The rubber stamp ministry
Posted on December 3, 2006
Filed Under All, Photos, Taking Faith, My Brain |
My friend David Perry, a retired Episcopal priest who lives in Portland, has decided to heal me with what I’m calling the rubber stamp ministry. David loves to create amusing communications adorned with rubber stamps and notes in his fine, small handwriting. He also excels at finding old postcards and very amusing greeting cards, which he often customizes before mailing. Something like 8 of these missives have arrived in the last month, a font of cheer, to say the least.
There is an Edward Monkton drawing of a The Cat of Glory (’And there shall come amongst them a CAT of such GREAT GLORY that all who see it will be SORE amazed and MARVEL at its SPLENDOUR’), a hilarious, and irreverent Thanksgiving card, as many cards featuring penguins (a favorite of mine) as David has no doubt come across in the past month, a postcard of Multnomah falls in winter with a prominent, cheery, penguin-themed rubber stamp on the back, a cartoon depicting life in the cat’s retirement home, and a gorilla cartoon card among those I can easily put my hands on.
It occurs to me that the David Perrys of this world are exactly the element that would be missing if Richard Dawkins et al. have their way, and end faith (or at least religion) in the name of intellectual rigor and honesty. More on this topic TK…
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It’s an absurd notion that ‘god’ and all its cultural trappings could be sufficiently opposed to fade out as a string of history, as is the notion that people will never again over-react to their cats.
Well put… there are all sorts of faith communities that defy rational explication (though evolutionary psychologists are having a good go at that particular space)….
[…] Friend, Episcopal priest David Perry dropped in today. David’s down from Portland visiting family in San Francisco for the holidays: I’m sure he had a thousand things to do, but being David, he drove down and spent part of his afternoon with me. We had a great time catching up. David is the author of the ‘rubber stamp ministry,’ which has been an unbelievable font of strength and hope these past couple months. David and I have stayed in touch from a distance since our days at All Saints in Pasadena, where David directed family ministries, lo these 25 years. […]
[…] David’s ministry to me has been one of the things that continue to convince me that Grace exists. David’s ‘rubber-stamp ministry‘ helped me (and Linda, too, I think) through some of the darkest hours of my confrontation with cancer. David, who spent much of his career with the national office of the Episcopal Church as an ecumenical ambassador, is, nevertheless, a bit of a character. […]