Yet Another Confusing Word Pair

Hung and hanged are both past tenses of to hang, which is what makes them confusing, but they have very different meanings.

Hung is something you did to inanimate objects. She hung all the old familiar pictures in her new apartment. She sent the curtains to the dry cleaners, then hung them back up. They hung garlands on the Christmas tree.

Hanged is something you did to a person; it is synonymous with lynched. The court sentences you to be hanged. The prisoner hanged himself in his own cell.

To say a man is well hung is to admire certain of his natural endowments (in slang), while to say a man is well hanged means you are glad he has been executed.

These are definitely words we want to keep straight.

P.S. All this reminds me of a favorite poem, by A. E. Housman. Mom used to pay us to memorize poems and this one was probably worth a whole quarter. (Okay, we're talking the 1950s.)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

All the cherry trees I ever met were wearing pink, but I think I may have seen photos of white cherry blossoms...??? Never mind. Hung is the point, hang it all!

Avoiding the Extremes

In the year 843 at the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Patriarch, the Emperor, and Empress, and others came in solemn procession to bring the icons back to their proper places. The iconoclasts were officially anathematized (delcared heretics). And that was supposed to put an end to the iconoclastic controversy in the Church, once and for all. It's amazing, how many iconoclasts are still around.

The first thing I always have to think and say about it is that I am very sure I would have been among the heretics. The abuses of icons had become so rampant that they were being virtually worshipped, and I would have been strongly in favor of abolishing them altogether rather than keep them if they were going to turn into idols. I'd have smashed them with my own hands.

But today, as every year since 843, we celebrate the middle way, the Orthodox way, avoiding both the worship and the abolishing of the holy icons. You cannot properly even recognize Christ, let alone worship Him, if you fail to see Him living in His saints. (Or if you cannot see His life being lived in their flesh, then perhaps it isn’t a real saint, but only a super-pious person; heterodox hagiography is full of such.)

One of the hymns we sang today is this one, the "theme-song" for the day, as it were:

We bow down before Your pure Image, O Good One, and ask forgiveness of our sins, O Christ God; for voluntarily You were pleased to ascend the Cross in the flesh, to deliver from slavery to the enemy those whom You had created. Therefore we thankfully cry to You: You have filled all things with joy, O our Saviour, by coming to save the world.

One thing that strikes me in this hymn is how, immediately after we sing, “We bow down before Your pure Image,” we go on to affirm that Christ Himself, not His image, is our God. And we do this not once, but (depending on how you count) at least four or five times in this short hymn:

First, we call Him “Good One,” when, as He Himself taught us, no one is good except God alone.

Next, we ask Him for forgiveness of our sins, knowing that only God can forgive. He is the One who ascended the Cross.

Then we call him, “O Christ God”.

And then we acknowledge that: He created us, He fills all things, He is our Joy, and He is our Savior.

As the prophets have seen,
as the apostles have taught,
as the Church has received,
as the teachers have set forth in dogmas,
as the whole world has understood,
as Grace has shone forth,
as the truth was demonstrated,
as falsehood was banished,
as wisdom was emboldened,
as Christ has awarded;
thus do we believe, thus we speak,
thus we preach Christ our true God and His saints,
honoring them in words, in writings, in thoughts,
in sacrifices, in temples, and in icons,
worshipping and respecting the One as God and Master,
and honoring the others,
and apportioning relative veneration to them
because of our common Master,
for they are His genuine servants.
This is the Faith of the apostles,
this is the Faith of the fathers,
this is the Faith of the Orthodox,
this Faith has established the whole world.

P.S.) And something in today’s Gospel lesson struck me, too. Nathaniel, on first meeting Jesus, confesses Him the Son of God (John 1:49) Right at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Long before Peter. So I poked around a bit and discovered that Nathaniel wasn’t the only one. Immediately after He calms the storm (Matthew 14:23), all the disciples profess their faith in Christ as Son of God.

Think It, Think It! Part II

In case anyone should misunderstand my post, “Think It, Think It!", I wish to clarify that I am not against thinking. Anyone who has followed this blog for long knows that in fact, I regularly rail against the oft-heard admonitions from certain heterodox quarters to “Stop trying to sort it out rationally and just adore the mystery!” First of all, only the Holy Trinity is to be adored, but no doubt this is what they mean, so never mind. The thing I want to point out here is, this is exactly when we need to keep on thinking, lest we mistake sheer nonsense for genuine Mystery. (How to tell the difference is discussed in this post and in the 48 comments that follow it.)

I think it is just as dangerous to stop thinking as it is to reduce spiritual things to mere concepts (and/or emotions). And in fact, the latter mistake is what usually causes the confusion that results in the former.

This has made it all the more delightful for me to discover a new (to me) blog, The Well Thought-Out Life, by Kacie, a young Evangelical. The subtitle of the blog is a quote from Galileo: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.” I love it!

If you check out Kacie’s profile, you’ll discover she grew up the daughter of missionaries “on the islands of Indonesia and the mountains of Papua” and you’ll find a link to her other blog, Papua Girl in Dallas. It’s also an interesting blog, more newsy and personal, while the first one is more her place for wrestling with theological matters. I’ve enjoyed both blogs enough to recommend them to you.

And while you’re at it, another new blog I like is Thesauros. It’s anonymously written but as of this writing already has 13 thoughtful and edifying posts. No idea what tack it may take in the future, but so far, so excellent!

Think it, Think it!

That’s what my husband and I say to each other whenever we come across an example of somebody trying to reduce a spiritual reality to a concept –a tendency we think has pervaded all of Western culture for several centuries.

We derived, “Think it, think it!” from this excerpt from a book I bought many years ago at a used book sale. It’s a collection of essays by notable Catholics, most of whom explain why they no longer practice that religion. This passage in particular struck us hard.

A beautiful Mass is very important, and the Russians and the Greeks have that. I can intellectualize, but I’m more intuitive and I like that whole multisensory approach where you can see and smell and feel instead of just having to think over and over again, This in holy, this is holy, this is holy.

I deeply resent Vatican II. Mother Church doesn’t embrace you anymore. You go there and she says, “I love you — think about it.” But she’s not going to hold you and make you feel warm. She wants us to be tough — tough grown-ups who just think. Now it’s all conceptual. It’s as if at the Last Supper Jesus said, “Take and eat, this is My concept.” That’s what the Mass has become…conceptualism replacing Incarnation. But man does not live by concepts alone.

--Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,  artist, in Once a Catholic by Peter Occhiogross (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1987), p. 34.

The Bravest Mouse of All

A mouse stealing a leopard's Lunch.... Are you serious?

This extraordinary scene was captured by 19-year-old photography student Casey Gutteridge at the Santago Rare Leopard Project in Hertfordshire, England. The student, photographing the leopard for a course project, was astounded by the mouse's behavior.

Seemingly unaware of the beast towering over it, the tiny rodent grabbed at scraps of meat thrown into the African Leopard's enclosure. But instead of pouncing on the tiny intruder, the 12-year-old leopard Sheena kept her distance. After a few minutes she tried to nudge the mouse away with her nose, but the determined little guy kept chewing away until he was full.

Perhaps there's a fence we don't see here, but it kinda looks to me like the bravest photographer of them all, too.

God’s Risk

Here is more from Olivier Clement, in his Book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. This is from page 37.

The human being, the being who is personal, is the pinnacle of creation. With humanity the omnipotence of God gives rise to something radically new. Not a lifeless reflection or puppet, but a freedom which can oppose God, and put the fulfillment of God’s creation in jeopardy by excluding him from it. In the supreme achievement of God’s creative omnipotence – for only lifegiving Love can create a free living being – there is an inherent risk. Omnipotence finds fulfillment in self-limitation. In the creative act itself, God in some manner limits himself, withdraws, to give human beings space in which to be free. At its highest point omnipotence thus conceals a paradoxical impotence; because the summit of omnipotence is love, and God can do everything except force human beings to love. To enter into love, as we know, is to put ourselves without protection at the mercy of the worst suffering, that of rejection and abandonment by the one we love. Creation is in the shadow of the cross. The Lamb of God, according to the Book of Revelation, is slain from the foundation of the world.

God is Love, Period.

I’ve sometimes thought it might be a good idea to go through all our religious literature and cross out the word, “God” and substitute, “Love.” But then again, that might mislead people who have wholly inadequate notions of Love and similar notions of God, so that for them, “God has got to be more than that!” Or, “Yes, God is love, but that is not the whole story.”

Well, it is the whole story. God is Love. Is God nothing else besides? Is He not, for example, also Just?

He is, but the question assumes that justice and Love are two different things. For us human beings, in our fallen state, they indeed often are two things, but in God they are one because they are perfect, and nothing is “just” unless it is an expression, an application, of Love. That is why Justice, for God, requires not punishment, but restoration.

God is also Truth, but there is nothing true that is not Love. Neither is there anything good, nor worthy, nor mighty, nor creative, nor beautiful, nor immortal, nor all-knowing, that is anything different from Love. Love is that beside which there is none other.

So I was relieved and grateful to find this in Olivier Clement’s book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, page 43. The author is discussing how communion in God on the one hand doesn’t destroy our unique personhood, but affirms it, yet on the other hand, does not admit of any separation or duality:

Personal existence has a ‘vertical’ dimension, a desire to be plunged into the fullness of God. And this fullness is not a solitude but an ocean already alive with the movement of infinite love. The depth is not an unrelieved gloom; it contains reciprocal activity, interchange, the presence of the other, while duality is avoided in the communion of the Three in One. The depth itself suggests the inexhaustible character of the Persons and of their love. We can now say boldly, ‘God is love’, without fear of blaspheming by appearing to trivialize.

So maybe it wouldn't be all that bad to cross out "God" and write in, "Love."

And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD LOVE smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that [was] in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

Now THAT would give us a lot to think about, wouldn't it?  And yet, this is how we must learn somehow to interpret the passage.

The letters in the "spokes" of Christ's halo say, in Greek, He Who Is, recalling God's Name as revealed to Moses: YAHWEH, I am the 'I am'.  Here, crowned with thorns, is Yahweh.

"Be Still and Know That I am God."

The Lenten struggle, which is but an intensification of our everyday struggle, involves all sorts of things: fighting against temptation, learning to trust and to hope and to love and to forgive, weaning ourselves from addictions to the things of this earth, acquiring virtue, rooting out vice.

None of which we can accomplish ourselves, even though love prompts us to struggle with them. Struggle we must, but the main struggle must always be to stand still and simply receive God's grace and mercy, to let Him work in us. If we can but be faithful in this, all the rest follows.

Happy Birthday, Wendy!

Today is my sister's birthday. She is 59. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SISTER! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you!


With Our Brother, Mike

Sloth, Disguised as Humility

It's no good being ever so humble about your lack of Christian maturity if continually acknowledging it becomes a substitute for doing anything about it.

Test Swatch and Tentative Verdict

Top photo shoes the "Print o' the Wave" pattern I've published here once or twice recently.  Bottom photo is my attempt to reproduce it

Can you tell that the difference is (other than that mine is so inexpertly stretched and pinned out)?  That could be fixed. What can't be fixed is that it still needs to be knitted more loosely; viz., on even larger needles. (These are US 11s.)

The other difference is that in real life, my sample here is probably twice as large in scale as the lavender one. What I actually need is not larger needles, but finer yarn. And of course, real wool instead of acrylic, so it will block. This is fingering yarn and I need laceweight.

Verdict:  I don't think I will bother. First because I've never knitted with such fine yarn before and feel intimidated. Secondly, and more importantly, because I don't know what I'd DO with the pattern. It's too sheer to be good for a blanket or sweater. Can't be attached to a solid backing without spoiling the effect. I don't wear shawls. I wouldn't want curtains out of this because (a) I'd be afraid moths would get to the curtains and ruin them and/or (b) I'd have to block them all over again (and blocking is a royal pain) every time they were washed or drycleaned. And finally, the pattern, with its 17-stitch repeat, takes so much concentration to knit that all the enjoyment of doing it is spoiled.

Lesson:  there are many reasons, other than gauge, that it's important to knit a test swatch before undertaking a project.

Tough to Take

Demetrios' patient Kevin (not his real name) of whom I've written before (here), died early this morning. His death was totally unexpected and sudden.

He got up from bed just after midnight, with a very runny nose. The physician on duty offered him a little Benadryl, but Kevin refused. He sat up for a while, not appearing at all ill (except mentally, of course), and finally went back to bed around 2:00. The nurses, making their routine checks at 3:00, found him dead in his bed.

The suddenness of it probably means heart attack, stroke, or blod clot, any of which is surprising as his cholesterol was low and his blood pressure normal. He was not a smoker and not obese. He was not on any particularly dangerous drugs.

He was only 49 years old.

We hope he is in better shape now. Please pray for him. And I think Demetrios could use your prayers, too.

On the Tragedy and the Glory of Human Freedom

Here is more from Olivier Clement, in his Book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. This is from pages 35-36.

Then the question arises: Why has God created us tragically free, tragically responsible – so heavy a burden that we constantly lay it down at the feet of idols and inquisitors? To which the great Christian Tradition replies unanimously: God created us free because he summons us to deification – to a divine-human condition in which our transformed humanity will find its fulfillment. This call demands a free response. Union that resulted from mere magnetic force would be automatic, instinctive, unworthy of a personal existence which, even in its wish for union, requires complete responsibility.

There does exist, it is true, an impersonal love which is the working of desire. Some contemplatives have stressed the spontaneous return or nature towards its origin. Denys the Areopagite, for example, saw the world as a kind of immense liturgy, a sacred dance revolving around the divine Centre, held in its attractive force. However, Denys was accepted into the Tradition only when corrected by Maximus the Confessor who, in his own writings and experience, emphasized the terrible freedom of man.

That is why Adam had to undergo the test of freedom, to grow in maturity towards a conscious love. That is why sacrificial Love could not be revealed until Abraham’s knife had glinted in the eyes of Isaac …That is why the chosen people were a stiff-necked people, who got their name – Israel – after wrestling in the dark with the unnamed Stranger. That is why, finally, when God took on himself the destiny of Isaac and of Job, he came in secret, so that only by the free love of humankind could he be recognized in a crucified slave, defiled with blood and spittle.

. . .

We can really love God only because we can refuse him. The book in the Bible which most clearly expresses this truth is possibly the Song of Songs, where the one painstakingly seeks the other. God seeks us more than we seek God.

When Metphors Become Literal

I love it when this happens!

The first time I can remember it happening was one morning when I was changing the sheets on the bed. You know how you sort of flap the top sheet to make it billow? Well, I let this sheet go too high, and it got caught by the rotating blades of the ceiling fan. I yelped.

"What's wrong?" called Demetrios from the next room.

And I said - are you ready? - I said, "The sheet hit the fan!"

Another time was while I was raising a baby robin. I stood looking out the window one rainy afternoon, wishing aloud I had gone out in the rain to collect some of the worms that had emerged from their flooded holes in the ground.

"Why don't you go out now and get some?" asked Demetrios.

"Too late; they'll all be gone by now. The other birds will have gotten them all."

"You mean...?"

I nodded, and in unison we said: "The early bird gets the worm!"

Yesterday, it happened again when I went to transfer a load of our undies from the washer to the dryer. The washing machine stretched and twisted one pair into a long rope, which got caught in the agitator and snagged half a dozen other pairs into a huge, tangled mess. I was bending over the washer, my head almost inside, tugging and muttering to myself, when Demetrios came to see what was the matter.

"Panties all in a wad?" he asked.

On Learning to Live

Repentance is not awareness of my personal guilt, as St. John Climacus says in the Olivier Clement snippet I posted yesterday. Repentance is awareness of “the daily murder of love” in me, of my loveless and therefore separated condition. Repentance is that awareness plus the longing to overcome it.

Simply keeping the Law won’t help. And this is not because I cannot do it, although that is also true. It is because there is no law that could give me eternal life even if I did keep it. (Galatians 3:21). Eternal life is the very same thing as true love, and no keeping of any (or every) law can instill in me that kind of love, the love we find perfectly expressed only in Christ, and less perfectly (but still marvelously) expressed in His saints.

Such love comes only from Christ, for only He has it, or rather, is it. Put another way, “Only [Christ] has immortality.” (I Timothy 6:16; see also John 5:26) Christ, by that immortal Love, transfigured death, proving Love stronger than every torment, and stronger even than Hades.

To be rescued from death, I need the Immortal Life, that is the Love, found in Him, in His Person. That is what Baptism and Chrismation together accomplish; the one plants me into Christ, into His death and resurrection, and the other plants His Holy Spirit deep in my own heart.

Now I am immersed in Love, in Life. Now He breaks the bread of Life with me.

There remains one issue, the one we tackle especially during Great Lent, and that is learning what to do with that new life, how to exercise that new love. As the wings of a newly-emerged butterfly do him no good unless he flaps them, so new and eternal life avails me little or perhaps even nothing unless I learn to live it. I have been awakened from sleep, but what does that mean if I never open my eyes, get up, move about? I am a newly-delivered infant; but what does that mean unless I breathe this new thing called air, unless I suckle, unless I can cry and move? Or what does it mean to be a fish that cannot swim?

Great Lent is for exercising our weak spiritual muscles and learning to use our new spiritual faculties, that we not enter the realms of light blind, nor deaf to the heavenly anthems, nor mute instead of singing, nor paralyzed instead of soaring.