G'mar tov

The Day of Atonement is a day for reflection.  This is good for all of us, Tribe or not. 

To our Jewish readers, Shanna tovah. 

Good Friday

This is a great reflection from the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land. I hadn't known that today is the only day that the Catholic church does not celebrate the Mass.

There's quite a lot of food for (spiritual) thought and reflection at the link.

Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo - O Holy Night

The World awaits its Savior. 

Music from St. Catherine's Monastery

St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is said to be the oldest continually inhabited monastery, founded by Emperor Justinian the Great around 550AD.  It has a library that has survived the ages, perhaps because they have a document said to be signed by Mohammad himself saying that the Monastery was under his protection.  Even if it was a forgery, it seems to have been an effective forgery.

It has perhaps the most impressive collection of icons in the world.  For example, the oldest known icon of Kristos Pantokrator, dating from the 6th century:

St. Catherine's has just offered full size (or reduced size) museum quality reproductions of many of its icons:

For the first time in its 1,500-year history, Saint Catherine’s Monastery is offering certified replicas of its most famous Byzantine icons. These replicas, available in actual size and true-to-life color, allow people worldwide to own a piece of this sacred art.

This groundbreaking project is the result of a three-year collaboration between the Monastery, the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, and Legacy Icons. Dr. Peter Chang, President of the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, called the partnership a “significant milestone in our ongoing mission to support Saint Catherine’s Monastery and its invaluable contributions to Christian spirituality and global civilization.”

The first set of replicas includes some of the Monastery’s most treasured works:

• Christ Pantocrator (6th century)
• Moses and the Burning Bush (c. 13th century)
• Saint Catherine with Scenes of her Life (18th century)

You can view (and purchase, if you'd like) the reproductions here.  They look to be very high quality (to me, at least).  As the original linked article says:

These replicas are created using high-resolution scans, capturing even the tiniest details. “To be able to look into the depths of the cracks and original paint strokes with this clarity is breathtaking and we look forward to shipping these for all to appreciate,” said David DeJonge, founder of Legacy Icons. The replicas are printed on high-quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper and mounted on solid hardwoods, ensuring they are as authentic as possible.

A portion of the purchase goes to support the Monastery's preservation activities.  Remember, this Monastery has been working and collecting manuscripts continually for 1500 years.

Here is a recording of traditional music from the Monastery.

Richard Dawkins is a midwit

Aesop brings the Hammer Of Truth down on the good professor:

One cannot have "only a quarter of an eye, only a hundredth of an eye, or half an eye, is better than nothing " (3:50ff).

Basic physiology disagrees:

It doesn't work like that.

 

In the trade, there's a technical term for what you are when you have a half, a quarter, or a hundredth of an eye (and by this we mean not just the eyeball itself, but the entire cascade of processes enabling vision): BLIND.

There's a lot more in the post, and even more in the comments.  But what I find most interesting is the fact that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and so he knows this. Aesop has a simple answer to why Dawkins still tells this sort of lie  (he's a lying liar).  Well, sure.

But that's not particularly interesting.  Why does he lie?  Moldbug explained this 15 years ago:

Nonetheless, it’s my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins has been pwned. Perhaps you’re over 30 and you’re unfamiliar with this curious new word. As La Wik puts it:

The word “pwn” remains in use as Internet social-culture slang meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.

(At least here at Unqualified Reservations, pwned alliterates with posse and rhymes with loaned.) How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit such an exploitable vulnerability? And who—or what—has taken unauthorized control over Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles.

Ah, those crazy kids and their barbaric slang like pwned.  Good Lord, do I really have over 400 posts with that tag?  Ahem.  

Continuing with Dawkins' failure to adequately explain the difference between Science and Religion:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc., etc.

This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.

Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.

Now I must warn you, Moldbug is pretty thick going.  Fosetti has a very accessible overview that will give you 95% of Moldbug's arguments.

One other interesting comment at Aesop's place concerned science as a process.  As I've pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, science as practiced today is very, very sick, and the reason is The Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action:

I can't seem to find and data about the number of scientists working today, vs. the number a century ago.  I can't even find decent proxy data for this - say the number of scientific articles published in 2010 vs. the number published in 1910.  But we can all agree that there has been a vast increase in the number of working scientists and the number of published articles (which may be up to 50 Million by now).

And yet we are not seeing any obvious acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery.  Nigel Calder again:

While the modern advances are all impressive, are they really more impressive than those from a century ago?  Especially when you adjust for the army of scientists at work today - perhaps a thousand times as many as at the dawn of the 20th Century - the question becomes why has science slowed down?

The post about how sick science as practiced today is gives the reason:

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

...

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

The people who run the institutions of Science don't see that there's a problem.  I mean, hey - there's a ton of grant funding coming in and nobody can be allowed to rock that boat, amirite?  And so it's all gatekeeping and name calling.

The result? Scientific Progress has essentially ground to a halt.

Note that this doesn't apply to Engineering, which we can call "science that works".  SpaceX is Exhibit 1 for the Prosecution here.  But Science as currently practiced is a game for fools and liars. And Richard Dawkins, but I repeat myself.

Retractionwatch is Exhibit 2 for the Prosecution.  A few minutes thought will produce another dozen Exhibits.

And yes, I was an Engineer not a Scientist by training back at State U.  Because of that, I haven't been (intellectually) pwned, like Dawkins has.  But good gravy, it's getting to where the term "scientist" is almost as pejorative as the term "intellectual".  The last word goes to Aesop, who explains why:

I doubt, with Dawkins being so invested, intellectually and morally, in the lifelong lie, he'd ever be intellectually honest enough to admit that he, just like Darwin, had a grudge against the idea of the divine or supernatural, and both had therefore sunk their spurs into the idea that there is no god, because it makes the rest of their pathetic existence tolerable and comfortable, not to mention lucrative.

He's entitled to go to hell in whatever way he sees fit to do so; that's free will in action.

But to make it his life's work to try and bamboozle others by deliberately ignoring the utter lack of any scientific underpinning for his delusions, and furthermore the evidence to the exact contrary, and outright lying about both in support of his line of twaddle, is quite inarguably and inexcusably monstrous and damnable.

Thinking about Grace

I have posted special Easter posts for most of this blog's history, despite the fact that I've never really studied theology.  I've done my poor best, but have leaned repeatedly on someone who was a theologian.  Frederick Buechner was a ThD and an ordained Presbyterian minister, as well as a best selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner (back when that meant something).  I found him exceptionally insightful and thought provoking.

Rev. Beuchner passed away last summer at the ripe old age of 96.  As a tribute to him - as well as a meditation on Grace, and Easter, and the human condition - here are his quotes that I've used in the past.

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do ... There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can only be yours if you'll reach out and take it.

- Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love Him.

  - Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is…the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe the truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity.

- Frederick Beuchner, The Hungering Dark

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . .

- Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Here are Beuchner quotes that I don't know the source.

The love for equals is a human thing--of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing--the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing--to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.  And then there is the love for the enemy--love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own — and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

Rest in Peace, Rev. Beuchner, and may flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.  I expect that you went to Heav'n a'shouting love for the Father and the Son.

Hector Berlioz - Dream of a Witches' Sabbath from Symphonie fantastique

I was raised in the Episcopal church.  It's been getting weird for decades and now seems to have pitched over the edge into the abyss of - dare we say it? - heresy: The Episcopal Church comes out in support of sex changes at all ages.

Sigh.

I don't know what a Chalcedonian christian can do these days.  I won't attend the Witches' Sabbath at the Episcopal church, that's for sure.  Although Hector Berlioz wrote some great music that would be appropriate for their so-called "mass".

 

Happy Birthday Santa Claus!

More formally: St. Nicholas of Myra, born on this day in 270 AD.

In addition to being the patron saint of children, he is also the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, and students.  The Queen Of Thee World swears that he's also patron saint of christmas trees and chimneys, but I hadn't heard that before.

The Feast feeds the Soul

The company makes the feast.

- Anonymous

The feast is a very ancient concept, almost certainly pre-historic.  Man is a social beast, and the social grouping requires regular glue to bond its members.  Nothing like an unusually large meal to bring family and friends closer together.

But this utilitarian, cultural anthropological view risks missing the most profound aspect of the feast.  It's not the feeding of the bodies that's important; it's the feeding of the soul.  That's where the glue is found, not in the extra calories.

And in pre-industrial societies, those extra calories were important, as most people lived only a harvest or two from starvation.  And the spiritual aspects were still more important.

The picture is from Peter Bruegel the elder, The Wedding Feast.  Whether because someone was getting married or buried, feasts were for a reason.  Every feast had an event to justify the expense. 

It's not the calories, it's the psychological meaning that bonds us.  Many parts of America, born of the puritan tradition, have a problem with the excess.  Groaning tables seem to rebuke us: do you really need all this?

Yes, you really do.  This has been known since the ancient days; the Greeks had a saying: Moderation in all things, including moderation.  A feast short circuits the usual rules of restraint.  It has to.

Because it's not about the extra calories, which many of us perhaps could stand to avoid.  Don't.  The feast is about stepping outside of the normal flow.  A feast isn't about eating, it's about the glue that bonds us together.  See the glue, not the food - unless your gravy is a little too thick and sticky.  But even that is a meditation on the whole point of the thing.  Calorie guilt misses that point, which is spiritual, the feeding of the soul.

Today I'm thankful for many things, not least of which is all of you who stop by.  I hope that your feast today is a feast of the soul as well as of the body.

The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.

- Father Aidan Kavanagh

 

Huron Carol/Twas in the Moon of Wintertime

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

Philippians 2:5-8

We all know the story, that's the problem.  We know it so well that we don't think about the story, and what it means.  It helps to put the story in a different setting to make us think on the meaning again.

Huron Carol is the oldest Christmas Carol from Canada, and perhaps from the New World.  It was written in 1642 by Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary to the Huron tribes.  It tells the story of the nativity in terms that were familiar to the Huron: instead of a stable, the baby was born in a lodge of broken bark.  Instead of three wise men there were three chiefs from far off tribes.  Instead of frankincense and myrrh there were gifts of fox and beaver pelts.  He wrote in their native language, as necessity called for.  If you would tell a tale, you must use words the listener will understand.

Tomorrow is the feast of the Redeemer.  Amidst the holiday cheer, gifts, and yes, feasting, think on the familiar meaning as explained in a different tongue, a tale made new again.

Huron

The original words of the carol in the Wyandot language (Huron).

Ehstehn yayau deh tsaun we yisus ahattonnia
O na wateh wado:kwi nonnwa 'ndasqua entai
ehnau sherskwa trivota nonnwa 'ndi yaun rashata
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia.

Ayoki onki hm-ashe eran yayeh raunnaun
yauntaun kanntatya hm-deh 'ndyaun sehnsatoa ronnyaun
Waria hnawakweh tond Yosehf sataunn haronnyaun
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia.

Asheh kaunnta horraskwa deh ha tirri gwames
Tishyaun ayau ha'ndeh ta aun hwa ashya a ha trreh
aundata:kwa Tishyaun yayaun yaun n-dehta
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia.

Dau yishyeh sta atyaun errdautau 'ndi Yisus
avwa tateh dn-deh Tishyaun stanshi teya wennyau
aha yaunna torrehntehn yataun katsyaun skehnn
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia.

Eyeh kwata tehnaunnte aheh kwashyehn ayehn
kiyeh kwanaun aukwayaun dehtsaun we 'ndeh adeh
tarrya diskwann aunkwe yishyehr eya ke naun sta
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia.

English

The 1926 English version by Jesse Edgar Middleton.

'Twas in the moon of winter-time
When all the birds had fled,
That mighty Gitchi Manitou
Sent angel choirs instead;
Before their light the stars grew dim,
And wandering hunters heard the hymn:
"Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
In excelsis gloria."

Within a lodge of broken bark
The tender Babe was found,
A ragged robe of rabbit skin
Enwrapp'd His beauty round;
But as the hunter braves drew nigh,
The angel song rang loud and high...
"Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
In excelsis gloria."

The earliest moon of wintertime
Is not so round and fair
As was the ring of glory
On the helpless infant there.
The chiefs from far before him knelt
With gifts of fox and beaver pelt.
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
In excelsis gloria.

O children of the forest free,
O sons of Manitou,
The Holy Child of earth and heaven
Is born today for you.
Come kneel before the radiant Boy
Who brings you beauty, peace and joy.
"Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
In excelsis gloria."

 

In lieu of politics and snark ...

This is your read of the day.  I can't imagine a more perfect message for this Eve of the Feast of the Redeemer. 

The Bronze Star Prayer

December 1944 saw the German Army launch a blitzkreig on the western front, designed to cut the American Army off from the British Army, and drive to the port of Antwerp cutting off the Brits.  It was Hitler's last roll of the dice.

For the first few days, things went all the German's way.  They overran a lightly defended area in Belgium, making big gains towards their objectives.  Only the crossroads town of Bastogne held out, bottling up part of the advance.

Eisenhower had kept George Patton on a shot leash - at the urging of British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery (he and Patton detested each other), but now Ike needed his best field General.  Patton turned on a dime and had six divisions point north to relieve Bastogne.

The problem was that the weather was awful.  Clouds and snow kept the Army Air Corps grounded while the SS Panzer divisions ran wild.  Patton turned to the Third Army Chaplain, Col. James Hugh O'Neill and asked him for a prayer for better weather.  Here is what the Padre came up with, which was distributed to the entire Third Army, issued on this day in 1944:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. 

Amen.

The weather cleared almost immediately.  Patton got Col. O'Neill awarded the Bronze Star for his intercession withe the Almighty.

Note: if you are not following OldAFSarge's online novel about this battle, you're missing out.

There are no atheists in a foxhole

Especially with priests like this around.  Wow.  "Just War Doctrine" goes all the way back to St. Augustine.  Maybe this guy is a saint, too.

Like I said, wow.

The Basilica of the Hagia Sophia as a musical instrument

The Hagia Sophia was for a thousand years the most famous church in Christendom.  Built by the Roman Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople, the church is unlike anything that came before, or since. When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and finally put an end to the Roman Empire, the Hagia Sophia became a mosque for a while.  Ataturk turned it into a museum in the 1920s.  You can visit it if you find yourself in Istanbul.

But there is to this day a ban on any musical performance there.  Since the Eastern Orthodox liturgy is sung, there has been no way to know what it sounded like back in Justinian's day.  Except now the science of acoustics and digital signal processing has brought this sound back to life after more than 500 years.



This is a very unusual edition of my Sunday Classical posts - the focus is less on the music than on the building.  The experience of the divine was captured in a unique way in the church, one that could not be experienced in the same way anywhere else in the world.  The architecture merged with and changed the sound in a way that was entirely sui generis; the rising (or setting) sun lit the interior in a way that was described as liquid gold.  While we cannot experience that today, we can get a feel for what it must have been like with the musical recreations of the group Cappella Romana, electronically enhanced to match the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia.

This is a very different experience from western church music, which we have seen here many times.  There is an outstanding (and long) discussion of this experience and how they recreated it at the podcast Byzantium and Friends.  It covers different aspects of the religious experience in that church - the sound, the decoration, the lighting, and how they all came together as much more than the sum of the parts.  I expect that Peter Grant, Lone Star Parson, Rev. Paul, and maybe Tim Wolter might want to listen to it despite the length (over 60 minutes).  Other people might want to click through that link which will lead them to a documentary about how the sound was recreated, which is included on the DVD of Cappella Romana's performance of Lost Voices Of The Hagia Sophia.  I expect that the DVD experience will far surpass MP3, because of the surround sound effect.

Hat tip to Peter Grant, who posted about this a couple weeks back; I ran across the podcast which adds a ton of depth to what he wrote about.  If you, like me, are a history nerd, then this is a great way to spend some time while you are isolating at home.

The lesson of Pope Formosus

Pictura per Wicipaedia

A very strange trial commenced in Rome in 897 AD, a trial of a dead man.  Pope Formosus had died the previous year, but his body was exhumed and he was put on trial in the Cadaever Synod.

His late Holiness was accused of improperly assigning Bishoprics, of perjury, and of serving as a Bishop before he had been ordained.  His corpse was dressed in his vestments and propped up on a throne during the proceedings.  Eventually Formosus was (posthumously) convicted of the charges.  The vestments were stripped from the corpse, his memory was damned, the three fingers he used in blessings were hacked off, and his body was thrown into the river Tiber.

And Donald Trump complains about Nancy Pelosi ...

It seems that some of this spirit remains in Rome and the Church to this day.

Atonement

To our Jewish readers, on Yom Kippur:

Man's days are as grass, it blossoms like a flower of the field.
The wind blows and it is gone, and its place it knows no more.

- Psalm 103

Jewish or not, it is good to think on who we are, and who we should be.

Happy Solstice!

I've been re-posting items from ten years back, and since the Solstice is almost always on June 21, this is a twofer.

Cycles of Time

The mystery of life - birth, growth, death, is almost certainly behind the ancient efforts to precisely know the seasons. They knew when to plant, and when to harvest - they didn't need any help there, and only a professor who never spent a day on a farm could think that.

And so the "ancient observatories" like Stonehenge aren't observatories at all. They're Cathedrals.

Happy Solstice. Grill something with your dad to celebrate. Photo from the always amazing NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day.

Eric Church - Like Jesus Does

Out of the crooked timber that is Man, nothing straight was ever built.

- Immanuel Kant

Bless me, Father, for I have been a Dumb Ass.  It's happened over and over again, throughout all my years on Planet Earth.  I fear that this will continue throughout the rest of my days.

But I'm lucky that I have The Queen Of The World.  No matter what the next Dumbassery, she is there as this world's manifestation of the gift of Grace for me.  She is the Lighthouse that always provides me a beacon in the dark.  It's quite amazing, really.

But she carries me, when my sins make me heavy,
And she loves me like Jesus does.

Easter is an old, old holy day.  It dates back to when christianity was just a tiny group of believers in a vast and unfriendly Roman Empire.  And yet it took over that empire despite the long odds.  I think that the reason is that from the very beginning, the story told by the christian church was about Grace.

None of us is as strong as we would like; all of us need that Grace to keep us from sinking, at least from time to time.  That gift of Grace took the Roman Empire by storm, and is one that I see here today.  The Queen Of The World shows it to me.  It's the gift she gives not when I deserve it, but when I don't deserve it.  And therein lies its power.

Yeah, she knows the man I ain't,
She forgives me when I can't

That's a precious gift to me.  It is in those moments that the spirit of Easter surrounds me.  It may even be that I'm a Dumb Ass as much as I am because I like that moment of Grace from her.  In a sense, it's always Easter here at Castle Borepatch, thanks to The Queen Of The World.

Always thought she'd give up on me one day,
Wash her hands of me, leave me staring down some runway,
Yeah, I thank God each night, and twice on Sunday,
That she loves me like Jesus does.

This Easter weekend you are as lucky as I am.  Well you don't have The Queen Of The World so you're not quite as lucky as I am, but you have that gift of Grace.  That gift doesn't give up on you some day because you've been a Dumb Ass once too many times.  That gift carries you when you when your sins make you heavy.  That gift forgives you when you can't.  We're surrounded by Grace, if we'll just open our eyes. Songs like this tell us some of the places to look, if we dare.

Dare.

She Loves Me Like Jesus Does (Songwriters: Casey Beathard, Monty Criswell)

I'm a long gone Waylon song on vinyl, 
I'm a backroad sinner at a tent revival, 
She believes in me like she believes her bible, 
And loves me like Jesus does.

I'm a lead foot leaning on a suped up Chevy, 
I'm a good ol' boy, drinking whiskey and rye on the levee, 
But she carries me, when my sins make me heavy, 
And she loves me like Jesus does.

All the crazy in my dreams, 
Both my broken wings, 
Every single piece of everything I am, 
Yeah, she knows the man I ain't, 
She forgives me when I can't, 
That devil man, he don't stand a chance, 
Cause she loves me like Jesus does.

Always thought she'd give up on me one day, 
Wash her hands of me, leave me staring down some runway, 
But, I thank God each night, and twice on Sunday, 
That she loves me like Jesus does.

All the crazy in my dreams, 
And both my broken wings, 
Every single piece of who I am, 
Yeah, she knows the man I ain't, 
She forgives me when I can't, 
And the devil man, no, he don't have a prayer. 
Cause she loves me like Jesus does

Yeah, she knows the man I ain't, 
She forgives me when I can't, 
That devil man, he don't stand a chance, 
Cause she loves me like Jesus does.

I'm a long gone Waylon song on vinyl

I'm a lucky man.  The Queen Of The World is there to give me that gift of Grace when I need it.  Even when I don't deserve it - especially when I don't deserve it.  She reminds me of what this weekend is all about.  That's a neat trick, right there.

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.  

... 

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. 

... 

There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can only be yours if you'll reach out and take it.

- Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith