A handful of semi-related items today… Continue reading
Note: this post grew out of a comment I made on Erl_queen’s LJ the other day.
I realized a long time ago that I am not going to fit into the mainstream of any religious community, even a Pagan one; as my wife puts it, we’re sort of the “fuzz on the end of the string on the fringe”, wherever we are. Continue reading
I have long honored Hermes as my professional (IT) patron, and more generally as the patron of the Internet; some of His most common associations, as patron of commerce and of communication (and of thieves, let’s face it :) make this new one fairly obvious. However, I have recently had cause to rethink this a bit; not to minimize His importance, but to consider Another Who may have just claim to share these honors – Athena. Continue reading
I’m most of the way through the new Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, and wanted to share this passage:
Quoth Lord Vetinari: “… one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on this delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
This is the title of a recent sermon at a Presbyterian church that I pass every day on the way to work, as advertised on their signboard. Having been raised a “preacher’s kid” in a fairly conservative Christian environment, and seeing so many familiar topics in the sermon titles at this particular church, I suspect that I could write that minister’s sermon myself almost word for word. Dollars to doughnuts he talked about how we humans (or at least Christians) are “in the world but not of it”, and how we don’t really belong here, how our “real” home is with God in Heaven (but only if we believe in Jesus).
I don’t normally pay a lot of attention to the sermon topics there – like I said, it’s all so familiar – but for some reason, at this time and in this season this particular topic has stuck in my head… both the familiarity of it, and the realization that there is no longer even a tiny residual corner of my psyche that’s wondering “what if they’re right?”; the whole theology behind it seems so – well, alien – to me now. It’s so obvious to me that we are a part of whatever is, and that our true home is right here… and if we don’t start acting like it, the whole house will eventually collapse around us.
And on that note, I’m going offline for a few days – see you next weekend!
A mountain,
A bird,
A tree,
A river.
A child… Continue reading
Ali just posted something so lyrical, lovely and true that I have to share: Continue reading
And so we come, at last, to theology. Continue reading
Let’s return for a moment to the question of the river (I have deliberately chosen a difficult example, on the assumption that if the theory holds water now, then it might be worth pursuing further). Continue reading
Executive Pagan 