Ruthenian music in honor of the saint given "a perpetual name for deeds of kindness on land and sea."
Courtesy Amy Welborn
Gift-giving as a subset of "deeds of kindness" might look different from the ordinary Christmas landscape. Motive is everything.
Rumor has it the Saint is available even today to tutor us in understanding and demonstrating kindness.
Apply within.
November 21, 2005
Dymphna's Neighborhood of God (referencing not piety but chaos) combines the sensory satisfactions of autumn fruits and an Advent hymn. Thanks for the Latin verse with haunting off-site melody.
"Veni, O Sapientia" to us all. In place of the crabbed malign apple of half-cocked ill-informed wilfulness.
ASAP.
Even at the risk of derision (one hopes not from Dymphna), we cannot resist referencing the current Martha Stewart Living gilded pears -- cooking-supply gold dust brushed on shapely pears, a green ribbon at the stem, set on a cloth napkin.
[Ed.: remind everyone that Martha's legal team says, Wash pears before eating, even though it's "cooking" gold...]
The beauty and the bounty... We have a weakness for edible art, particularly when on dim grey near-winter wooded-foothill days it could resemble an abbreviated chiaroscuro still life.
Sometimes it's a little too gorgeous in Central Texas.
Or, maybe not.
November 12, 2005
The venerable Eastern Orthodox Fr. Alexander Schmemann lays it on the line.
An Italian psychiatrist wants to gauge a quality of disorientation people may experience in viewing great art.
In July of 1984, one of us here helped escort 40 South Bronx third-graders to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They were overstimulated to the point of racing or tears. We thought it was the absence of fig leaves on the statues. Maybe it was the statues...
November 8, 2005
Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics in Japan, who led the research, told Discovery News that the hands are not the only parts of the body that shine light by releasing photons, or tiny, energized increments of light.
"Not only the hands, but also the forehead and bottoms of our feet emit photons," Hiramatsu said, and added that in terms of hands "the presence of photons means that our hands are producing light all of the time."
Via LiquidLifeHacker, a commenter at One Cosmos
November 1, 2005
On the heels of All Souls' Day, it's All Saints' Day, gloriously scored* [Sine Nomine] by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Update: Better music link via YARGB.
Benedict XVI identifies in them a renewed mind something like "Beginner's Mind."
the poor in spirit, that is, those whose heart is free of prejudices and conditionings, and who are therefore totally disposed to the divine will.
As it happens, Annie Vera Cantey, 95, is being buried in Montgomery today, not many days after Rosa Parks. Not a famous woman, a mother and civil servant, with her own sublime refusals. Fame is not the point. Life, is.
Remembering Annie Vera, beneficiary of a daughter's devoted care, a creamy beauty for most of her life, who always remembered her girlhood days in Texas.
Thanks to Pontifications for the beatitudes.
*
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/mid/s/i/n/sine_nomine.mid
Dymphna offers a story in tune with the day, and songs of the countless host.
The opportunity for the perfect gift is the perfect gift.
Via her and the Baron's Gates of Vienna
..even, or perhaps especially, for a world-class theologian who cites with appreciation e. e. cummings'
wherelings whenlings,
(daughters of if but offsprings of hopefear
sons of unless and children of almost)
never shall guess the dimension of
him whose
each
foot likes the
here of this earth
whose both
eyes
love
this now of the sky.
Funny, we think the Others are the wherelings, the whenlings, the oblivious were-folk callously, inadvertently drinking living blood and tearing innocent flesh in egoistical inattention. But Fr. Alexander Schmemann observes that enlightenment may not be wheeee, so much as despair at our own condition upon awakening, even though the rain still has small hands.
Courtesy the inspiring reading of James Nee.
October 24, 3005
J.V. Cunningham on the fading of ambition, not to be confused with moral or artistic collapse.
Daniel Mitsui, fresh out of Dartmouth and thinking about a career in ecclesiastical architectural restoration, executes the kind of elaborate pen-and-ink drawings Aubrey Beardsley might do if he were more oriented to virtue than to decadence. Here's Daniel's SS. Cyril and Methodius, the monks-later-saints
from beautiful Thessalonica who brought the Slavs into Christendom. Not least by inventing the Cyrillic alphabet.
Очень хороший! Спасибо, С-. Сирил!
Especially if you have some affection for a parish that is not obligated to hew to the exact niceties of the iconographic tradition, maybe commission a Patron Saint's Day bulletin cover? Why not? Be a patron of the arts! These days, compared to the Medici you can buy in for a generous pittance. Some patrons even attempt, in fine Renaissance fashion, to insert themselves in the humble crowd. Figure, lower left, kneeling...
