Got Your Apostolic Constitution

Here.

Brother Stephon of Sub Tuum has initial thoughts.

And while they were hula-hooping

These guys started singing one of my favorite Kevin Welch songs, one that I hadn’t thought about it years. Years.

On this beautiful day, with trees dropping dead and dying brown leaves around us in the warmth and life,  they sang this song and I sang it too:

There’s gonna to be two dates
On your tombstone.
All your friends’ll read ‘em.
All that’s gonna matter
Is the little dash
Between ‘em.

…it’s a great big world…

life down here on earth.
Softly.

Trains

Where?

Here.

I love the old guys in charge of the model trains. They’re called the “Wreckers” because they regularly wrecked their basements with their hobby.  The little blue and green coffee pot on top of the middle building in the last picture is an actual little lit-up moving sign.

And yeah, there’s a “See Rock City” barn roof in the display.

How could there not be?

Hula Hoops Can Be Dangerous

Where? Here. An arts/crafts/enviro-emphatic event at a local chi-chi faux Charleston/Savannah style-like development that backs up to an apparently lovely nature preserve that we were too worn out to go explore.

Not enough parking, of course, so you park at Regions Field (where the Birmingham Barons play) and ride the bus over, with friends of all types:

And all species:

One of them was on a leash. The other one probably should have been.

And then he started talking about the Romans

…which you’d expect (how they strayed by their innovations of a different way of signing the Cross; celibacy;Immaculate Conception…etc), but what I liked about his informal presentation of the Orthodox faith to this probably mostly Protestant group was the matter-of-factness of it – non-apologetics apologetics. Of course we’d want our babies to be joined to the Body of Christ. Of course our worship, full of signs and ritual brings us closer to God. Of course we are so glad to be surrounded by icons, by the family of faith.

Of course!

Oh, and the deep Southern drawl didn’t hurt.

The Russian Orthodox community in this tiny burg just 20 miles north of downtown Birmingham has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when mine owners brought Eastern Europeans and Russians to work. The mines closed in the 20’s, but the tiny church remains in Brookside and celebrates a Russian food festival every fall.

We didn’t eat any of the meals – not to the children’s taste and really not my favorite cuisine either. But we did buy sweets and a fantastic flatbread (I’ve forgotten the name, but the woman told me it has cheese and potato in it), and I picked up a book on icons for children.

The parish hall is next door. Did the Baptists outgrow it or were they vanquished?

More on Brookside here.

“We’re just God’s pencils”

How the Russian Orthodox priest described the priest’s role in Confession.