James D. Hogan

While He May Be Found

On December 9, 2023

Dall-e made an image for me of someone lost in the wilderness.

God is not Time and Temperature

Episcopalians who are familiar with the Morning Prayer liturgy may remember in its Rite II form a canticle that comes from the second of Isaiah’s four servant songs.

Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
ISaiah 55:6-7

Isaiah is a regular stop on the Advent cycle. During this season, in fact, the Morning Prayer liturgy opens with two different pieces of scripture from this book. They offer two ideas: that we are in the wilderness, and that God will soon reveal himself to us.

You might remember the prophet Isaiah from the token verse of his calling. God asked who he should send, and Isaiah answered, “Here am I! Send me!” I admit that as a child, whatever I assigned to Isaiah in my brain was dramatically reduced to lines like that–but it’s worth remembering that this prophet lived and wrote some 800 years before the birth of Christ. The book’s narrative essence follows a time of captivity, a time of punishing Babylonian captivity and exile, and afterward, a time of restoration.

I receive a daily Advent meditation by email, and this morning’s scripture was Isaiah 55:6-13, which begins with the passage quoted above. For some reason, the first sentence landed differently: Seek the Lord while he may be found.

An Over Forty Victim of Fate

By James D. Hogan

On September 2, 2023

In writing

IN MEMORIAM

Cheeseburgers and ice cold beer and departure signs in airports and grapefruit have an unusual allure in this stage of life.

Roughly anyone alive in the last fifty years who listened to the radio has almost certainly heard the chirpy steel drums and layered recorder intro to Jimmy Buffett’s ubiquitous “Margaritaville.” The trop-rock favorite saturates every summer, and together with the other Core 8 songs he was known for playing at every live show, the song anchored any beach trip soundtrack.

One of my strongest memories of “Margaritaville,” though, came when I was in college. I honestly didn’t care too much for Jimmy Buffett at the time–all for reasons that aren’t really worth defending anymore, but largely because in the early 2000s it felt like he was at the bottom of the value trough between his original luster and his late-career popularity*.

I was sitting in the back of Chris Hall’s Chevy Tahoe with some friends, four of us carpooling together to a high school about half an hour from our college. We were student teaching, the capstone to our education degrees that is effectively an entire semester of unpaid labor, and gas had gotten expensive, so we took turns driving every week to save money.

Rabbits

By James D. Hogan

On June 28, 2023

In writing

three rabbits huddled in pine needles — *Sylvilagus obscurus and strawberry.*

Sure, life finds a way. So do all the forces conspiring against it.

Friday morning I was leaving for work when I opened the garage door and found what appeared to be a large pinecone in the driveway. As we don’t have any conifers next to the driveway, I was curious as to how it ended up there, and I went to explore.

It had been raining all week, and there, next to a puddle, was a baby rabbit. At first glance, I assumed it was dead, but after a few seconds, I realized the poor critter was in fact alive, breathing shallowly now and then. The morning temperatures were in the 50s; it was probably hypothermic.

There really wasn’t anything to do. Most of what I know about baby rabbits revolves around a grim understanding that they die. They are comically vulnerable. Loud noises could spur them into fatal shock. I wasn’t sure how this fellow had ended up in our driveway, but I needed to get to work. I put him under a rhododendron next to the garage.

My mistake is that I told the kids what I’d done.