I was sitting down to a dinner of salad and blackened chicken parts which aren’t really very blackened, not by my definition, but that’s what the menu said. And I had picked up a Dallas Morning News for some entertainment reading — great comics page, rather rotten right–wing editorial section — extremely conservative. After reading the comics, I glanced at the front page, and there was note about an old family acquaintance, a Presbyterian minister, now 87 years old. He was accused by six different women, the former minister supposedly sexually abused these women.
“Uh-oh,” I think.
Put down the fork, pick the cell phone, call my sister on the left coast. I left a message.
By the time she got around to calling me back, she had been interviewed by the reporter on the story, She was in extremely good spirits. “Years of therapy…” she said.
Turns out that portions of the Presbyterian Church knew about such allegations against this particular minister, going back as far as 1970. Is this an attempt to disparage to a member of the clergy, or is it a chance to heal past pain?
The last time I was on the Left Coast, my sister gave me a sweet smelling sage stick. Over the last weekend, I picked a rose from the neighbor’s garden patch — gave the rose to a Capricorn who was over for an evening. She left it on the monitor. Put them both in a special dish and the sweet fragrance is purifying my space. It’s a simple yet remarkably effective tool for cleansing a space of bad stuff.
“I said I’m running but I’ll take my time, a friend of the Devil is a friend of mine” (Hunter, Garcia, Dawson © 1970, Friend of the Devil from American Beauty)
