Reading Rabelais

What have I been doing all this time? A few months ago I did almost three posts a day; now I'm closing in on three posts a month. Can it be that the rigors of chaplaincy, moving, painting, scheduling, cooking, devising intricate anecdotes salutary for humor and incisiveness have held me back from developing further my time folded upon blog blog blogging bloggidly? Can it be such a state of affairs that ensues and entails rigors and chaplaincy and chaplincy - and the Champlain See - take so much from me that when the time comes to write, I writhe.
Several times in the last few weeks I've had conversations where Jami or Bob or Cheryl or some one will say, "see here, this conversation we're having right now here now - this is what you need to be writing in your blog, this is what you need to be blogging." And I won't have time. I'll sit down to write and sleep, with its needs and demands, its soothing promise of eyes closed and warm covers and deep dreams, dreams of lands of warm dreams and oceans of sleep, or rest, will converge on me and remove me from this task, this writing task.
I think something similar happened to the Apostle Paul, when he was living in Spain, the lovely Thecla at his side, as he looked out over his vineyards, and read Horace, while sitting under a cork tree, while he composed songs and taught his sons Latin and Greek and the stories of his Greco-Hebrew childhood, that things just slipped his mind. He didn't write further letters telling believers to not dis the leadership of women; to not get carried away by end time predictions, but instead do some good in the here and now.
What a time to have lived. Still I would not depart this present moment to live there and then - no matter how many questions might be answered - and all sorts of form critical and redactional and canonical questions abound. But at some point the past has nothing for us. What is past is so far removed from our concerns that our will, much less our emotional strength, is lacking. We are eventually thrown back to the present, and as Ecclesiastes counseled: living in the present is our appointed task - not piling resources away for the future, nor pining away for a golden age. In the present we meet all our pertinent challenges. About each moment of the present we can only ask: Am I savoring enough of this? Am I seeing clearly? Am I drinking fully and recognizing the content of the air - such that were I to breathe it again, I would know it and relish it? am I l0ving fully or do I love absentmindedly?