As we start a new year I would like to look forward to all the good things that can happen to each of us and indeed to this old world. But part of my mind is held in the past, specifically in the month of October and my 50th high school class reunion that was held during the Charter Day weekend.
Here is the problem – I didn’t attend any of my class’s reunion events and would like to explain why to myself and to you, if you don’t mind listening. Part of me really wanted to participate in the planned activities, but I realized that I had almost nothing in common with my former classmates. Most were and are strangers to me.
For example, about a year ago I saw a former classmate in the Swedenborg Library. We looked at each other for a few moments, showed signs of faint recognition, then we turned away – strangers.
Then a few months prior to the reunion, there was a planning committee meeting in my neighborhood. I happened to be walking by the house where it was being held. Two of my former classmates approached me in a car. They appeared to look at me and exchange a few words. Then one looked away and the other slunk down in her seat to avoid me as they drove by. (I suspect that one of them said, “Just ignore him.”) But I looked down at her as they drove by and she looked up at me from her hiding position and away they went. What, in the name of God, do they believe about me? Am I some sort of odious person to be avoided? Well, let them have their thoughts, but I doubt that they are based on any reality about my actual nature and behavior.
Yes, I really wanted to go the reunion activities but that incident killed my enthusiasm. Also I wondered what I would be reuniting with. It would have been mostly with strangers, people with whom I have no friendships based on the serving of uses.
The past is past and I can only approach it with careful reflection, but that game is not one I choose to play for any extended period. Rather let me and you look to the future, to what good we can do there, to how we can serve humbly the Lord there and enjoy genuine friendships.
Hope you smile occasionally as you read the January 2009 issue of SUNSHINE.
A young student’s advice: Never smart off to a teacher whose eyes and ears are twitching.
From the Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina:
Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you
passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.
An inflatable boy goes to his inflatable school one day with a pin. He sees the inflatable headmaster walking towards him and he pokes him with the pin. Sick of school, he then pokes the inflatable school with the pin. Finally he pokes himself with the pin. The headmaster tells him gravely, “You’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down, but worst of all you’ve let yourself down.”
A first-grade teacher provided the first part of a proverb and her students provided the last part.
After stopping off for lunch on a day trip, an elderly couple had driven ten miles down the road when the woman remembered that she had left her glasses at the restaurant. Her husband was irritated at having to go back for them. “How could you forget your glasses?” he moaned. “This is going to add an hour to the journey. The whole day is wasted!”
He was still complaining when they pulled up again outside the restaurant. As his wife got out of the car, he grumbled, “While you’re in there, you may as well get my hat too.”
By Virginia Bennet
By Dee S. Johnson
A little boy climbed on his grandfather’s knee,
Said, “Grandpa, how come you’re so tough
You rope and you ride, and you chew on rawhide.
What makes you so rugged and rough?”
The old cowboy grinned, said, “I’ll let you in
On my little secret for roughness:
Gun powder on oatmeal for breakfast each day!
That’s sure to assure tough-enoughness!”
Well, the little boy did as his grandfather had said,
Gunpowder for breakfast is great!
He died hale and hearty at his own birthday party
At the age of one hundred and eight.
He left seventeen kids, forty grandkids,
Sixty-seven great – grandkids in all;
Also left, when he died, a hole fifteen feet wide
In the thick crematorium wall
By Ed Brown
Just a nosy, bossy spinster
Allergic to all fun
Her life’s devotion: GOSSIP
Every town’s got one
Just last week my truck was parked
In front of our one bar
Miss Busybody saw it
Amongst the other cars
So my status has been altered
“The town drunk” now I’m called
With gossip, instant, lightening speed
The whole town knows it all
What goes around then comes around
I didn’t want to fight
So I just parked my pickup
In her driveway all last night
To be loved, love. Decimus Magnus Ausonius
I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody. Benjamin Franklin
I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to my fellow creatures, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect, for I shall not pass this way again. Anonymous
Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service and from solitude to kinship with all mankind. ibid.
Love seeks not limits but outlets. ibid.
The time when I was converted was when religion became no longer a mere duty, but a pleasure.John L. Lincoln
The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation. William Hutton
In God’s will is our peace. Anonymous
Most men forget God all day and ask Him to remember them at night. ibid.
God loves to help him who strives to help himself. Aeschylus
God has many names though he is only one being. Aristotle
A heathen philosopher once asked a Christian, “Where is God?” The Christian answered, “Let me first ask you, Where is He not?” Aaron Arrowsmith
I fear God, yet am not afraid of him. Sir Thomas Browne
God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers. William Penn
Blessed be God’s voice, for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it! Thomas Carlyle
Before I start this section, allow me to share a momentary fantasy about my ignorance. I imagine that my house has a
small fire in it and I yell out the window, “Quick, please, anyone, tell me the number for 911.” Then a neighbor shouts,
“Just dial the numbers 9-1-1.” After a few minutes, I call out the window to my neighbor, “I can’t find the eleven.”
I apologize and hope you enjoy the rest of the items on this page. RL
Golfer: What a disastrous round. You must be the worst caddie in the world!
Caddie: I doubt it, sir. That would be too much of a coincidence!
A man heard that most car accidents happen within 2 miles of home. So he moved.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Astronaut.
Astronaut who?
Astronaut what your county can do for you
but what you can do for your country.
Nothing ever happens in our town. If we want excitement we go down to the department store and try on gloves.
Our town is so boring that the local newspaper prints the crossword puzzle on the front page.
A man came home from a game of golf to be greeted by his young son. “Daddy, Daddy,” he cried, “did you win?”
“Well,” explained his father, “in golf it doesn’t matter so much if you win. But I tell you one thing, son –
I got to hit the ball more times than anybody else.”
Live your life like a fried egg – with the sunny side up.
A mother is a woman whose life is disorganized around her children.
I call my dog “Bulova.” He’s a watchdog.
The secret of success is a secret to most of us.
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
By P. Boller, Jr. & J. George
“Elementary, my dear Watson”
Between 1887 and 1927 British writer A. Conan Doyle published four novels and fifty-six short stories about the
celebrated detective Sherlock Holmes and his physician friend Dr. John H. Watson. But not even once did he have
Holmes utter the well-known phrase. It was Basil Rathbone, British actor playing the ratiocinative sleuth in a
series of Hollywood moves appearing in the 1930s and 1940s, who made the words famous.
“Go west, young man….”
In an article for Indiana’s Terre Haute Express in 1851, John Babsone Soule first gave this advice, and [Horace]
Greely who reprinted the article in his New York Tribune saw to it that Soule got full credit. But nevertheless
it didn’t work out that way; ever afterwards the statement was attributed to Greely.
“God must have loved the common people; he made so many of them.“
There is, sad to say, no evidence that Lincoln ever said anything of this kind. It was James Morgan, in a book
entitled Our Presidents (New York, 1928), who apparently first put words of this kind in Lincoln’s mouth.
“Let them eat cake.”
If the average American knows anything about French history…he knows that Marie Antoinette said that if the peasants
didn’t have bread to eat they could “eat cake.” But the remark, according to Columbia University historian
Jacques Barzun, is an old chestnut, current long before the French Queen was born. In his Confessions, written
in 1778, French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote: “At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great
princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat cake.’” This was
several years before Marie Antoinette is supposed to have tossed off her unfeeling remark.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
One of the popular pseudo-Scripture quotes, the cleanliness admonition, comes, not from the Bible, but from John Wesley,
the 18th century British clergyman, who founded Methodism.
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Many people think this is in the Bible, but it’s actually Alexander Pope. In An Essay on Criticism (1711),
the British poet wrote: “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.”
This page and the next contain items from the February, 2008 issue of Sunshine.
While driving I had an accident with a magician. It wasn’t my fault, the guy came out of nowhere.
My grandfather lived to be 103. Every morning he would eat a whole raw onion and smoke a cigar. You know what his dying words were? Nobody knows; they wouldn’t go near the guy.
They usually have three tellers in my local bank. Except when it’s busy, and then they have one.
I don’t know anything about computers. I don’t even know how often to change the oil.
My grandfather had a special rocking chair built that would lean forward rather than backward, so that he could fake interest in any conversation.
A man suffered for months with chronic back pain and was eventually persuaded by his doctor to go and see a
chiropractor. But he didn’t have much faith in such people and was convinced they wouldn’t be able to help him.
Yet after a few minutes’ treatment, his back felt like new.
“How do you feel about chiropractors now?” asked the doctor.
The man said, “I stand corrected.”
Two peanuts were walking down a sidewalk. One was assaulted….
What do you call an unemployed jester? Nobody’s fool.
“Don’t worry about senility,” my grandfather used to say. “When it hits you, you won’t know it.”
I have bad luck with women. A woman I was dating told me on the phone, “I have to go now, there’s a telemarketer on the other line.
Everyday at six p.m. on a game reserve in Kenya, a pride of lions gathered at a watering hole. They didn’t drink from
it, and they made no attempt to attack passing impala and zebra. Instead, they just sat there and watched. After a week of
this, an elephant came over to them and asked what they were doing.
The leader of the pack said, “We’re waiting for the early evening gnus.”
By the Old York Road Historical Society
Regina Iungerich’s house still stands at 2832 Alnwick Road, east of the loop near Huntingdon Pike, and was built in 1910. The Howards were later owners, as were Robert Cole and his son. The French chateau-style house was called Petit Chateau.
The Rose house is located at 2639 Alden Road and dates from c. 1792 when John Webster built the three-story fieldstone farmhouse. Christina Snyder owned the property in 1830, and later Benjamin Yerkes owned it and lived there until his death in 1851. His widow and son stayed in the house. From 1906 until 1910, James Worthington lived there. Transient farmworkers then occupied the house until Don Rose purchased the property in 1918. After he left in 1952, his daughter [Tryn] and her husband became owners.
The Potts house, Stancott, meaning “stone cottage” dates from 1896 and is located on the south side of Alnwick Road. It was built for Rev. John Faulkner Potts, his wife, and nine children. Reverend Potts was not an active minister but rather spent 27 years, starting in Glasgow [Scotland] before his relocation to Bryn Athyn, compiling what would become a 10-volune concordance, or index, to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Henry Stroh built Pendle House in 1895 for the family of Bishop William F. Pendleton. The house is at 2701 Alnwick Road, on the south side…. The southern-style mansion remains a showplace in Bryn Athyn.
BY William and Mary Morris
ad hoc An ad hoc committee is one organized to direct attention to a single particular situation, usually without regard to the broad picture. Thus members of a university faculty might organize an ad hoc committee for the defense of one of their number who they feel has been unfairly discharged, without regard to the general problem of academic freedom or tenure or whatever broader concepts might be involved. The term comes from the Latin ad (to, for) and hoc (this thing).
a cappella originally Italian for “from the chapel,” means “without accompaniment.”
red letter day Almanacs and calendars issued by religious organizations often print saint’s days and holidays in red. Since these are days for special services, the expression red letter day came to mean any very special day, especially one that’s lucky for you.
tangerine The first tangerines came from Tangiers, the Moroccan seaport, and were called “tangerine oranges.” The color tangerine is a bright reddish orange.
What the dickens has nothing whatever to do with the famous English novelist. It’s simply a euphemism for “What the devil!”
woebegone Here’s an oddity, a word that means almost precisely the opposite of what you think it would mean from the sum of its parts. One would think that a woebegone chap would be all cheerful and devil-may-care, because his woe had been gone. Not so, however. In Middle English wo did indeed means the same as woe now does, but begon was a word unto itself, meaning “beset.” So a woebegone person is one beset by – not free from – woe.
Rhubarb, meaning heated argument, often between professional athletes in the course of a game, comes from the language of the theater, TV and movies. In the early days of films – and still today in the theater – when a crowd is supposed to be muttering in a surly or argumentative mood, the director often tells them to say “rhubarb” over and over again.
Vamoose came into our language from a source many hundreds of miles away from the habitat of the moose. Specifically, it is a word that early Texan cowboys picked up from the Mexican vaqueros [cowboys]. The word comes from the Spanish vamos, meaning “let’s go.” Most commonly it was used when there was some pressing reason for hasty departure. Something along the lines of: “Vamoose, boys, here comes the law!”
MARY AVERY
Mrs. Avery, known to many in this community for her work for Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Pitcairn, passed into the spiritual world January 4th. Mrs. Avery has performed many services of value to the Church including the typing of sermons and other material sent out by Mrs. Pitcairn, and [she] frequently attended services and other occasions in Bryn Athyn.
Larry Brannon has been elected President of the Student Government Association of Broward Junior College (7000) students in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and will appear in the upcoming edition of Who’s Who in the Colleges.
A meeting last Sunday evening as a result of the letter in the Theta Alpha Journal concerning the establishment of a New Church retirement and/or nursing home, gave careful consideration of this topic as initiated by Dr. Andrew Doering and the Lennart Alfelts. Those present made preliminary plans for the exploration of the possibility of such a home in Bryn Athyn.
Dr. Marguerite Beck Block, author of “The New Church in the New World,” has kindly agreed to visit the Academy College and meet with a class on the history of New Church Education….
Miss Dana Gruber graduated from the Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing. She received the Moss Award in “recognition of her academic achievement, who, by qualities of mind and spirit has best lived up to the high traditions of the Pennsylvania Hospital Nurse.”
ELEPHANTS in Southampton! Things like that shouldn’t happen to a motorist without warning. To be driving along minding one’s own business, when all of a sudden out of the corner of the eye, one sees three elephants peacefully grazing next to the turnpike on the way to Southampton, could be demoralizing! But quickly the children solved the mystery – a carnival or circus was coming to town.
Here lies Johnny Yeast
Pardon me for not rising
Ruidoso, New Mexico
Here lies John Ross
Kicked by a hoss
Kendel Parish Church
Westmoreland, England
None of us ever voted
for Roosevelt or Truman
Hallenbeck Family
Elgin, Minnesota
An elderly priest, speaking to a younger priest, said, “It was a good idea to replace the first four rows of pews with plush bucket theater seats. It worked like a charm. The front of the church always fills first now.”
The young priest nodded, and the old priest continued, “And you told me that to add a little more beat to the music would bring young people back to the church, so I supported you when you brought in that rock ‘n roll gospel choir. We were packed to the balcony!”
“Thank you, Father,” answered the young priest. “I am pleased that you are open to the new ideas of youth.”
“However,” said the elderly priest, “I’m afraid you’ve gone too far with the drive-through confessional.”
“But, Father,” protested the young priest, “my confessions and the donations have nearly doubled since I began that.”
“I know, son, but the flashing neon sign, ‘Toot ‘n Tell or Go to Hell,’ just can’t stay on the church roof.”
Minnesota, land of two seasons – winter is coming, winter is here.
If you love Minnesota, raise your right ski.
Have you jump-started your kid today?