Povey Prattle

My friend Pat Cosgrove comes, like I, from a family of ten children.  He and his family grew up in Chicago.  He too has suffered the loss of a brother, in his case brother s and a sister. At Pat's suggestion he came to my home yesterday for a chat.   We talked about our similar but different family lives, the joys and the sorrows. He told me that his family grief s do not evaporate with time, but that her and his sibs are sustained when they get together and share stories of their life together. Thanks so much Pat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last week my Dermatologist gave me Cryotherapy  to treat some precancerous "spots" on my pate, face, and neck. On of those spots was near my left eye. The therapy (spraying ice cold nitrogen?) is not pin-pointed, which means that I have swelling on my left eye-lid and also below the eye. This alarmed me enough to call my PCP yesterday morning for a consu...

Joe Curtatone. Mayor, Somerville MA Somerville, I love you. Yesterday we had a bunch of protests, two in favor of  ‪#‎ BlackLivesMatter‬  and one against it. The numbers were overwhelming in favor of  the "for" side, just like our local response has been overwhelming in favor of the for side. For all of you out-of-towners rolling in here trying to stoke a fire, allow me to give you the headline: we don't have a fire. It was a small number of police officers who showed up to protest the BLM banner hanging at City Hall and most of them were from other cities and towns. At the end of their protest, pro-BLM folks came up to them, shook their hands and then everybody talked. Nobody was yelling at each other, just civil discussion taking place. Down in Union Square, we had hundreds of BLM protesters show up and pack the Square for hours. They spoke, they sang, they read some poetry. Our police at the site handled the event like the pros they are. Everybod...

On the Lord's Prayer “This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's  Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about  it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It  means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray  for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.” As published in "Relevant" Magazine

On Knowing Which Way to Go “It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” As published in "Relevant" Magazine

I recently made some stoup. I call it stoup 'cause I am not sure if it is stew or soup. It was my way of using leftovers  - Farro, Quiona,   Lentils, Black Beans, Corn, Green Peppers, Diced Onions, a few bits of Beef etc,  all cooked in vegetable stock.   (I hate wasting food) After a few days this stoup got to be old hat, so I dressed it up and transformed it into "Cottage Pie a la Pove".   All I needed to do was to put the stoup into a casserole dish, cover it with mashed red potatoes, ( made from scratch),  and bake it at 375 degrees for about 35 minutes. Darn!   It was good!.  (Maybe on account of the copious amount of butter I added to the mashed spuds). I believe that Cottage Pie originated as a "Monday Leftover Dish" made by frugal housewives in poorer families  in the U.K. and Ireland. Any cooked beef leftover from Sunday dinner would be minced, and placed in a baking pan  - together wi...

I am reading  terrific book by Professor A.C. Grayling of the New College of the Humanities in London U.K. The book is "The Age Of Genius * The Seventeenth Century & The Birth of The Modern Mind" (Bloomsbury, London, 2016). It should be required reading for every politician, priest, pundit and pastor! It could be read alongside:  "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World"   43   Andrea W ulf  , 2015 Knopf) Both books challenge we of Western European ancestry  to revisit and readjust our sense of who we are, and who we have became  in the light of the 17th and 18th Centuries, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A.C. Grayling's book is especially  masterful. It posits that modern (as opposed to magical)  thinking emerged in Western Europe, even in the midst of the dreadful and religious  "Thirty Years ...

Last Sunday (17th July 2016)  I took my accustomed pew at for the 8:00 a.m. Eucharist at St. Boniface Church, Siesta Key.  My regular pew-mate Gray Davis was absent, so I felt very alone. The guest preacher is a good man, but half his sermon was lost on me, due to his habit of dropping his voice at the end of sentences. Then we heard a presentation about our budget deficit ($85,000) and the need to raise more money. I have been making and hearing such presentations for more than thirty years (what goes around comes around!). I like and respect the man who made the presentation, but my mind and heart were elsewhere so I quietly slipped out of Church at "half-time". All those words  ( sermon and presentation) were more than I could stomach. I longed for some silence for prayer, meditation and contemplation. That longing for silence in worship is not unique to me.  Episcopal Church liturgies are "busy, busy, busy" (and the same is true of most denom...