April 19, 2012
Danko/Manuel
Drive-By Truckers
The Dirty South
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Levon Helm died today. Here’s the Drive-By Truckers with a song about the deaths of two other members of The Band.

April 18, 2012 • 1 note
Christians can embrace all the relativities and penultimacies of history without becoming relativists or skeptics—not because we have a certitude behind us but because we are confident that we have certitude ahead of us.

Peter Leithart, Foundations.

Peter routinely writes things like this that become fixed points in how I look at life (here’s another).

April 16, 2012 • 1 note • commentmagazine
Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication and communication suggests talking inside a community.
Flannery O’Connor (via commentmagazine)
April 2, 2012 • 1 note

The Trinity and human relationships

Some thoughts developed with a little help from Peter Leithart. By “a little help” I mean things like “forming my understanding and belief in the possibility of everything mentioned here”…

The Father gives the Spirit to the Son; the Son receives the Spirit and then gives the Spirit back to the Father, who receives the Spirit and then gives, etc… this inter-trinitarian giving is the basis of human relationships, and the relationship between God and man.

God gives (he initiates), and we receive. When we receive, then we may give. When we give, we give expecting to receive back something glorified. 

God’s initial gift to us enables us to enter into this Trinitarian dance of gift. That initial gift is the Spirit. When He gives His Spirit to us, we produce the fruit of the Spirit and thus we offer the Spirit back to God. Giving the Spirit back to God, we expect him to return to us glorified, a fresh outpouring of the Spirit that proves even more fruitful than before.

Likewise, God gives people to us (wife, children, friends, even enemies); we receive them and we then give those people back to God. When a husband gives his wife, he expects her to return to him more lovely, for instance. When parents give their children, they receive them back. This is most dramatically illustrated in baptism: the parents hand the child to the minister. The minister baptizes the little one. Then the parents receive their child back, a new creation over which the Spirit now hovers.

More intriguing, when one gives his enemy, he may receive that enemy back as a defeated enemy—or even as a friend. “Vengeance is mine…” and so forth. We give up enemies by forswearing vengeance, bitterness, wrath, and so on, and commit them to God by praying the words of the psalms of complaint.

March 2, 2012
As One Who Has Slept
Choir, The & James Whitbourn
Tavener: Choral Ikons
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

This shall be sung at Easter by the Trinity Reformed Church choir. Until that time, when the voices of my brothers and sisters are singing it, this recording shall have to do. If you listen to this, stop whatever else you’re doing to take it in.

March 2, 2012 • 1,602 notes • warriorsrise
Lalibela Church, Ethiopia The town of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia is renowned for 12 Christian churches that were hewed out of solid stone some 800 years ago. The most stunning is Bieta Giyorgis, shown here, a massive monolith 40 feet (12 meters) tall, intricately carved and shaped like a cross. Via: NPR

Lalibela Church, Ethiopia

The town of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia is renowned for 12 Christian churches that were hewed out of solid stone some 800 years ago. The most stunning is Bieta Giyorgis, shown here, a massive monolith 40 feet (12 meters) tall, intricately carved and shaped like a cross.

Via: NPR

(via npr)

February 27, 2012
February 6, 2012 • 1 note
O thou who art the sparrow’s friend,” he said, ” have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen.
Buechner, Godric, p. 38.
February 6, 2012 • 1 note
Erc was a great cairn of a man. His belly was where the stones buckled out under their own weight. His feet was where a pair of them had tumbled to the ground. His head was a boulder on top that was cracked straight across. He could open this jagged crack of a mouth wide as a stone cave and bellow out of it all manner of wild flummeries he’d learned from the days when he was a druid.
“Ah-h-h-h! Yah-h-h-h! God is the wind that blows over the sea… the wave of the deep… the bull of the seven battles… the tear in the eye of the sun.”
His breath had the musty moulder and damp of caves to it. The words rushed forth thick as bats but more of them got left within that ever come out because there’s never been the likes of druids for secrets.
Buechner, again, this time describing the monk Erc, in Brendan.
February 6, 2012
Ailred was fourth. They say as a babe he reared up like a lily in his tub and spoke the Pater Noster through nor would take of his mother’s teat for the forty days and night of Lent save Sabbaths. He grew to a sheaf of bones made fast round the middle with a monk’s rope.
The pictish king of Galloway was the devil fleshed. He had the gold eyes of a toad and a forked beard. On cold nights he’d slit a slave’s belly open like a sack so he could dabble his feet in the warm bowels. He tied together the limbs of women in labor for sport and drank blood. Ailred went to him. Throned on a rock, the king was picking his teeth with the bone of a weasel when Ailred knelt and watered his shins with tears. They say a light went forth from Ailred then that blinded the king’s gold eyes, and a creature was seen passing forth out of the king hung all over with bottles of the blood he’d drunk, and the king swore holy faith from that day on and took him the name of Ailred for his own. Thus with no loss of seed or purity, my friend got him a son that day upon the rock, and Jesu a forkbeard, pictish knight though blind as a bat from that day on.
From page 5 of Godric, by Frederick Buechner. Open this book at random and you will find a miraculous piece of writing wherever your eyes land.