The Bestiary
The Bestiary is a moralizing natural history of ancient origin, based on the Greek Physiologus
. It rivaled the Bible in popularity during the Middle Ages. . . . A standard book used by medieval artists, the Bestiary was an important influence in many areas of medieval art. . . . Moralizing parallels were drawn between the animals and their human counterparts.
The bee appears as a symbol of industry, creativity, and wealth, because of the busy organization of its life and its ability to make and store honey. . . . During the Romanesque period bees were symbols of eloquence. . . .From
A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art, by Gertrude Grace Sill.
I don't know how many tattooes I'll end up with, but currently I am looking into one for religious/cultural reasons. Our society is almost completely devoid of religious/cultural symbolism, replacing that tradition with symbols and icons of pop culture. I don't think it's a fair trade. It is also a symptom of our death as a viable society; ethnicity, that is community based on a shared tradition, is the key to a society's success. Currently, America is running on the fumes of her technological success, and not much more. And, due to my longing to be a part of a society with a viable ethnicity, I'm delving into the traditions of my religion to mark myself as belonging to something. (The modernists are after the great Catholic traditions of art and archietecture, too . . . very sad. Well, this chick's not taking it lying down!)
If I choose the bee, I'm thinking a woodcut image. I wonder if I can rustle up some cheap reproductions?
Labels: body modification
The Amish School Shooting
You know me, I always have something to say.
There is nothing in human nature that has become more twisted, nothing in our constitution that has grown more depraved on this day than was twisted and depraved after the first moment our first parents ate the apple. What was wrong in that pair is still wrong in us, in just the same way. What Charles Carl Roberts did was no more inventive in its wickedness than anything executed by any other human being in the millennia of our time here.
What is different is that we have flattered ourselves by telling ourselves that we are better than our first parents, that we have "progressed" beyond the human nature that was granted us by God. That what we were prone to do a thousand years ago, when those nasty Crusaders went a-slaughtering, what we were prone to do 500 years ago when those vile slave traders went gathering up children to sell, what we were prone to do 150 years ago when women were classed as less intellectually capable--well, all of that is somehow not a weakness for us any longer. We maintain this pretense that we don't do nasty savage things any longer, which means that we don't maintain the guards against those nasty savage things, which means that all the nasty savage things we are capable of doing, get done much more easily because
no one thinks to lock the door against them.
The Church is often faulted for emphasizing the wicked in human nature, as if she is being mean to point out that we are capable of awful things. Yes, it's true that human beings are capable of good equal to the evil. But people obstinately insist that if left alone we will tend toward the good, rather than the evil.
Good has a source. Evil has a source. Our capacity for either is in equal proportion to our bondage to one or the other. When you claim that we do not need God, you are not walking away from God into independence, you are only falling into line behind the other guy. That we can still be decent people capable of good acts even when claiming to have walked away from God is only evidence of the persistence in us of the good that the Source of Good has put into us. That we can still be rotten people capable of rotten things even when stumbling along after God is evidence of the persistence in us of the taint of original sin. What gets me is that a person can think he can cut himself off from the source of good and still expect consistently good results.
What also gets me is that society can look at this poor, disturbed man and make him out to be "different." Something, they say, must have been
wrong with him to make him do that. How so? Did he have a different nature than you have? No, what he did I, too, am perfectly capable of doing. When you pretend that you aren't capable of evil you are all the more capable of committing evil because you haven't prepared yourself against it. How can you run a marathon if you've never gotten on the treadmill?
There's no pithy conclusion to this. I'm sure smarter people than I am are hunched at their desks right now hammering out much better-worded explanations of all this. And, who reads this humble blog anyway? It was just on my mind.
Labels: modernism, violence
Requiem Aeternam
My grandmother died on Thursday. Her decline was quick and the end merciful . . . if you can call it that, dying without tying up the loose ends that way. It was the same way with my other grandmother. I wonder, when she left her house did she turn and look and know she would never see it again? The last load of laundry, did she say, I'll do it when I get back? The book she never finished, the plants that she would water when she got back . . . Do I want to die that way, quickly, without anticipation? But then, I think, when you get older surely you know, surely it follows you, the knowledge that every day may be your last. As a younger person that seems a burden, but they say as you age you begin to look forward, because you grow tired.
At the funeral there were the usual platitudes spoken by a cheesy Southern preacher, the usual thirties-era church songs played acappella (of course) as visitors walked by the coffin. Strangers had washed her body, strangers had dressed her and prepared her. How sterilized it is these days, so that we the family don't have to "suffer" by taking care of our own. She looked waxen, a bit shrunken, the hands stiff, but not used up, the way I had expected.
When my grandfather walked up to the coffin he simply said, "Bye, sweetheart."
At the graveside the same cheesy preacher spoke Gnostic nonsense about this not being Alice, it was only the body God gave Alice to use on earth. Hogwash. That body that was born and lived and bore children and aged was as much Alice as the part of her now beyond. Don't demean death that way, don't pretend it isn't the most vulgar of insults to human dignity, that it separates what was never meant to be separated: the body and the soul. Don't pretend it isn't what it is.
All weekend I thought,
I'm all she has to pray for her. No one else knows to do it. I wasn't close to her in life; now, in her death, I'm the only one she can count on.
When we arrived home on Sunday night the terrier was nowhere to be found. Lady was there, though, looking at me with what I know is anger for having left her for three days. This morning, I opened the front door to put something on the porch, and she went out, sat in front of the door looking at me. She was telling me that this time I wasn't going anywhere without her.
A partial indulgence can be obtained by devoutly visiting a cemetery and praying for the departed, even if the prayer is only mental. One can gain a plenary indulgence visiting a cemetery each day between November 1 and November 8. These indulgences are applicable only to the Souls in Purgatory.
A plenary indulgence, again applicable only to the Souls in Purgatory, is also granted when the faithful piously visit a church or a public oratory on November 2. In visiting the church or oratory, it is required, that one Our Father and the Creed be recited.
A partial indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, can be obtained when the Eternal Rest (Requiem aeternam) is prayed. This is a good prayer to recite especially during the month of November:
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Labels: death, family
