Baby's Breath

The Ranks Must Be Purged

Comrades! Your attention please.

You should, of course, already be aware that this is the final Final Hour and that the AntiChrist approaches, and indeed there are already many antichrists hidden among us.

Be on the lookout for spies, provocateurs, diversionists, and arsonists. Be on the lookout for Red Guards, Trotskyites, reformationists, revisionists, and other enemies of the state hiding at the gate. Watch for Untied Methodists; they may already be in your community.

Watch for the know-nothings drinking Blisterine behind the abandoned paper mill at the edge of town. There are flamboyant illusionists surrounding themselves with idealists – take down their names.

Be on the lookout for Saboteurs and Zapatistas and other assorted shoe freaks.

Other dangerous characters included: Horse thieves, cattle rustlers, sheep molesters, and agrarian revolutionaries. Unapproved sectarians and minor secretaries. All former, current, and potential names on the undisclosed, official (s)hit list. Film critics. Undesirable relatives. Foreign intelligence agents who know more than we do, and readers of Russian literature.

Even surrounded as we are by such a miasmic cloud of adversaries, we could still remain calm except that these nemeses have come from us. The perfidy and putridity is in our own house, sitting in our pew, wearing our uniform.

Comrades! The ranks must be purged. Report all suspicious persons (left-handed or otherwise) to your commanding officer. Report your commanding officer to the Sentry.

Your name will be noted in their report. 

The Prayers of the People

The votives are lit, the prayers of the saints:

for Eloise, for Mary, for Dave who broke his hip,
for Ernesto who got the job...

A breeze billows a curtain
and the sanctuary is ablaze.

The smoke of the incense,
together with the prayers of the people,
God’s holy people,
went up before God.

My Girls

My girls, I love 'em both.

1 Corinthians 12: 12 - 20 with Necessary Additions

For as it is with the human body, which is a whole thing although it has many different parts - all the parts make up one body - so it is with the body of Christ.  … The body consists not of one member, but of many. And if the foot were to say, “I’m not a hand - so I don’t belong,” it doesn’t belong to the body any less. Or if the ear said, “I’m not an eye and so I can’t belong to the body,” it would not stop being part of the body.  If the whole body were an eye how would it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how could it smell?

As it is, God has put all the different parts into the body just as he chose. If they were all the same, how could it be a whole body? As it is, the parts are many, yet the body is one.

But for the love of Christ, don’t be another asshole. The body of Christ has enough of those already.

Philippians 2 as American Foreign Policy

Recently, I’ve been reading Bob Woodward’s 1987 book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981 - 1987 in which Woodward describes the way that the Central Intelligence Agency expanded its covert and extra-legal activities during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, exerting influence, and power, and supplying weapons and money around the world in the aid of of American interests, and American profits.


Then this morning, I was struck (again) by Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians and I began to wonder what it might look like if an ostensibly, nominally Christian nation used Philippians 2: 3 - 4 as the guiding principle for its foreign policy.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. (NRSV)

Or in the the KJV - Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory…

Would we wage secret wars and fund and arm militant right-wing dictators to benefit the Coca-Cola Company or The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). Would we depose government officials, topple democratically elected leaders, crash world economies, and stir up war and revolution around the world if we thought of the interests of others as important as our own, if we thought of the people of Chile, Lebanon, Argentina, Cuba, Iran, Korea, etc… as more important than ourselves?


If we want to “make America great again” we should look to the needs of others and not to our own profits.