WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Something Wonderful for Good Friday: A Rose Among Thorns
byVanderleunonApril 15, 2022
“We do not die period. We die comma.” — Rev. Donald Sensing
In all of God’s created universe, in all of God’s given time, one, just one, rose among the thorns is the one we became and which we shall remain until. . .
“We do not die period. We die comma.” — Rev. Donald Sensing
================
That’s what I believe, sorta.
The body dies but the mind lives on, it is eternal.
It’s the spark of life, always was, always will be.
None of that imaginary superhero nonsense.
Electricity, you know, the stuff that illuminates your kitchen in the early morn, and the stuff that connects all of your senses to the central control panel in your brain.
Electricity can’t die.
But, we live in our bodies and the electricity is released into the ether so what does all of that mean?
No one lives in the ether as all the electricity is combined and mixed, so the only “life” you will ever know is that which you are experiencing right now.
Make the best of it.
Do something new today.
GhostBusterApril 9, 2022, 2:34 PM
“Electricity can’t die”… Stupidest thing I’ve read all month.
Then why does electricity constantly have to be generated or stored? And you obviously ignore the fact that electricity (which is an energy) cannot exist without matter– simple physics.
“None of that imaginary superhero nonsense.” Are you referring to God? The almighty creator of all things? Whom you refuse to believe in, despite all the overwhelming evidence of his existence- because you’re angry at him for all your failures?
“But, we live in our bodies and the electricity is released into the ether so what does all of that mean?
No one lives in the ether as all the electricity is combined and mixed, so the only “life” you will ever know is that which you are experiencing right now.”
Egads, WTAF is all that babbling nonsense supposed to mean?
Regarding “ether,” it appears you may have been huffing a whole bunch of it in order to achieve your current level of brain damage — disproving your opinion that “the mind lives on, it is eternal.”
Hey, good luck on Judgement Day.
ghostsniperMarch 30, 2018, 4:54 AM
I did not watch the video.
GhostBusterApril 9, 2022, 2:47 PM
Of course you didn’t. It might have lead to some type of enlightenment.
scoryMarch 30, 2018, 5:14 AM
You and I – each and every one of us – can never not be. We have always been. We never end.
Spirit plus body = wholeness. Jesus made this equation eternal.
What we believe, say and do in this life determine consequences after mortality has ended. We choose our future.
He Is Risen. We read these words in the scriptures, of an event 2000 plus years ago, and, as Christians, we have hope, a desire to sincerely believe, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God , and we can enjoy life everlasting with Him. Those three little words, which we today can recite by rote, sometimes seem so ancient and myth like that we often may simply take those words for granted, a mere greeting for us to banter back and forth as we attend Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter services. Can you imagine with what wonder and amazement those words, He Is Risen, were shared those 2000 plus years ago? He is indeed a rose among thorns, lifting us up and blanketing us in beauty, thorns though we may be. He Is Risen.
RichardMarch 30, 2018, 8:02 AM
Thank you for the video. Truth, Beauty, and Light. We are drawn to it because we are drawn from it. The Holy Triduum is the most profound time of the year.
JackMarch 30, 2018, 9:25 AM
The melody accompanying the vid was given lyrics by Sarah Brightman. It’s called Nella Fantasia and my favorite version of it, apart from Brightman’s is sung by 14 year old Dutch, now S. African crossover singer Amira Willighagen. Check her live performance of the song when she sang before an audience in South Africa. 14…you just can’t make this stuff up.
I’ll be dipped if all I can remember of The Mission was that my roommate, and lifelong buddy (I was his best man), could speak Guarani, Spanish and Portuguese and translated everything being said and sung in the movie for us. The Guarani can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so their choir part was pretty much faked. Other than that failing, they are a fine people. My buddy was in a missionary family in that very location.
Makes me want to study the movie and history.
Enjoy the Holy events today through Sunday. Jesus is risen!
IMHO one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. One of my favorite movies.
Fluella De VilApril 3, 2021, 9:08 AM
This post doesn’t like being in proximity to the post above it. The purple Easter bunny makes it feel dirty. I guess one could say you’re versatile, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Gerard, thank you for the quote. Here is my work for Holy Week this year:
If someone were to ask you, “Why was JFK assassinated?” you certainly would not answer, “To save us from our sins.” Yet that is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we church people are asked why Jesus died or why he was crucified.
That answer is correct, of course, but is that really all there is to it? None of Jesus’ accusers thought that. Caiaphas, the high priest who turned Jesus over to Pilate, would have thought such an answer to be idiotic. Pilate, a Roman pagan, would never have remotely thought it. None of the crowd who demanded of Pilate, “Crucify him!” thought their sins would be forgiven via Jesus’ death on a cross. And for that matter, not even Jesus’ disciples thought so, despite more than one occasion when Jesus had clearly taught it to them.
So what was happening in the ordinary realm of human motives and actions that ended with Jesus dying on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem? “Execution Day – The Case Against Christ,” is an work-in-progress essay I wrote in 2019 to explore how to answer why Jesus was crucified in the same way we might answer why JFK was shot – who did it, why, and what did they hope to gain? To read, just click the link.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
“We do not die period. We die comma.” — Rev. Donald Sensing
================
That’s what I believe, sorta.
The body dies but the mind lives on, it is eternal.
It’s the spark of life, always was, always will be.
None of that imaginary superhero nonsense.
Electricity, you know, the stuff that illuminates your kitchen in the early morn, and the stuff that connects all of your senses to the central control panel in your brain.
Electricity can’t die.
But, we live in our bodies and the electricity is released into the ether so what does all of that mean?
No one lives in the ether as all the electricity is combined and mixed, so the only “life” you will ever know is that which you are experiencing right now.
Make the best of it.
Do something new today.
“Electricity can’t die”… Stupidest thing I’ve read all month.
Then why does electricity constantly have to be generated or stored? And you obviously ignore the fact that electricity (which is an energy) cannot exist without matter– simple physics.
“None of that imaginary superhero nonsense.” Are you referring to God? The almighty creator of all things? Whom you refuse to believe in, despite all the overwhelming evidence of his existence- because you’re angry at him for all your failures?
“But, we live in our bodies and the electricity is released into the ether so what does all of that mean?
No one lives in the ether as all the electricity is combined and mixed, so the only “life” you will ever know is that which you are experiencing right now.”
Egads, WTAF is all that babbling nonsense supposed to mean?
Regarding “ether,” it appears you may have been huffing a whole bunch of it in order to achieve your current level of brain damage — disproving your opinion that “the mind lives on, it is eternal.”
Hey, good luck on Judgement Day.
I did not watch the video.
Of course you didn’t. It might have lead to some type of enlightenment.
You and I – each and every one of us – can never not be. We have always been. We never end.
Spirit plus body = wholeness. Jesus made this equation eternal.
What we believe, say and do in this life determine consequences after mortality has ended. We choose our future.
He Is Risen. We read these words in the scriptures, of an event 2000 plus years ago, and, as Christians, we have hope, a desire to sincerely believe, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God , and we can enjoy life everlasting with Him. Those three little words, which we today can recite by rote, sometimes seem so ancient and myth like that we often may simply take those words for granted, a mere greeting for us to banter back and forth as we attend Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter services. Can you imagine with what wonder and amazement those words, He Is Risen, were shared those 2000 plus years ago? He is indeed a rose among thorns, lifting us up and blanketing us in beauty, thorns though we may be. He Is Risen.
Thank you for the video. Truth, Beauty, and Light. We are drawn to it because we are drawn from it. The Holy Triduum is the most profound time of the year.
The melody accompanying the vid was given lyrics by Sarah Brightman. It’s called Nella Fantasia and my favorite version of it, apart from Brightman’s is sung by 14 year old Dutch, now S. African crossover singer Amira Willighagen. Check her live performance of the song when she sang before an audience in South Africa. 14…you just can’t make this stuff up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_WyjEj5DW8
I’ll be dipped if all I can remember of The Mission was that my roommate, and lifelong buddy (I was his best man), could speak Guarani, Spanish and Portuguese and translated everything being said and sung in the movie for us. The Guarani can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so their choir part was pretty much faked. Other than that failing, they are a fine people. My buddy was in a missionary family in that very location.
Makes me want to study the movie and history.
Enjoy the Holy events today through Sunday. Jesus is risen!
IMHO one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. One of my favorite movies.
This post doesn’t like being in proximity to the post above it. The purple Easter bunny makes it feel dirty. I guess one could say you’re versatile, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Without God, life is meaningless.
https://forge-and-anvil.com/2021/04/01/historical-world-accounts-of-the-crucifixions-darkness/
And here is something even more wondrous and terrible to behold.
Jewel, how bittersweet to see your words here again and know you’re on the other side, dining at the Lord’s table even now.
So very true. Jewel is resting in Abraham’s bosom. Her words, though ghostly, remind me of what a beautiful woman she was and is.
“I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”
Rev. 1:18
Charles Manson said, ” as best he could figure,
God is oxygen.”
I would imagine that Manson has changed his view somewhat considering where he is.
Gerard, thank you for the quote. Here is my work for Holy Week this year:
If someone were to ask you, “Why was JFK assassinated?” you certainly would not answer, “To save us from our sins.” Yet that is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we church people are asked why Jesus died or why he was crucified.
That answer is correct, of course, but is that really all there is to it? None of Jesus’ accusers thought that. Caiaphas, the high priest who turned Jesus over to Pilate, would have thought such an answer to be idiotic. Pilate, a Roman pagan, would never have remotely thought it. None of the crowd who demanded of Pilate, “Crucify him!” thought their sins would be forgiven via Jesus’ death on a cross. And for that matter, not even Jesus’ disciples thought so, despite more than one occasion when Jesus had clearly taught it to them.
So what was happening in the ordinary realm of human motives and actions that ended with Jesus dying on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem? “Execution Day – The Case Against Christ,” is an work-in-progress essay I wrote in 2019 to explore how to answer why Jesus was crucified in the same way we might answer why JFK was shot – who did it, why, and what did they hope to gain? To read, just click the link.
Or watch this video I made about the same subject, “Why Crucify Jesus?”
May the Lord bless you all!
Thx G for the repost under “Something Wonderful”.
Your elegaic writing and ability to pick out what matters is the reason I return, usually end of day to end on a positive note.
Reminding myself to feed the white wolf…
-foo