Seven whole days

From our parish prayer booklet, a reading and a prayer for Ash Wednesday. Look for one of these each day in Lent and Holy Week.

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. Joel 2:12-13

Fleshly God, you greet us with bodily presence and thus make it impossible for us to control you. We give thanks for our bodies, destined as they are to death. Through them, you give us life. Make us your resurrection body, that they world may know your Spirit. Amen.

Prayer by Stanley Hauerwas, from Prayers Plainly Spoken.

This is what I wrote for our parish email newsletter, which appeared this morning at about 7 a.m. (If you want to subscribe, just visit our website. There’s a “subscribe” box at the bottom of the page.)

I used to despise Lent. It seemed so…depressing. Who needs a big guilt trip, I thought. Now I really look forward to Lent. What changed?

As I paid more attention to Lent, I realized that it is surely calling me to turn toward God. But it’s not about self-loathing or even massive amounts of guilt. It’s about saying that we often get things wrong. God wants us to get things right, and so we are (a) forgiven and (b) invited to reorient ourselves toward God in our earthly pilgrimage.

Take Ash Wednesday, for example. Is it morbid to have someone place ashes on your forward and say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”? Not really. Ash Wednesday’s real message, if we can get past our own squeamishness at the mention of death, is this: life is short, and we are called to live it well.

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Hello, dear readers! I’m back in the blogosphere. While others fast from blogging, I plan to keep 7WD full of Lentastic material. Those of you who are not fasting from reading might enjoy this, I hope.

The parish I serve has produced a small prayer & scripture meditation booklet. There’s a scripture reading (taken from the daily office lections, usually) and a prayer for each day from Ash Wednesday through the Sunday of the Resurrection. I’ll post all those here — one per day.

This Friday is George Herbert’s feast day, so you can look forward to my Second Annual Herbert Festivall starting February 27. Each day for a complete octave, I’ll post a Herbert poem with some commentary. Last year I posted bit from A priest to the temple each day. You can find materials from last year’s Herbert Festivall here.

We won’t be all-Lent-all-the time. I have a stash of humor and sundries to post. So, enjoy!

If, like me, you enjoy both maps and the interwebs, this is for you.

At the end of every URL and email address is a top-level domain (TLD). Although .com is the world’s most popular TLD, it is far from alone. There are more than 260 TLDs in use around the world, most of which are country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). The Country Codes of the World map includes 245 country codes, which encompasses all United Nations countries as well as numerous islands and territories. Each two-digit code is aligned over the country it represents and is color coded with the legend below for quick and easy reference.

How cool is that?

Via gizmodo.

Every Sunday, I stand outside the church to greet churchgoers before and after the service. People marvel at this in the winter, but my good English wool cloak and my Canterbury cap are actually quite warm. Anyway, I now have a dilemma. I mostly stay warm, but my hands do get cold. If I wear gloves, then it would seem less personal as I shake people’s hands. However, the Washington Post reports there are data to report what I’ve long suspected:

Yale researchers have found that having your hands warmed up is likely to give you a warmer first impression of someone. Lawrence Williams and John Bargh tried it with two groups of students. They found that students who held a hot cup of coffee or a hot pad just before getting a description of a fictitious person rated that person as being more generous, sociable and good-natured than did students who had held a cup of iced coffee or an ice pad.

So, should one be impersonal or unfriendly on a winter day shaking hands? I keep hoping someone will donate money for one of those huts like the guards outside palaces use. Or maybe one of those heat lamps that some hotel porters enjoy. Until I get this resolved, I’ll just hope for spring.

Thanks, Ann, for pointing me to this. Photo from flickr user misswired.

I like photography. I like travel. I like cities. I like beautiful things. I like clever things. This is all of the above.

flickr user ettubrute employed his DSLR to create a video using time-lapse photography. Hope you like it. (By the way, there are some other great ones on his site. Check them out.)

A friend of mine recently left for vacation in Turks & Caicos. You can understand why, since it’s a world-class vacation destination. But there’s really no need to go so far away, according to the American Academy of Hospital Sciences. Yes, that’s right. They’ve published their latest awards, and Rhode Island is now included as a top-notch world-class destination in company with “Egypt, Turks and Caicos, [and] New York City.” Is that a big deal?

“Only 10 destinations in the academy’s history have received this award,” said Mark Brodeur, Rhode Island’s director of tourism, at a posh reception held under the rotunda of the Rhode Island State House Jan. 15 attended by 200 state hospitality and tourism professionals, as well as local and state politicians. “We’re honored to be the first state to get one.”

Call me skeptical, but as much as I love Newport, WaterFire, and Federal Hill, they’re not exactly equivalent to the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, and Alexandria. There’s another thing Rhode Island is famous for: graft. I wonder if someone slipped the hospitality people an envelope full of cash. Hey, that’s something worth seeing! Come visit us, and view our monumental corruption!

Sorry for the long silence here on 7WD. Things have been a little (OK, a lot) crazy in the parish. It’s a mixture of “good crazy” and “bad crazy” and I hope to write a bit here about what’s been going on.

Every time I have a gap here, I always stress about how to re-enter the blogosphere. Perhaps it’s the fact that I just finished eating supper, but this seems like the perfect bit, for some odd reason. I also have a soft spot for Claymation. Enjoy!