This is kinda sad............

for me, anyway. I've really got into this blog thing and keeping fairly often......
So, we're off for another adventure and I won't be around for a few weeks, maybe. If I get a chance to post on the road, I will, but not too likely.
Today was another nice Central Oregon kind of day. A little cloudy in the morning, then turning of sunny for the remainder of the day. I did a few last loads of laundry and was able to hang it outside, so that made me happy. I covered the tender plants again last night, but they didn't need it as it only got down to the low 40's. Picked the zucchinis for the trip, but nothing else coming on, yet. The corn will probably be wonderful while we're gone :(

I was thinking about what to leave you with to ponder while I was gone. I remembered this, from NPR - Morning Edition, December 18, 2006. The feature, This I Believe, chronicles the contributions of listeners in a variety of ways. This is how I was first introduced to Fr Richard Rohr, who I was lucky enough to see and hear in person last year. This is an amazing man, so I invite you to "google" his name and learn more.

Utterly Humbled by Mystery
By Richard Rohr
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.
Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. "Hints and guesses," as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don't scare me anymore.
When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.
Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like "principles of uncertainty" and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"! How strange that the very word "faith" has come to mean its exact opposite.
People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is -- quite sadly -- absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

Blessings, my friends, until we meet again - in a few weeks. Comments welcome (and appreciated.....)