K and I have been living in Mobile now for almost six years, and we have really come to love this quirky place. We love the diversity of architecture…the Greco-Roman revival, the Empire, the creole cottages, the craftsman style, the ghosts of Gothic, the faded influence of the Spanish and French who once inhabited this place, their winding wrought iron singing of past glory,the lavish Victorian and the brash Colonial, the surprising burst of Rococo…all forming and informing past present and future…emblems of place and time. We love the beauty of the Bay and the Delta…the osprey on the hunt….the ancient pelicans…the salt smell of a sea breeze. The artists here as well…poets and playwrights; musicians and singers; dancers and painters; seamster and seamstress….oysters on the half shell, and a crab meat omelet sandwich. The Mardi Gras bug has finally bitten us ever so gently…the colors of emotion in the middle of the streets…the glittering beads in the night air, evidence perhaps. Place and time like no other place and time.
And we have our dark side as well. We are a city still divided by racism…the mouldering albatross around our neck…and there’s the poverty that breeds violence on the streets in the lost corners of town….agricultural and industrial pollution, the extent of which we’ll likely never know…the shamefully regressive system of taxation in our state….illiteracy and ignorance, sometimes willful.
Yet, we’re no worse nor any better than any other place in any other time. This is still the place that forms and informs us…We, whether new comers or old timers, are born again and again out of this mysterious stew of cultures and commerce and revelry and disease and invention and love and death; we dance in both its light and beauty, and in the blood brother of darkness…one never exists without the other….a cosmic necessity in all truth….the cosmic dance between dark and light turning to a music whose genius precedes all memory, all place and all time, the music that birthed the stars, set towards a future that is sure to astonish the imagination of both God and humankind.
As people of a peculiar order….the order of the Way…the order of a commonweal whose constituent virtues include mercy and compassion; forgiveness and forbearance; justice and peace; gracious hospitality and welcome; dignity and equality…as people of the Faith, our vocation is to live lives of imaginative repentance…repentance (literally: to turn around) meaning a life long practiced art of turning towards the good, turning towards that which gives life and light in the place and time wherein we live and move…We are to form and inform our world by our lives of sacrifice….to love our place and time…In sacrificial repentance we join the dance of creation, the rhythm of the Truth, turning towards an end whose meaning in part we can only apprehend in the means, a beautiful end in which all is redeemed, past present and future… nothing lost or left behind… not even the dark .
A way of living, a way of happening, a mouth, walking among the ancient trees, the image of truth reborn in the burdened air, nature without check with original energy…
Good stuff, my friend!
Very interesting blog. I was raised in a different faith, but I am finding myself agreeing with a great number of Episcopal beliefs. It seems to be much more Christ-like than other churches. Anxious to find out more.