A moving experience

     Here I was on Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the back porch (actually a wooden deck) reading, my sister, Janie who was visiting sitting on the couch with Sammy her puppy, when it felt like someone jumped onto the deck, giving it a little shake.  We looked at each other and both said "What was that?"  She kept dozing and I kept reading on that beautiful late Summer afternoon.  About an hour later I saw on the news that and earthquake struck central Virginia about the time we felt the "shake" on the porch.  An earthquake!  Who would have thought.

     Back in the Fall of 1996 I spent four months in Central California on Sabbatical at the School of Applied Theology (SAT) at Berkeley.  Every week San Francisco listed in the papers the tremors and their magnitude.  There were many.  But in four months I felt not one.  Now, at home in Southwestern Pennsylvania, I felt the earth move.  Strange world!  It has become one of those "Where were you?" moments.

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     One of the twelve was a man named Bartholomew, also called Nathaniel, a native of Cana in Galilee and a student of the Jewish Law.  He was one of the seventy-two, and was introduced to Jesus by Philip.  Jesus recognized the integrity of the man in words of praise: "Here is a true child of Israel.  There is no duplicity in him."   With the promise of Jesus that he would "see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man",  Bartholomew took the good news to remote places of Asia and the East and was martyred  in Armenia.  Today is his feast.