Saturday, December 7, 2013

Longing

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing--to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from--" . . .
"--my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now--?"

Psyche in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces

Friday, August 23, 2013

Faerie

“Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”


― J.R.R. Tolkien 
On Fairy-Stories 

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

For God's Glory

Our approach changes from "Come into my world and make me happy," to "Father, show me how to go into Your world and glorify you."
~ Susan Hunt
Spiritual Mothering

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Good Times

The first families of Clintonville had plenty of self-made entertainment available, including skating, sledding, buggy and automobile rides, swimming, knocking about in the woods, following ravines to their source, playing in the river, climbing on train trestles, visiting with neighbors, and taking long strolls on Sundays. Since a good book had no competition with television, they read, and libraries became an integral part of their lives. Everybody loves a parade, and Clintonville residents mounted their fair share of them. They actively gardened, put on their own concerts and plays, started clubs, and were involved with their churches.

~Shirley Hyatt
Images of America: Clintonville and Beechwold

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Potatoes

From the ground, each round potato,
russet, brown, or gold--crumbs of dirt
still clinging to its skin--just fits
into the palm of the hand that
pulled it from the earth. Brushed clean and
roasted, held again in two hands,
it offers warmth, then nourishes
the body, the hands that held it.

~ Helen Frost, The Braid

Song


The songs that enter children's ears
carried across centuries of
love, stay with them, bringing comfort,
setting their feet dancing, coming
back to them when their own children
first look up and see them smiling
or hear them weeping as they rock,
strong boats upon a stormy sea.

~ Helen Frost, The Braid

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Modern Art

The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. They had a remedy for this, and the name of that remedy was beauty.  The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.

But art turned its back on beauty. It became a slave to the consumer culture, feeding our pleasures and addictions, and wallowing in self-disgust. . . They do not show reality , but take revenge on it, spoiling what might have been a home and leaving us to wander unconsoled and alienated in a spiritual desert.

~ Roger Scruton
Why Beauty Matters

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Do You Love the God of the Tyger and of the Lamb?


THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee 
 Dost thou know who made thee 
Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 
Little Lamb who made thee 
Dost thou know who made thee 

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb: 
He is meek & he is mild, 
He became a little child: 
I a child & thou a lamb, 
We are called by his name.
 Little Lamb God bless thee. 
 Little Lamb God bless thee.
 
~William Blake
 

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Titles

Nehemiah's prayer is a good example of addressing God in a way that's consistent with what and how we speak to Him in prayer.  For example, is it consistent to pray to God as "Lord" and then give Him a list of things we want Him to do for us? At such times, it would probably be more appropriate to address God as "Father" or "great Giver of life."...When in pain or grief, we might address the Lord as "God of all comfort" or "God of hope" or "blessed Friend" or "the one who has promised never to leave us." Taking our cue from the Israelites and their sensitivity to the many characteristics of their beloved God, we should never speak His names or titles lightly.

~ Approaching God 
Learning from Nehemiah pg 14
By Lee Brase

Thursday, April 25, 2013

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son! 


Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936) 

Friday, April 12, 2013

Domestic Virtue

“From all that I have read of history and government and human life and manners, I have drawn this conclusion: that the manners of women were the most infallible barometer to ascertain the degree of morality and virtue of a nation. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Swiss, the Dutch, all lost their public spirit and their republican forms of government when they lost the modesty and domestic virtues of their women.”
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the USA

Sunday, March 17, 2013

A Rebel's Prayer

Oh, my God, how great was thy goodness, to bear with me at this time, and to allow me to pray to Thee with as much boldness, as if I had been one of thy friends, I who had rebelled against Thee as thy greatest enemy.

Madame Guyon
pg 50

Friday, March 8, 2013

Poetic Fiction



From what we have said it will be seen that the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i. e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do—which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters; by a singular statement, one as to what, say, Alcibiades did or had done to him.

translation of the Poetics
from “The Works of Aristotle”

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Read With Caution

I loved reading to such excess, particularly romances, that I spent whole days and nights at them. Sometimes the day broke while I continued to read, insomuch, that for a length of time I almost lost the habit of sleeping. I was ever eager to get to the end of the book, in hopes of finding something to satisfy a certain craving which I found within me. My thirst for reading was only increased the more I read. Books are strange inventions to destroy youth. If they caused no other hurt than the loss of precious time, is not that too much? I was not restrained, but rather encouraged to read them under this fallacious pretext, that they taught one to speak well.

Autobiography: Madame Guyon
pg 45

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Passion & Purity

  Still indomitable was the reply--"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart is beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot"

~Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte