The Life of Christ by Chinese Artists. I’d found this before, lost it, then found it again today. I’m linking it here so that I can find it easily the next time I’m looking.
Last night it started snowing… which is odd for Seattle. It snows maybe once a year here, and when it does snow the snow usually dissipates the next day as the sun comes out and the city warms up.
But last night was different. It snowed seriously: big, wet flakes that stuck, and it snowed for over two hours. It stayed cold overnight, and the result was surprising: this morning there was serious snow in Seattle, deep enough to have a snowfight and icy enough to make it dangerous to drive. The “dangerous to drive” part is what got most of the attention of the news, but Larisa and I weren’t worried. I had practice driving on icy roads in Minnesota and Colorado, and we weren’t going far.
Nonetheless, Larisa didn’t go to work: her boss sent her home as soon as she got there, since less than half of the staff was able to get to work, and they didn’t even have enough customers to justify that. So we drove home, which became a small adventure, because I made the fateful decision to try to drive through the neighborhood on the way to our apartment. I was somewhat forced into it: as I was driving home, we crested a hill and I could see that the lane in front of me was blocked a little ways ahead with stuck cars. I couldn’t safely merge into the other lane and I couldn’t safely stop while going downhill on ice-covered roads, so I did the best thing I could manage: I made an immediate right turn into the neighborhoods. This proved to be a bad idea. The ice on the roads in the neighborhood was much thicker, and the streets behind our apartment are very hilly, and our apartment block lies at the bottom of a long series of hills. As we started going down the first hill, I realized my predicament: attempting to brake going down the hill made me slide immediately, so my best bet was to let the car roll so that I could at least steer. What followed was a hair-raising challenge: drive the car down several hills, on narrow winding roads, around stuck cars and roundabouts, with the roads covered with ice and the minimum possible use of the brakes and limited ability to make sharp corners. It was terrifying. But I did it perfectly. We didn’t hit anything, lose control, or freak out. It was great.
Of course, as Larisa reminds me, it was God who protected us. We both prayed during our ordeal, which I’m sure had something to do with our making it through.
Then I worked for the rest of the day, and in the afternoon Larisa and I went out for a walk, and I took pictures. Fun!
I was tired of the old design, so now you have this one. The background image is large, but we all have broadband now, don’t we? I like it better than the last one, which was too narrow. The only thing that would make this better is if there were a good way to do CSS transparency; as it is, users of some browsers will probably see something other than intended. Too bad for them.
My blog is turning into a clip blog, it seems. Ah, well. Today we have another tasty tidbit from Fr. Stephen on Bad Icons:
And so the mystery of the holy icons seems to work from both sides. For the viewer, the icon is a window to heaven (if the viewer is indeed looking for heaven). And for those who are not looking for heaven, icons, including their human forms, become opaque, and we see only the reflection of our sinful self….
What seems inescapable to me is that there be icons. If you outlaw them in the Church, they will still occupy the Church in the persons of the congregation. We cannot say, “Only read the Scripture, do not look at me as an icon.” Nobody gets that kind of free ride as a Christian. You’re an icon whether you like it or not. And there will be other images as well - either well done reflecting heaven itself - or poorly reflecting everything other than heaven. But there will be icons. God give us grace to rightly honor the windows to heaven He has opened for us, and to be a window to heaven for all who see us.
From today’s bleat:
If we do not remind everyone that it’s “okay” to be an individual we will all topple back into the gruel-colored sea of Conformity, waiting for Elvis to return from the dead and save us again. We’re always so close; it’s a miracle some people have the courage to leave the house with unpopular bands on their iPod, lest the Conformation suddenly strike before you can get home, and the grey-flannel-suit-clad Sameness Squad takes you aside to see if you’re listening to something other than a Clear-Channel approved song. We have a long way to go, of course, before we know we’re safe; I read the other day about a fellow who got a full-face tattoo and had troubles finding employment in the service industry. But he sounds like an individualist, you think. Alas: he used Maori imagery. Most people who get a full-face tattoo use Maori imagery. That’s right: conformists.
Chris Jones has invited comments on a paragraph from Dom Dix, a famed Anglican liturgical scholar. I will reproduce the entire quote here:
We know now, too, that the Apostolic paradosis of practice, like the Apostolic paradosis of doctrine, is something which actually ante-dates the writing of the New Testament documents themselves by some two or three decades. It is presupposed by those documents and referred to more than once as authoritative in them. This paradosis of practice continued to develop in complete freedom from any control by those documents for a century after they were written, before they were collected into a New Testament ‘Canon’ and recognised for the first time as authoritative ‘Scripture’ beside and above the Jewish ‘Scriptures’ of the Old Testament, which alone formed the ‘Bible’ of the Apostolic Church. Now that the history of the Canonisation of the New Testament is better understood, we can begin to shake ourselves free from the sixteenth century — or rather the mediaeval — delusion that primitive Christian Worship and Church Order must have been framed in conscious deference to the precedents of a New Testament which as such did not yet exist. The purely occasional documents now found in it do not contain, and were never intended by their authors to contain, anything like the Old Testament codes of prescriptions for the rites of worship. That was governed by the authoritative ‘Apostolic Tradition’ of practice, to which it is plain that the scattered Gentile Churches adhered pretty rigidly throughout the second century. I am not for a moment seeking to question the authoritative weight of the New Testament Scriptures for us as a written doctrinal standard. I am only trying to point out that there is available another source of information on the original and authentic Apostolic interpretation of Christianity, which the Scriptures presuppose and which must be used in the interpretation of the Scriptures. I do not deny that in time the recognition of this fact will be bound to lead to some considerable readjustment of ideas for more than one set of people. But tonight all I would say is that the liturgical tradition can be shewn to be older in some of its main elements than the New Testament Scriptures, and that down to the end of the second century, at least, it was regarded as having an ‘Apostolic’ authority of its own independently of them. We cannot look, therefore, for any attempt in this period to conform the practice of worship to them artificially. Nevertheless, the two do illustrate one another in a remarkable way.
forest shall destroy them and whatsoever is there
I love it. It’s the title of my next novel: “Forest Shall Destroy Them.”
There is a beautiful post today over at Glory to God For All Things title “Things Are More Than They Appear”:
Things are so much more than they appear. A little girl is the longed for bearer of the Word. She will be the Mother of God. This little girl is the one of whom the prophecies of old, given to Eve, were spoken. Her seed will indeed “bruise his (the serpent’s) head.”
Our own lives have their irony, an irony too often lost on us. “Man,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa (I do believe), “Is mud who was commanded to become god.” The irony that we are commanded to become god is lost on us - we usually just think that we’re mud, or worse.
The greatest irony of all, perhaps, is that we are loved so infinitely, so beyond measure, while we still feel so unloved. We are lonely in the midst of all the company of heaven. We are hungry in the middle of a banquet. We are naked while the glory of God waits there to clothe us.
Things are so much more than they appear. My neighbor, who seems so well described by the term, “mud,” is himself as much destined to glory as myself and all I can see is mud. Walking in the finite, created walls of an old temple, I would easily have mistaken a young girl of three for just another mud child. Would I have known the Mother of my God?
C.S. Lewis said the same thing in his essay The Weight of Glory.
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing
to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Lord, have mercy on us, and help us to know You that we may one day be like You.
This was too delightful to pass up. From Language Log:
THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)
My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.Another student gave me a diagragm.
“The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth.”Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can’t?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.You won’t get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I’d sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I’m on their side. I better be, after my brush with “infinitessimal.”There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.
And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, “George…”I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
“Their their,” I needed to hear them say, “their their.”You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying “tsk tsk.”I know they’re there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast ‘em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let ‘em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is “Oslgmbnh.”“Om?” they inquire. “No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you’ve only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there’s an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers’ bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that’s all the time extension you’re going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don’t be surprised if it’s the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys.”Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini’s Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other “Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!” and tearing their hair.Intricate are the compoundments of despair.
Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.
Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.
The structure of the negotiations is such that the question is framed
exclusively in terms of whether or not the narrator will accept or reject proposals formulated by Sam-I-Am. The onesided
nature of the negotiations might reflect the real imbalance of power, but nothing in Seuss's analysis allows
us to see the operation of this power. Indeed, the assumptions of these terms of reference run so deep that it is almost
impossible to imagine a scenario in which issues other than eating green eggs and ham might be raised. At the end,
we are led to believe that the narrator has discovered his true interests and now enjoys green eggs and ham. But does
he? Has he discovered his true tastes, or has he simply been forced under duress to accept a fundamentally unfair
conclusion?
A critical analysis of Green Eggs and Ham. HT: Angel of the Morning.
