About Bishop Steven Charleston

 Former Bishop of Alaska, and former Dean of Episcopal Divinity School, in New York City, Bishop Charleston is currently serving as the interim Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in Oklahoma City, OK.  (Which is kind of neat for a member of the Choctaw Nation.)

More biography and links to sermons are at:  http://day1.org/328-the_rt_rev_steven_charleston

Our Prayer of the Day

       I very much appreciate the wise counsel of Bishop Steven 

Charleston this morning: "Beware of any generation that 


seems


 lost without a leader. That search may become a dangerous 


thing to do. A society that is fearful, money worried, anxious 


for


 order, hungry for law, a nation of wall builders, accustomed 


to war, watching enemies without and enemies within, afraid


 its glory will fade. Longing for the strong man grows, ever so


 quietly, while people look the other way.




       Help us, O God, not to flirt with forces so ancient and so 


evil, but rather to put our trust in you, that justice never 


bends to fear nor freedom to the false gods of power."




Thanks to Louie Crew for this tidbit

a poem from wandering the Organ Mountains...

Violent Night

Stars shout in the stillness,

Of a cold mountain night

A soft breeze stumbles down

the erratic, rocky gorge

and ruffles the browning grass

at my feet

Just above the jagged crest

the harvest moon pushes aside

the glowering black and bursts

the air with creamy light

                                                                                                                                                        Jim Macey


Photo Credit: Michelle Stump is the artist who created the accompanying photograph, entitled:
Mountain Night - Purple Wind.  See more of her spiritual works at www.harpofthespirit.com

The Psalm of New Mexico

Behold the mountains of the Lord,

Gaze upon the majesty of His hills;

Look down at the verdant river valley,

See the dwelling place of our greenery.

View the Jornada and its sere sands,

The eye hears a symphony of tan and brown.

Tread quietly amid the Mesilla pecans,

Walk softly in their cathedral of shade.

This is the land the Lord has given us,

The varied earth He has bestowed on us.

This is the land He gave us to care for,

The earth for us to nurture.

by  Jim Macey,  Los Lunas, NM    

A psalm is a special form of poetry, rarely found outside of the religious setting, and its rhythms are due to calculated repititions of the poetic thought.  It's a difficult format to work with for the poet, forcing you to think and rethink your utterances.  I find the psalm lending itself to nature poetry by bringing the cadences of the worship service to the mundane viewing of a landscape.


For further reading:  Really good poetry can be found in any work by Billy Collins, our former Poet Laureate.
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Names - A Light Moment

Naming is probably one of the biggest problems for the genealogist and also for the persons transcribing documents of genealogical interest.  The spellings of our ancestor's names drives us up walls; the meanings of names escapes our ken; the audio aspect - how a name sounds- is often pure conjecture.

Here's a good example:

"Sexauer is an ordinary German name referring to one who came from
Sexau, in Germany. Looking for a Mr. Sexauer, a man in Washington
called at the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee.
Helping him, a girl employee called the Banking and Currency Committee
by telephone to check, and inquired politely, ‘Do you have a Sexauer
over there?’

    ‘Listen,’ the girl switchboard operator snapped, ‘We don’t even
have a ten-minute coffee break anymore.’ "

– Elsdon Coles Smith, Treasury of Name Lore, 1967

For further reading:  any of E. C. Smith's vast works on names.

Genealogy: An Activity of Ecstasy & Grief

It’s been a good week, for Faith Hope Macey, and it’s been a momentarily disastrous week, in her ongoing family research.

The thrill of a new document found by happenstance – that act sets off tremors through the body of a genuine genealogist.  Faith found several.  ”Oh, boy – look I’ve got two new cousins!”

Sure enough, there they are: and look – as they are tracked through recent history, they lived in some of the same areas where Faith lived.  More research:  ”Oh my God – one lived 10 blocks away from me in 1986.”  ”Jim, see if you can google and find an e-mail address for them”

Well, as some of you can surmise, further research led to the SSDI:  both cousins had died in the last few years.  And now they must remain unmet, un-talked with, un-hugged.  There would be no sharing of stories, no questions answered,  no offspring introduced to each other.

Genealogists all know this facet of our endeavor: where we are literally beside ourselves one minute and crushed with disappointment in the next.  And we recognize that it is our very nature to feel the joy of discovery  and the tears over the what-could-have-been.  The moral of the story: don’t lose touch and keep searching…

• In Memoriam:  Joyce Elaine Schaefer Adams,  1933 – 2010
•                          Robert E Schaefer, 1926 – 2010

Further reading:  the books of Boyd Magers on westerns, serials, and Gene Autry give insight into the life of Armand Schaefer, father and uncle to the cousins above.  Armand was the number two man in the Flying A Productions, and was a minority owner in the Angels baseball team.

Welcome (...sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture)

In the heart of the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico comes the thundering hoofbeats of meandering, swirling, coalescing thoughts from the proudly parabolic mindstream of a blue-eyed, Norman-blooded bard of deep Celtic origins in the wild black forests of far-gone history.  And these writings are his story and your story, so sit back and enjoy the history of both of us...