Thanks

Thanks, Wolfgang. I hope we meet someday
God Bless you and your’s.

Pastor Roy

Our Son’s Deployment

Our Son, Doug and his wife just left. He has been home for Christmas following a pre-deployment assignment away from home. He returns tomorrow and awaits transportation to his overseas destination, all of which are confidential. Pray for us as this additional seperation is most dificult.

God’s Richest Blessings be upon you for the coming year.

Pastor Roy

THIS IS A TOUGH ONE!

This blog was meant to be an occasional one, but not as infrequent as it turned out to be.

I have been a Pastor for over forty-three years, and  have met with families and individuals in crisis too many times to count. I have conducted an uncounted number of funerals, and shared an untold amount of hospital visits. But none compared to the one which occured a week ago today.

Our Daughter, Elizabeth had a chronic ailment and received surgery at a hospital in a city distant from our home. She recuperated for five days while we stayed in the area until she was well enough to travel home. The Physicians were confident the surgery would help her condition from which she endured in pain and much discomfort for over twenty years. For two days she appeared to be doing well. Then for three days she would not get out of bed. She drank fluids but ate very little.

One week ago today she collapsed in our hallway. Efforts to revive her both here and at the ER were   unsuccessful and she began her eternal journey.

Pastors and their families are supposed to be strong. But we are not made of stone. Family is everything - a responsibility God has given to hold in trust, along with the lives of which we are also Stewards.

I know all the right words. My faith in the Resurrection has not faltered. But we miss our lovely Daughter very much. Elizabeth’s two girls, ages thirteen and six, will grow up without her wise counsel, but they will never be without her love. Their Father is trying, but it is a trying time for him also.

We ask the question, “WHY?” The answer is not forthcoming other than it is God’s will. And I know it is not God’s will to punish and recklessly take away life.

The comfort we receive is not only from friends and family, but in the knowing that there is a higher purpose, along with some things to which we are not privy.

The cause of death is listed as probable pulmonary embolism. We do not know what else transpired within her body. Nor what might have happened had this taken place while she was driving with our Grandchildren.

We miss her dearly and grieve her passing, sad that she will not physically see her children grow and achieve the things they surely will. It is this emptiness that tugs at the heart, not anger at God for the taking, nor for the rebuke about the unfairness of life.

Liz was a giving and loving person. She was a Registered Nurse with a hospice agency. She saw the end of life many times in her profession, and knew all the signs. I feel she knew eternity was near. She gave until she could give no longer.

We celebrated her life, rather than mourned her death and were grateful she passed on with us at her side rather than in a remote hospital room.

Our lives can never be the same. The memories can not be taken away. Pray for us and especially her two girls Sara and Emma.

May God Bless you as He has blessed us. 

Pastor Roy

The Beauty Of Art

Martin Scorsese in the companion text to his PBS documentary Series, “The Blues”, has written: “The beauty and power of art is  that it can never be standardized or mechanized. It has to be a human exchange passed down, hand to hand, or else it’s not art. It’s endlessly old and endlessly new….” (Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, p. 6).

No one can exclusively own art or charge for its propagation, but it must be taught, shared and handed down in order for it to be genuine. It is old in the person of those pioneers of the Mississippi Delta slavery; it is old in the pain of the endless struggle of the sharecropper; it is old in those who hollered in the fields of the prisons, all crying the blues. It is new in the person of those who have discovered for the first time this voice. It is new as one begins to experience the roots and meaning of “the blues”.

 Sitting at the feet of a guru, listening to pontificated absolutes, contributes little to the acquiring of the ability to produce art. To sit knee to knee, nose to nose, fingers to the fretboard, keyboard, or other note producing mechanism is the heart of the apprenticeship experience. To listen and learn from those who went before is the beginning of knowledge. W. C. Handy, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Blind Willie McTell, Little Walter, Memphis Minnie, Bessie and Mamie Smith, Mississippi John Hurt, B. B. King, and others of the struggle to rise from the Delta of pain have led the way to only a beginning of what BLUES really means.

And how can you put a price on this? How can you determine the only way to approach this art? To know the blues is to feel it, taste it, to see that it is really more than just about a stubborn mule or unrequited love. And if you were not there your empathy only comes from the handing down of the experience. It is our calling to continue to hand this down, freely, without reservation or imprimatur.

Of course The Blues is only one example of the art of music. I believe this holds true for the entirety of the folk genre.

God Bless You!

Pastor Roy

The In-Between Blues

Robert Gordon, in the biography, “Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life And Times Of Muddy Waters” has written “If gospel music is about the future of one’s soul, blues music is about its present” (pg 275). John Work writing for the Fisk-Library of Congress Coahoma County (Mississippi) Study in 1943 has added, “The blues singer has no interest in heaven, and not much hope in earth.”

This seems so pessimistic, and in reality it  is. The blues were born in the slavery of the Missippi Delta where there was not much hope of ever escaping the poverty of serfdom or its successor, share-croppery. Nor could there be an expectation of life beyond the prison walls which adopted the walk-behind mule, and cotton choppers’ hollers (calls and responses) into the lives of the Southern black inmate population.

At first crude African instruments and language wailed back and forth across the fields. Feelings of despair echoed from the wail of a solitary voice, at times unintelligible to the uninitiated. Adopted dialects slowly arose accompanied by the plinking of a banjo, the strum of a guitar, or the moan of the harp sobbing in the solitude of the night.

As time wore on, and it was a slow wearing, the blues musicians became popular, at first playing on the porch for kin and friends, later in juke joints. When touring began, they were lured to distant cities, now centers of the blues and the recording companies with promises of large advances and royalties. The truth, however, was that they were no better than their sharecropper forebears, who owed their lives to the commissary, which had no accounting other than to itself. Royalties went unpaid as the illiterate artists signed away the rights for their work. It wasn’t until Muddy Waters filed suit against his music publisher in 1976 did the artists begin to receive the fruits of their labors from those who attempted to steal them, including suppossed collectors of early folk music.

The legacy of the blues has been an unhappy one. There is only one way out of this life! But the music matured into what we now know as the Chicago Blues, Harmonica Blues, Rhythm and Blues along with Gospel music which in the end offers a glimpse of hope in a still troubled world, littered with broken relationships, underemployment and less than desirable jobs and wages. The blues just keep plinking, until one day something better comes along.

God Bless You!

Pastor Roy 

Did you read Dear Old Dad’s post on the Tangier Sound blog this morning? What great advise for us neophytes. How often we want to give up because this ole thing could better be used as a boat anchor.

Play, practice and play some more. Just keep plinking!

Pastor Roy

Hello world!

The Crisfield Folk Musicians’ Retreat is looking great. I can hardly wait to mingle with the talent that will be present, and do a bunch of learning. I hope all who are attending will sign up at the Google Group per your invitation. See you there.

Pastor Roy