Goodbye, Mariners. Their season ends today, the first Sunday of Autumn. Thanks to manager Lloyd McClendon, his staff, and the Mariners players for the best baseball season in Seattle in a long time! Today’s game had a playoff feel to it. Had the A’s lost, with a Mariners win, the two teams would have played a one-game playoff tomorrow. One game does not make a playoff series, of course, but the general public is sold on this one-game format as a legitimate playoff.
The week before this last week saw our last temperatures as high as 80. This last week could have had our last temperatures in the 70s. Autumn comes as quick as that. September has Summer days. Beginning the month, September seems firmly in the category of Summer, but by month’s end– especially after four straight days of rain, and sunsets before 7:00– Autumn is here.
Ever been stuck next to a born-again, evangelical Christian on a broken down bus? Happened to me last week. On a bus, strangers generally don’t talk to each other, but if someone does talk to me, I try to take it in the spirit intended, and try to be open-minded, try to be mindful that this might be more interesting than the average bus ride, which isn’t interesting, and of which I have had thousands, and will have thousands more, although I might never again sit next to someone who will ask, “How’s your day been? What book are you reading these days?” (John Muir’s “The Yosemite,” which is very good. He scrambled under, over, and around everything– small and big, and expertly knew his trees, mountains, and geological formations, conveyed with abundant wit and accomplished descriptive narrative and literary skills).
I explained the book a bit. He said, “God’s creation is a wonderful thing!” He took a slim book out of his briefcase and laid it on top of it, holding a yellow highlighter pen, as if he wished to convey that he was reading this book, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to open it just then– “God Has A Wonderful Plan For Your Life,” by Ray Comfort, with a fragment of a painting on the front depicting, I’m almost positive, the stoning of St. Steven. Not exactly Kierkegaard, or Schillebeeckx.
“What are you reading?” I asked, thinking it would be polite to ask him the question I thought he might be fervently praying that I would ask him. And I hoped I would be able to hold my own in any conversation that might result, though I certainly didn’t expect that the bus would break down, and he and I would hold our ensuing (politely quiet) conversation in the back of an eerily quiet bus weighty with the suspense of a busload of people in anticipation of learning what was wrong with our bus and what would happen next by way of our getting on with our trips.
My new friend told me that, out of the Ten Commandments, he would just tell me about the first four, all of which he had broken, and he had broken all ten, so that made him guilty. I had to say– a person doesn’t have lust in his heart just because he looks at a woman with desire. If he had a bad intent and would act on it given the chance, that’s different, but is that the treasure in my new friend’s heart? Or is that treasure rather his knowledge that he might struggle against the temptation, but he would do the right thing instead? If he had to choose between “sin” and “don’t sin,” wouldn’t he choose “don’t sin?” Okay then. Innocent, I say!
“Here we are, stuck on this bus, and we’re not at each others’ throats,” he said. “That’s because God’s law is in our hearts!”
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus. Much is made of this, but rarely does one encounter someone who has anything interesting to say on that. My friend thinks it means accepting Jesus as Saviour, as Christ, and if you don’t, forget about going to the Father. Forget about going to Heaven. You’re going to Hell. My dismay is in thinking, is God that easy to figure out?
I wish I had a really good rebuttal to that to bring back down to Earth people who are so smug in the idea that a little lip service to a simple, bookbound Jesus is their ticket out of doubt and into all tomorrow’s parties in the afterlife. I hope my new friend isn’t that simpleminded. Maybe that’s just how he explains it, because he thinks anything deeper would go over his audience’s head.
My thinking is that, “No one comes to the Father except through Me” has a lot to do with that last “Me.” Jesus refers to Himself as a subjective person, “I,” an individual, in relation to the Father. I can identify myself too as “me” versus “you,” an “I” in relation to my/our Father, Who is my creator, creator of us all.
Perhaps Jesus means not, “Come to the Father through Me” in a way that is different from the way a person naturally comes to the Father. Perhaps He is asserting a level of kinship between the way He comes to the Father and the way we all naturally come to the Father– the simple, intuitive recognition of a common origin of our species.
Although Jesus the Christ is “the Way” to the Father for His people, inasmuch as He is the Savior, the Alpha and the Omega, He Who is the “Yes” to God’s promises of salvation for His people, and “the truth,” the revelation of God in His Son.
“Look!” my friend said. “We’re next to a church (Calvary Christian Assembly on Roosevelt)! How cool is that?”
We had to wait for the next bus to come, complicated by our being on a Sound Transit bus, not on a much commoner Metro bus. As many of us as could fit got onto the next bus. Had I known not all of us could transfer over, I would have let someone else go instead of me, because I wasn’t in a hurry. After that, I don’t know what happened.
One never does get all the answers.

So much for the feast day of my primary patron saint, St. Matthew– so little.
It fell on a Sunday, but the USCCB readings for the day didn’t have the headline it often has citing the saint(s) of the day. The readings didn’t have anything to do with St. Matthew, though one supposes that any of the typical Gospel readings for Matthew’s day could have been used.
I went to Mass at a St. Matthew’s church, for the first time, expecting some ceremony. Even there, they didn’t use a reading that included Matthew. The priest told the congregation that, if they wondered why he was wearing red, it was because it was the feast day of Matthew. A few rows up, someone said, “Hm!”
No mention of it in the bulletin, or in the sermon.
“Hm!” That’s all St. Matthew got.
I googled around some to see if I could quickly find out if this feast day was a major celebration anywhere. Nothing turned up.
Hm!
In 1600, Caravaggio painted “The Martyrdom Of St. Matthew.” He also painted “The Calling Of St. Matthew” and “The Inspiration Of St. Matthew,” all now in the church of San Luigi dei Francesci in Rome.
Hm!
He did write a Gospel, after all– as the Table Of Contents goes, the beginning of the New Testament.
Hm!
And the world has had plenty of Matthews.
I found out what the legend has.
Matthew traveled to Ethiopia, where he found a kingdom in thrall of magicians. He preached against them, and converted many, including Ephigenia (same feast day), who founded a convent of 200 nuns.
Hm!
The King wanted to marry Ephigenia, and asked Matthew’s help.
Hm!
Matthew invited him to Mass. He preached about the excellence of marriage, to the encouragement of the king, then Matthew twisted this into an attack against a king who would dare try to tamper with the marriage of Ephigenia and Jesus.
Hm!
The king sent a soldier to kill Matthew, and his soldiers tried to burn down the church, but Matthew appeared and redirected the fire against the king’s castle, and only the king and his son survived.
In the future, Ethiopian food for the last day of Summer, the feast of St. Matthew, will be a good idea. You use the injera bread to scoop up the rest of the food.
Hm!
Others might prefer Italian, or the exotic Israeli couscous.
Hm!
Bankers might reflect on the life of their patron, and reflect on how a bank might help not the “well,” but the “sick.”
Hm!

Summer’s heat, Autumn’s light: overlap, as we multitask, two steps forward, one step back, two steps back, one step forward, as we tread water and eye the shore, not sure if the trees we see are the trees we saw before we went under and surfaced last time, selfless for our loved ones, selfish for our selves.
“Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, Whose service is never furthered through the Top Seven Deadly Sin of anger.
If someone says, “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,” they snicker, the self-styled learned, who wouldn’t recognize a man without guile if Jesus Himself pointed out such a person.
A victim wants justice, and that will almost always include ostensible harm to the perpetrator, who will then point the finger all around in accusation that the victim merely sought revenge.
When one has forgiven someone, and taken much credit over many years for that maturest of actions, one can be quick to accuse one’s self of a secret desire for revenge, so secret that he himself hadn’t even been aware that it had lurked in his depths for decades.
Then trouble comes, and the old sibling patterns assert themselves, and the junior of the old pattern realizes he now has the upper hand, and needn’t relive the toxic episodes of the past. He swiftly and brutally, with no preamble, cuts off the head of the snake, before the other person knows what happened.
The explanation quickest to hand is that this is his long-awaited revenge.
It was a switching of roles: the balance of power had shifted, and the younger no longer had to suffer at the hands of the older.
The older had to understand that the old relationship was over. As equals, the younger no longer had to endure the drunken abuse and fights. He could simply walk away, and leave the other to wonder why everything had changed, and he was no longer welcome in the society of the younger and his family.
Someone who was powerless had wanted revenge, but that person, much older, hadn’t wanted revenge. He wanted compassion, understanding, peace, wisdom, and understood that the sudden, ugly turn of events might look like revenge, but it was more complicated than that.
He wanted people to grow, and wanted to help that along, but he could only do so much.
Vengeance is God’s, as is mercy, and forgiveness.
The “vengeance” of God? A figure of speech. God’s way of saying, “You want your enemies to suffer? Maybe they will, but I will decide what happens, and that may very well seem like vengeance to you.”
Jesus advises us to settle with our enemies on our way to court, because the judge just might side with our opponents, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Turn the other cheek. The first will be the last.
Why not decide for ourselves what is right?
Justice, vengeance, compassion, mercy, selflessness, selfishness: like Summer heat and Autumn light, our younger selves and present-day selves inevitably, and sometimes uncomfortably, through the darkest of glass, overlap.

We are stardust, this week, under a Harvest Moon.
As I researched the dates of a long-ago year’s full moons, I learned that each month’s moon has a name.
This made immediate sense to me, a long-time admirer of Nashville’s Jason and The Scorchers and their song, “Under A Harvest Moon.”
Why September tomatoes and blackberries seem sweetest, why farmers markets in September seem most complete, why the Washington State Fair in Puyallup with its agricultural displays and baking contests are left to September: the Harvest Moon.
But each month has not one name, but many names, conferred by myriad, far-flung peoples.
The Inuit might not feel any resonance at all from the full moon of September.
An Irishman might call the March full moon Pat’s Moon, while readers of farmers almanacs call it the Worm Moon.
Once, I called the January moon the Clam Chowder Moon, probably because I needed to think of a name fast for an arts & crafts project so I went with that. Water Moon would be a better name. “God’s Spirit hovered over the waters,” says the beginning of Genesis. The almanacs list it as the Wolf Moon.
February is listed as the Snow Moon. I called it Potato Moon. Now, I call it Skunk Moon in honor of the florid and flamboyant skunk cabbages that pierce the muddy miasmas of wetlands toward the end of the middle of Winter.
March they call Worm Moon. I called it Pizza Moon. Why not Still Moon to honor the distilleries that brew the spirits we enjoy on festive occasions such as St. Patrick’s Day?
April: Hot Dog Moon? Any month could be Hot Dog Moon. Pink Moon is nice. The Chills did a song, “Rolling Moon,” on a CD that includes “Rolling Moon.” Okay? Rolling Moon it is!
To be a child served a dish with rice pilaf and shape that rice into a perfect moon shape is a sublime memory. In Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, she discourses frequently on the Moon’s power to waken memories of the pleasantest and melancholiest sort. May could be Rice Moon, or Flower Moon, if one feels pastoral in the bucolic English sense.
Only one month rhymes with Moon, so June Moon is worth considering. But a million big and tiny insects take that notion and amend it to Junebug Moon. Another type of bug is the jitterbug, a dance people do late at night during summertime parties that last all through the soft, fragrant summer nights. Jitterbug Moon then, although this might be one of the names with lesser staying power.
July has the Buck Moon. As in, 4th of July fireworks that give you more bang for the buck? No, deer. Maybe this one should be the Ice Cream Moon. Flag Moon? Trout Moon? August, in one telling, is the Sturgeon Moon, so, as if such a thing is even possible, I say, “Too many fish.” For years, some one I know has called it Grapefruit Moon. Who can improve on that? I don’t see any raised hands out there, at least none I care to call on.
Sometimes in August, the heat builds up so ridiculously in an upstairs, non air-conditioned apartment that one must flee to the shade of the tall trees of a nearby cemetery. While there, I’d have lunch, including a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Peanut Butter And Jelly Moon will remind us of the crappy apartments of our youth, but there will be no such thing because the fish need a moon, and they have the Sturgeon Moon of August.
Give up on your gardens, everybody– it’s about to get cold and wet. Those green tomatoes aren’t turning red. Who knows what’s up with that tomatillo plant that sprouted dozens of blossoms months ago, but those haven’t gone anywhere. Remember those corn plants? The squash, the zucchini, the bok choy, the chard? Better luck next year, hapless, half-hearted gardeners. Maybe we should call it the Sushi Moon.
October has been listed as the Hunters Moon. In that vein, maybe Slayer (as in Buffy The Vampire Slayer) Moon.
Witch Moon is persuasive. Pumpkin Moon. Black Cat Moon. Black Moon…. That could be a keeper.
The books faithfully list November as the month of the Beaver Moon. So as long as we’re coming completely from way out in left field, why not Puppy Moon? We have the dog days of Summer. Astronaut Moon? Soul Moon? Bleak Moon? College Moon? Monsoon Moon? Mons Moon it is!
The Cold Moon is the final official moon. Captain Kirk met many characters in his travels, and of all the souls he met, Mr. Spock’s, he said, was the “most human.” If Jesus told Mr. Spock, “Fear not!” Mr. Spock would honestly say, “I do not.” In December, we sing “Auld Lang Syne,” and hope that all people will live long and prosper. December’s would make the best “Spock Moon.”
In the book, Owl At Home, Owl addresses the moon: “What a good, round friend you are!”
Indeed!

Hard thing, “labor,” but not as bad as “toil.” But not as good as “work.”
Toil is punishment, not work. It can be a useful figure of speech though, in the sense that one has worked so hard that, to an untrained eye, the work would have seemed senselessly, gratuitously difficult, although actually the strenuous effort was necessary to accomplish a worthwhile goal.
“Work” is constructive effort and activity that enjoins the worker in a worthy cause and results in betterment of the worker.
One’s job might or might not include activities characterized as work in this constructive sense.
At many places, as little is left to chance as possible. An employee must adhere to a dress code. He is watched on camera all day, so not a single moment of his day is not recorded and subject to scrutiny and second guesses by management. An employee manual dictates exactly how the employee should perform in every conceivable situation. Individuality and creativity are expressly discouraged.
Work is a great burden for the majority. “Misfits are everywhere,” goes the Kinks song, and it’s really true. We constantly see commercials for fast food places I entirely avoid, because the reality is so depressing. I see the people who work there and the idea of going into that fast food restaurant and asking them to do something for me is thoroughly distasteful, because they don’t want to be there, wearing those silly clothes, making that lousy food, and I don’t want to add to their misery.
We are surrounded by people in those positions.
Grocery stores? When the employees go on strike, we hear about their miserable working conditions.
The single parents waiting on tables, a paycheck away from homelessness, dependent on tips.
Department stores, malls, gas stations, nail salons, all the businesses in strip malls, all those people working part time, without benefits, who can’t afford college and can barely afford their rent and car payments.
Everywhere, people who have wound up doing things for a living they never would have intended.
People who, every day, struggle to assert their dignity under difficult circumstances because they couldn’t possibly do otherwise.
Jesus was accused of many crimes by His enemies: blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath. “My father goes on working, and so do I,” He said.
So God wasn’t finished after six days. He is still working, because work is part of His identity. It is part of our identity as His children, created in His image.
Even if we can’t celebrate our paying jobs on Labor Day, we can celebrate the real work we do– all the constructive activity we undertake– being good, helpful, honest, compassionate people, having positive impacts– simply through being human.