Six Things for Six Days til Pentecost

1. I have finished my first year of seminary. They didn't kick me out.

2. I heard Barbara Kingsolver talk Friday night, about her new book "Animal, Vegeatable, Miracle." Local food is a necessary ecological corollary to the coming anarcho-baptist revolution.

3. This week in Chicago, Pentecost is coming with cicadas. Folks at Grace Baptist Church celebrated Pentecost a week early. I was shocked and appalled by this gross violation of the liturgical year, but I am happy to have two chances to celebrate my favorite day of the year. Chicago's 17 Year Cicadas will emerge from the ground, we think, sometime this week. There's something deeply Pentecostal about this, and there is probably a poem in there somewhere: quietly waiting below ground for seventeen years, sucking on tree roots for nourishment, and then all coming out together, and covering everything, and making the loudest insect noise on earth. Like, really loud. There may also be a revolutionary strategy there.

4. According to NPR, no one knows how cicadas know to all come up from underground together, after seventeen years. I believe that cicadas are impelled from their nests through the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Pentecology.

5. Tomorrow morning I leave for two weeks in Nicaragua. I'll be back June 6th, and on June 11th I start my hospital chaplaincy internship. I expect both of these experiences to be deeply challenging and wonderful.

6. I bought a broad-brimmed hat for my trip. It had a tag on it that proudly trumpeted its ability to float. It also featured a warning label "not to be used as a flotation device."