G as in Good H as in Happy

Christmas Potpourri

December 25, 2005

James Lileks celebrates archaic gender roles at ChirstmasTM with the help of Punjabi contractors, meanwhile racing Hannibal Lector through the garage door. Entire event sadly lacking in nachos, boxing, and beer.

Candy-covered cuteness all year round.

And Dilys, she say Hi at Christmas.

The Light Around Experience

In pursuing the principle of the Value-Added Lifetm, we'll take every advantage.

“In real life, unlike in Shakespeare,* the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.”  – Hubert H. Humphrey

I Have Seen Straw Transformed into Silk

Long colorful commentary on Juan Diego, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and These Times, from Clueless Christian, the blog of a Sri Lankan-born physician who traveled to Mexico this summer, and tells the story well, locating Luther, the Aztecs, and all of us, in sacred history.

The Aztecs were finally defeated in 1531, a few months before Henry the Eight formally initiated the Anglican schism with the Roman church. Seventy four percent of the Aztec people died in war, famine, slavery, and of European diseases for which they had no immunity. The end of the world had come indeed. Yet, in the midst of the world’s ending, the Resurrection was proclaimed to Juan Diego, a 57 year old Nahuatl peasant convert. The same year that the Aztec defeat was completed, the impoverished and (by the standards of the time) elderly peasant was on Tepeyac hill...

Courage...

September 7, 2005

...at the End of the World.

Scenes from

the home of Lt. David M. Benelli, 55, commander of [New Orleans'] sex crimes unit, and the woman he calls his child bride, Sgt. Becky Benelli, 42, assistant commander of the crime lab. The Benellis are cops to the core; they met at a traffic fatality and fell in love.

Via Titusonenine

Everybody loves Aslan...

...and is linking this story, triangulated somewhere on the map of saints' legends, Kipling-esque imaginings, and our dream of a Peaceable Kingdom.

An Ethopian girl of 12 was kidnapped and beaten on the way to a (sadly, customary) forced marriage. Three of the last 1,000 lions in the country chased off her captors and stood guard over her until she was rescued. One explanation is that her weeping and whimpering elicited the tenderness given to a mewling cub, and saved her from being eaten.

Who but they could tell us, if they would?

Years ago one of us here at the Chez dreamed she met a huge black bear on a wilderness path. When the dreamer asked the dream-figure bear why he did not eat her, he replied, unsentimentally, "Not hungry." Perhaps these lions weren't hungry either, having drunk deeply at a natural spring of Harmlessness to Beleaguered Innocence.

Ethiopian royalty styles its titles to include Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

Via the Anchoress and Instapundit.

Wheeling Over Dùn Èideann

Edinburgh is full of magic, everyone has some place, that's ours. Paradise is an autumn afternoon in a private garden near Moray Place.

The red kite, near-extinct and known since the 30's only in Wales, has returned. No news yet of Arthur Pendragon wandering, newly awake, toward the Northeast. We're watching like a hawk.

Via mirabilis

Putting Things...

...in perspective.

Via The Paragraph Farmer

Anyone Dilys Might Know?

Picture Auntie's closet in Wales. Open the door, and instead of sensible shoes and saved string -- prehistoric bones, 42 human skeletons from the Bronze Age.

The magical realism of such a scene delights those here of a literary and philosophical bent. Just as one day 31 springs ago a young-ish woman stepped on a dankly clanking subway train, rode an elevator into the World Trade Center, and saw for the first time the Love of Her Life, we do not know what's next, often goodness (even if in disguise) that boggles the imagination. Hence the demonstrable validity of the Theological Virtue of Hope.

Rest and eternal light may they enter, by whatever means such celestial matters are settled.

P.S.  As it happens, the answer to the question is Yes.  Chez Dilys shelters an American scion of the Welsh family Morgan. You never know. Small world, long history.

Remains located via Mere Comments.