“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!”

Shakespeare | Richard III

 

Religion just won’t go away

https://acculturated.com/good-vs-evil-star-wars-last-jedi/

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2009/06/religion-in-science-fiction.html

https://acculturated.com/serenity-as-secular-myth-the-future-of-religion-in-science-fiction/

 

There is a battlefield, perhaps (although it is not certain) in the Balkans. Many soldiers have been killed, their bodies lie in shallow graves. An old woman moves across this forlorn landscape stooping every so often. I realise she is planting out flowers from old tins – wildflowers and lavender. She is doing so to honour the lives of the fallen soldiers. It is clear in the dream that it is of no importance to her which side they were on; it is their lives she is honouring with the flowers. Each flower tenderly Pushed into the dark soil says, here was a life.

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Traditionally the colour lavender in the Christian calendar is the colour of Easter.

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Death, and resurrection.

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The dream is not an argument for moral equivalence in war (a dream is not an argument for anything). But Christ makes no distinction between us; He is not interested if you were on the side of the victor or the vanquished. His interest is the texture of the human soul.

And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.

THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard (1994) “Simulacra and simulation”

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

-Karl Rahner, German Jesuit priest and theologian

“Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.”

By TS ELIOT

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

“Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.”