Photos You Can Hear

Mt. Horeb Holy Church Choir, Kigali, Rwanda. These should cheer you up a bit after the previous post. Photos by the gifted and adventurous Christina Syndikus.




The woman in purple was totally, I mean totally. I wanted to either marry her or steal her life force, assuming those are two different things. The woman in glasses next to her is her sister, and also a rocker.







I sometimes think that if you knew you'd be singing this music at the end of the week, you could stand almost anything during the six days prior. Plus there are rehearsals.








A singer in the choir, she just walked to the front and did that once in a while. Wait, what do I mean walked to the front?







It was a privilege to be there.












Okay, here are some more. I took these.






waiting for church






Christina outside church (Paige in foreground)






choir strutting






in purple





Yes!!!

Is hell exothermic or endothermic?

Find the answer here. (Scroll down to the italicized section.)

When people recommend something to me as "hilarious," I'm usually disappointed, but this one is.

I'm enjoying linking to old-favorite blogfriends today. This one's Lucy at Box Elder, an Englishwoman who lives in Brittany with her husband and posts richly detailed descriptions and crisp bucolic photos of her travels through France.

More Cool Rabbis

I've been receiving rabbinical wisdom from all quarters lately. This is from my old friend Larry in New York:

"Song is one of the degrees of enlightenment; prayer occupies a lower rung on the same continuum. When you are on the rung of prayer and have not yet reached that of song, you need to exert yourself greatly to begin to sing. Then you will begin to see with spiritual vision and become enflamed with the passion for God."
-- Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno

And here's another that Annie Dillard quoted in For the Time Being:

"When I see a bundle of straw lying in the street, it seems to me a sign of the presence of God, that it lies there lengthwise, and not crosswise."

And here's a response I got from God:

"Crosswise, lengthwise, what's the difference? What do they want from me, these nudniks?"

How God Prays

"Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said that God studies Torah three hours a day. The Talmud notes that God prays, and puts on phylacteries*. What does God pray? 'May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger.'"
-- Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

*leather thongs, wrapped around the forehead and left arm, to which are attached small leather boxes containing passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, worn during weekday morning prayer

Holy Week Greetings

Whenever things look darkest and I can't imagine how I'll possibly find anything to post ever again, something calls along and fills the need, and thankfully this time it came in the apparently innocuous form of a mass email forwarded from a friend. (Thanks, Diane.)

Undoubtedly someone will tell me it's beeen circulating the Net since 1998, but I haven't seen it before so I expect that at least one of you hasn't either. Those of you who've seen it before, shut your eyes.

An atheist was walking through the woods. "What majestic trees! What
powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.

As he strolled along the sparkling water, he heard a rustling in the bushes
behind him. Turning quickly, he saw a seven-foot grizzly bear charging toward
him.

He ran as fast as he could up the path, but looking over his shoulder he
could see that the bear was gaining on him. When he looked again, the great
beast was even closer! Just then he tripped and fell to the ground.
He rolled over frantically trying to arise but saw the bear towering over
him,reaching for him with his left paw, right paw ready to slash with
terrible claws!! He screamed, "Oh, MY God!!"

Time stopped.

The bear froze.

The forest was silent.

As a bright light shone from the sky, a deep voice thundered, "You! You
deny my existence for all these years, teach others that I do not exist,and
even credit creation to cosmic accident! Do you really expect me to
help you out of this awful predicament ? Am I now to count you as a
beleiver?"

The atheist looked into the great light. "No, it would be hypocritical of
me now to suddenly ask acceptance as a Christian, BUT perhaps you could
make that BEAR a Christian?"

"Very well," said the Voice. And the light went out. The sounds of the
forest came alive again. And the bear dropped his right paw, and he brought
both paws together, and bowing his massive head, with great reverance, spoke,

"Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen."

I also like this from The Anchoress. Make sure to read the italicized part uunder "More nun stuff."

PS: For those who wonder, I'm not a Christian. I've tried and it hasn't worked. I'm not an observing Jew either (though I am a pretty observant Jew). I try to recognize holiness when it appears, though.

A Retort to Atheism

They are ill discoverers that think that there is no land if they see nothing but a sea. —Francis Bacon

(This quotation appears on a finely written post (all of his are) on Teju Cole's Modal Minority. His post, "Nothing But a Sea," is memoir or fiction and has nothing to do with my post.)

Sapling, Redwood, Galaxy

At the foot of a huge redwood, a sapling grows. It will never reach maturity. Its parent blocks its sunlight; its parent's roots steal its water and minerals.

The huge old redwood has survived lightning and flood, drought and loggers, pests and disease, and it wears its scars as signs of righteousness. It is home to many species of bird and mammal, insect and reptile. It will live hundreds more years.

The frail sapling will not last many more seasons. Soon a rodent will chew its bark to shreds, or a colony of ants will infest its roots, or a running deer will step on it, or a hard rain, delightful to big trees, will drown it. It will be food for something, but never a home to anything.

I ask myself, Which tree does God love more? The answer is obvious to me: they are the same within eternal tenderness. God doesn't care about magnitude, only we fools do.

We have photographs of the Elephant Trunk Nebula, and of the red and white pinwheel of the Whirlpool Galaxy. Of the shock waves of gas pouring from the newborn star HH 46, and of the perfect rings of Saturn honed smooth on the potter's wheel of gravity. We send probes and aim telescopes and get back pictures. It is all dead. There is nothing anywhere like us. It is cold black vacuum or screaming radioactive fire, and there is not a thought, not an eye, not a memory, not a love, within lightyears.

I think that every one among us is worth more than all that deadness. Or am I just being sentimental?

But sometimes I look at all that deadness and think, If it is pointless, how can it be so beautiful?

Ash Wednesday

I'm giving up agnosticism for Lent.

"The atheist non-god is not going to send me to non-hell for my lapse of non-faith if it should turn out that I am mistaken"

The science fiction writer John C. Wright, whose work I'm not acquainted with, was an atheist all his adult life until his recent conversion to Christianity, which happened through both intellectual and mystical means. His story, found on Speculative Catholic, would have been one of the brightest ornaments in William James' THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.

Wright on the error of atheism:

I began to notice how shallow, either simply optimistic or simply pessimistic, other philosophies and views of life were.

The public conduct of my fellow atheists was so lacking in sobriety and gravity that I began to wonder why, if we atheists had a hammerlock on truth, so much of what we said was pointless or naive. I remember listening to a fellow atheist telling me how wonderful the world would be once religion was swept into the dustbin of history, and I realized the chap knew nothing about history. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

I would listen to my fellow atheists, and they would sound as innocent of any notion of what real human life was like as the Man from Mars who has never met human beings or even heard clear rumors of them.

Wright on his mystical experience:

I became aware of the origin of all thought, the underlying oneness of the universe, the nature of time: the paradox of determinism and free will was resolved for me. I saw and experienced part of the workings of a mind infinitely superior to mine, a mind able to count every atom in the universe, filled with paternal love and jovial good humor. The cosmos created by the thought of this mind was as intricate as a symphony, with themes and reflections repeating themselves forward and backward through time: prophecy is the awareness that a current theme is the foreshadowing of the same theme destined to emerge with greater clarity later. A prophet is one who is in tune, so to speak, with the music of the cosmos.

Read a much longer, and thoroughly fascinating, excerpt here.

Hat tip: Good and Happy.

For the record, I'm neither an atheist nor a Christian.