April 16, 2013 • 2 notes
It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they’d slaughtered for it the day before. I’d been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle. We poured water on the carcase and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms. They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped around its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us. Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops—we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath’s leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn’t so much as know my name then.
“It’s a smirchy sort of business you’re at with that pig, some would say,” she said. “There’s many a monkish boy either he’d beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it’s neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That’s the deep truth of things no matter or not if you know it.”
Ita’s eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.
“Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear,” she said. “I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you’ve learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land.

From Frederick Buechner, Brendan, pages 34-35.

Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear.

April 8, 2013 • 4 notes

Democratic capitalism is only a way station along the way of the destruction of the ancient world.

Rich Bledsoe, “Christian Imperialism”, over at Trinity House Institute. A dense and at times opaque article studded with some absolutely thrilling distillations of what it means for Jesus to be King—the above quote is among the least of these.

March 19, 2013 • 1 note
I think that industrial livestock processing is, like all technology, a kind of magic. Peasant meatsmiths, on the other hand, worked miracles, not sleight of hand. Rather than turn pigs into pork at an astonishing rate and in unfathomable quantity, they multiplied fishes and loaves and this feeds more people with less and more deeply.
Brandon Sheard, the Farmstead Meatsmith, putting into words a thought I’ve had banging around my head for some time. The Bible speaks of magic and sorcery as a kind of counterfeit miracle: the appearance of something arriving ex nihilo that disguises a considerable material and spiritual cost. Modern industrialism, agricultural and otherwise, is a kind of sorcery. But miracles take that same material and spiritual burden and make something new and good out of that raw material. That butchering your own pig fits that definition of miraculous will take more defending than I have time for here, but I will say that when I butchered my hog last October, we took up twelve large baskets full of fragments and scarcely had the space to store it all.
February 25, 2013

The Moral of Pierre by one Timothy Burke

I’m not sure who Timothy Burke is or where exactly he’s coming from, but this is a superb piece on how neoliberal societies try to get people to change:

“If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

Questions concerning how people treat one another, I believe, are ultimately theological. Whatever we think people are will determine what we think the problems are and why we must solve them. If we think of people primarily as gobs of material or units of economic activity, then we’ll get diagnoses like the above-quoted. 

But what would happen if we acknowledged man as the image of God, as capable having his humanity completed and fulfilled in Christ, brought into the fellowship of the Trinity, and finally able to live at peace with himself and his neighbor? 

January 21, 2013 • 2 notes
Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Op. 31: XVI. The Lord's Prayer
Cambridge King's College Choir, Peter Scorer, Stephen Cleobury & Tobias Sims
Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St John's Chrysostom

The Lord’s Prayer from Rachmaninov’s world-stopping Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, performed by the Cambridge King’s College Choir.

January 2, 2013
There are meals that come in courses. Meals that use broths boiled for 24 hours, cuts of pork kneaded daily for a week. Meals in which humans share their humanness and become open and vulnerable with one another. You could call my hamburger a meal, but then you’d have to call piss marks in the sand a work of art.
My friend, Josh Stevenson, who wrote Fed with the Burger of Tears.
December 18, 2012 • Spotify

The Dying of thirst passage of this song is astonishing. Even more astounding is how important the skit at the end is to the song—and to the entire record. How is it that a blockbuster rap record climaxes with a baptism scene and the words, “Remember this day, the start of your new life, your real life…”?

good kid, m.A.A.d city might be my favorite record of the year. 

December 14, 2012 • Spotify

Paul Hillier directs what I think is the definitive recorded performance of Arvo Pärt’s time-stopping Magnificat. The rich are sent empty away.

October 30, 2012 • 3 notes
Unity, after all, is what God has given us through Christ’s death and resurrection. For in that death and resurrection we have been made part of God’s salvation for the world so that the world may know it has been freed from the powers that would compel us to kill one another in the name of false loyalties.
Stanley Hauerwas, from his Reformation Sunday sermon. Lots of details to quibble with, and lots of sly, provocative statements that will harry careless readers, but I’ve long wanted to hear someone say this to Protestants on our high holy day.
September 13, 2012
Where Finch sleeps, Palouse, WA.

Where Finch sleeps, Palouse, WA.