From Canon Victoria Heard of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas:
As I walked down the hall, I found myself, by chance, behind a nurse with beautiful braided gray hair that tumbled down her back like a waterfall. I told her it was beautiful. She was startled, and smiled, and ever so slightly straightened her shoulders. I was intentional. I meant to give her a blessing.
@ayjay, quoting Ross Douthat on Paul Kingsnorth’s coming to Christian belief:
… he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by … stark mystical experiences
@ayjay, again, contrasting the homo religiosus “seeker” with the Christian:
We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us.
Exactly. And it seems to me that Kingsnorth’s coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments, and stark mystical experiences are God’s drawing Kingsnorth to Him; of, as Edwin Muir beautifully writes, his being found.
I was recently inducted as a new member of the Grandparents Club. Per the club handbook, within 24 hours, I’d changed my phone’s lockscreen to a picture of the baby. (I’m smitten.)
By tapping a guy accused of having sex at a party with a 17-year-old girl to be America’s top law enforcement officer, Donald Trump discovered that even life forms as supine as congressional Republicans have a limit to how much sleaze they can rationalize. But I wonder if, in hindsight, the president regrets letting Gaetz withdraw from consideration instead of daring the Senate GOP to vote him down.
… everything we’ve seen from them since then proves that they do not, in fact, take their jobs very seriously.
The … Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites.. but you know who’s really going to pay? … working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions… the essence of Trumpism: [is] to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS, but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high-school girls’ swim meet.
In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.
What I myself seem to damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging, as did even most of those who loved it best.
But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had; and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, and call at night in the sky.
Another great post from the inestimable Spitalfields Life.
