. ”

Many church signs are lame.   Some are lamer than others.   Today I saw the lamest ever.   It is at the “Fellowship of Believers” on nearby 10 th St. here in SRQ.   (The “background” is the  recent cold snap here in SRQ).   The sign reads:   “Too cold to change this sign. The message is inside”   OMG!

My "best friend" in olden days was Jeff Davies.  We never ceased to be friends, but we lost touch over the years. Thanks to the Internet we have been back in contact. We have exchanged memories of our childhood and youth, and  for this blog, of the times when I went with him to a farm owned by his uncle and aunt in Wiltshire U.K. Here are some photo's from way back then.  They are very precious to me.  You will see his Uncle George and Auntie May  (she was his father's sister). They lived at Marsh Farm, Lydeway ( a hamlet within Urchfont) in Wiltshire. You will also see Uncle George and his tractor, and also a picture of the house at Marsh Farm. And there is a picture of Salem Chapel. Devizes - the meeting house for the Plymouth Brethren - a "denomination" in which Jeff and I came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Marsh Farmhouse Uncle George Lancaster and his tractor The Lancasters -  Uncle Geor...

Jack Marshall is (was) a poet of great distinction.  He was born in Brooklyn in 1936.   His father Albert was an Arabic speaking Jewish man, who was born in Baghdad (Iraq), moved to Manchester (U.K.) and later migrated to the United States. His family anglicised their last name from its original Arabic to “Marshall”   Jack’s mother Grace (in Arabic it is Garaz ) was also a migrant.  She was born to a prominent Jewish family in Aleppo (Syria), a family which ended up on these American shores.  She also spoke only Arabic, and refused to learn English when she arrived in the U.S.A.   Arabic was the in home-language of this Jewish couple.  Yes indeed - a Jewish couple whose most comfortable language was Arabic.  In fact they always referred to G-d as “Allah”.   Albert and Grace Marshall had an arranged marriage. Sadly it was also a very unhappy union. In the tight knit Syrian Jewish community in which they lived, divorce was out of the question....

Via my friend Susan H "Although the Church has been called to combat social evils, it has often remained silent behind the anesthetizing security  of  stained-glass windows.... How often the Church has been an  echo rather than a voice, a tail-light behind the Supreme  Court  and other secular agencies, rather than a headlight guiding  men and women progressively and decisively to higher levels  of understanding." - Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Sermon for January 15 th 2012. The Revd. J. Michael Povey, at St. Boniface Church, Sarasota FL. 1 Samuel 3: 1-18 As women and men are ordained into various ministries in the Episcopal Church they are required to state that they believe “The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, and to contain all things necessary for salvation”. “The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments”. Not just the New. We need to be reminded of this for a number of reasons. First, because what we call the Old Testament is in fact the only “bible” which Jesus, the disciples, and the earliest Christians knew.  The teachings of Jesus and of the early Church leaders are dependent upon, and arise from, the Old Testament. Second, because we cannot fully understand the New Testament unless we know the Old.   So much of what we read in the epistles and gospels is rooted in that much older tradition. Third, because we need to be delivered from the facile argument ...