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How Blest Thy First Disciples, Lord 1 comment |
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Above: All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Atlanta, Georgia, May 8, 2016 |
Image Source = Bill Monk, Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta |
Text (1890) by Theodore Claudius Pease (1853-1893) |
Source #1 = The Pilgrim Hymnal (1904), National Council of Congregational Churches in the United States |
Source #2 = The Christian Ministry: Its Present Claim and Attraction and Other Writings (1894) |
The Pilgrim Hymnal (1904) contains five of the seven stanzas; The Christian Ministry (1894) offers the complete text. |
How blest Thy first disciples, Lord, |
Whom Thou didst choose to walk with thee, |
Who daily met around Thy board, |
And made Thy home and family! |
How blest, when throng and press were gone, |
And weary day herself had fled, |
From all the noisy world withdrawn, |
Alone with Thee to break the bread! |
Has the long day its burden brought? |
Are heavy hearts in sorrow bound? |
What sweet relief in kindly thought; |
What sympathy with Thee is found! |
For every care Thou hast an ear; |
Thou knowest all their changing moods: |
What stirs the timid Philip’s fears,– |
Why thoughtful Thomas sadly broods. |
Ah, who would such a meeting miss? |
What strength is here to nerve the will! |
How fair a home for hearts is this! |
Who would not long to find it still? |
And is the vision vain as sweet? |
Nay, Lord, Thy table still is spread; |
And ever where disciples meet, |
Thy blessed hands still break the bread. |
We see Thee not; yet when we turn, |
These moments melt in memory, |
And all our hearts within us burn, |
For we have met and talked with Thee. |
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U.S. Cuba policy plays right into Castro's hands |
While Jimmy Carter tours Cuba on the strong arm of the world's longest-ruling tyrant, President Bush is readying a speech to announce tougher sanctions against Cuba. |
For Fidel Castro, it doesn't get any better than this. |
On the one hand, Carter provides Castro an opportunity to seem magnanimous, the elder statesman in a pinstriped suit, charming, hospitable and cooperative: |
Dissidents? You want dissidents? Carter may speak to any he'd like, says the dictator. |
Biological weapons, who me? Carter may tour any biotech facility his little peanut-lovin' heart desires, Castro asserts. |
On the other hand, Bush plays politics with Florida's Cuban-American vote, so vital to brother Jeb Bush's re-election as governor next November, and promises to make things even tougher for the communist dictator. The trade embargo will remain in effect, against much wisdom to the contrary, and travel between the two c... |
Meanwhile, the question for Carter's visit is, which dissidents? The ones permitted to live freely, at least for the moment, or the ones in prison? As for touring facilities, one wouldn't expect to find biological weapons labeled on shelves like alphabetized spices. |
Sadly for the Cuban people, neither Carter's visit nor Bush's tough stance advances the needs of the people all purport to care about. Diplomatically disparate--one a benevolent gesture, the other a threat--both work in ironic tandem to accommodate Castro's strategy of oppression and self-aggrandizement. |
Carter's visit is nothing but a preen-op for Castro, master manipulator and public-relations magician. The former U.S. president will see and learn nothing he isn't intended to see and learn. I've been to Cuba on the Cuban government's peso tour and learned what I was meant to learn: Viva la revolucion. Repeat. Viva la... |
When one member of our journalists' group asked National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon how Cuba treats its dissidents, Alarcon shifted in his seat, permitting us a provocative peek at his navel, and chuckled, "Well, of course, sometimes we put them in prison." |
Think Carter will get to chat with a few of those? |
Meanwhile, the embargo--Bush's defense of which serves a family voting bloc and little else--hurts the Cuban people while helping Castro. It hurts American business, too, but one can argue favorably for lifting the embargo without caring whether America's purses benefit. |
Owing in part to the embargo, the Cuban people suffer from a lack of basic goods, the sort of stuff we routinely toss in the trash--food, toiletries, pencils, paper--or take for granted. Toilet seats are scarcer than Eskimos for the non-tourist class. |
Castro benefits because he's permitted a lifelong, by now beloved, scapegoat. When his people complain they don't have enough to eat, Castro blames America. Not enough medicine? America's fault. Bad teeth, shabby shelters, cramped living quarters? America's embargo, which Cuban officials stubbornly call "the blockade." |
Bush argues typically, but incorrectly, that lifting the embargo would help Castro. Lifting the embargo and permitting freer travel between the two countries would accomplish exactly the opposite. Freedom, after all, is irresistible and contagious, as Cubans are learning from the thousands of foreigners who visit their... |
It does not escape their notice that only tourists are permitted entry into the fancy hotels in Old Havana and along Cuba's beaches. Those who work in the tourist industry go home at day's end with tales of lavish food spreads and high-roller lifestyles of the relatively rich, all mere dreams to the rice-and-beans fami... |
Officially, Cuba would welcome a lifting of the American embargo, but even a casual visit to the island confirms speculation that the embargo is Castro's favorite thing. It provides an excuse for his failed policies while justifying his lifelong contempt for the United States. Indeed, Castro and the U.S. embargo are li... |
Of this much we can be certain: Whatever transpires from Carter's visit will be what Castro wants rather than what Carter achieves or Bush forswears. In this little triumvirate, there's only one dictator. |
E-mail: kparker@kparker.com |
31 January 2007 |
We're All Domed......again! |
Looby is right. We're heading for another gigantic, farcical, incompetent and idiotic and yet somehow typically epic British fuck up aka the 2012 Olympics. How do we do it? Is it something in our psyche? Is it all horribly inevitable? If it does happen, the concreting over of the Manor Garden allotments will be the sad... |
26 January 2007 |
Manor Garden Allotments |
While answering a query from Lois about growing achocha I was alerted to the plight of the 100 year old Manor Garden allotments in London which are in danger of being buldozed to make way for a footpath leading into the 2012 olympic games area. Can I urge my readers to visit their site and sign the petition and do what... |
Elsewhere in the blogosphere there is a discussion taking place about virtual as opposed to 'real' identity. I find this quite interesting from a number of angles. In some cases people worry around what they write and who they are becoming public knowledge and in some cases they are right to be worried as I imagine it ... |
Probably for the majority of allotment bloggers there is no real problem here; we tend to write mostly about how our tomato seeds are doing and how crap was our garlic last year and about the clarty soil and the sun and the wind and the couch grass and the club 18-30 root. In most cases our blog does exactly what it sa... |
This does not make us in any sense 'better' than the Let It All Hang Out Blood Guts & Thunder Boardroom or Bedroom bloggers who publish every nuance of their inner lives for all to read. That's fine too. All bloggers just need to bear in mind that if it's an open blog then it's public domain full stop and really so is ... |
Actually, the best of these blogs are fabulous. Well, sometimes beautifully written, witty, insightful, gritty and startlingly honest accounts of personal lives or perceptive comments on culture or society that should (possibly do) leave the professional commentators and lifestyle columnists green. Your blog is what yo... |
They can present themselves with as many cyber identities as they want. They can put out or shut out and I don't give a fiddlers fart who they really are and don't most of us have some sort of filter to sift the real from the contrived anyway? Oh well, clearly I'm running out of steam now, but can I just leave you with... |
24 January 2007 |
Three Sheets |
Three sheets to the wind again. No, not me... the greenhouse. Still, I suppose I got off relatively lightly losing only three sheets from a side panel. The winds on Thursday and Friday were tremendous and caused a fair amount of damage on the allotments including blowing a whole greenhouse over a few plots further down... |
Monday on the other hand was glorious sunshine and we spent a couple of hours on the plot putting the new glass in and pottering about and then we went off to the Mammoth Onion where we bought: |
Pink Fir Apple (salad potatoes) |
Pentland Javelin (earlies) |
Sante (main crop) |
Elephant Garlic |
Spaghetti Marrow |
Hysam onion sets |
Jolant leeks |
Robinsons giant cabbage |
Igor brussel sprouts |
Show Perfection peas |
Robinsons lettuce |
Parella green/red lettuce mix |
Mammoth Long beets |
Exhibition Long parsnips |
Marian swede |
White Dream radish |
Big Max pumpkin |
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