Friends,
I like the foreground and background sense here. in the foreground
women bring spices to anoint the body of Jesus but are told by 'a
young man' that he is gone...they must tell Peter and the disciples
that he goes ahead of them to Galilee.
this is the foreground
the doing for the broken defeated and dead teacher and friend that
which they could in despite of the the sense of loss and despair. We
are all defeated in ways and broken in ways and so in sustaining each
other within this awareness of limitation shared, of allowing ourselves
to touch weakness and failure, we are doing what they did...
But then the unaccountable opens out. there is no end. no ending to the
story but a call to meet the one they sought among the dead but who now
is moving ahead through life, there to be met in every place, first of
all in Galilee the place of beginnings, but in the sister or brother, in
of course the bread and wine, in all the unaccountable in our lives, in
the earth and sky and mist on the mountains, in every thing the life of
the endlessly living one whose life has expanded beyond any individuality
without yet losing his own...
and in the background the church which in a time remote from the trip of
the women, remembers and makes present this sign of the eternal...
sharing the call as George W Russell said to "seek on earth what you have
found in Heaven"...
sharing the sense of a suddenly dizzyingly open future...

+Seraphim

.

Несколько дней назад на конференции в Москве я всё-таки прокомментировал реакцию представителей Церкви на установку бюста Сталину в Якутске. Здесь есть и нравственные проблемы, и банальное незнание церковных документов. ИА "Благовест-инфо" вполне корректно изложил мою позицию.
Памятник Сталину в Якутске: предельно сбалансированные высказывания вокруг предельно конфликтного события
Участие православных христиан в установке памятников Сталину – событие, недопустимое с нравственной точки зрения, и оно прямо противоречит каноническим установлениям Русской Православной Церкви.
Читать полностью...

Греческий Институт СПб: 20 мая в 15.30 пройдет очередное заседание семинара по новогреческой диалектологии, в рамках которого выступит О. Балытникова-Ракитянская с докладом на тему: "Понтийцы: прошлое, настоящее, будущее".

Напоминаю, если кто забыл, что завтра, 19 мая - День памяти жертв понтийского геноцида.

Friends,
Yesterday afternoon went out to City Island, an island in Long Island
Sound which is part of the City and yet is in effect a New England
seaside village with quaint houses, docks, and an array of seafood
restaurants. Recommend the Black Whale for its available dining in a
wonderful back garden and for its crab cakes.

Anyway here are some seagulls , beating their wings in a wind blowing
through their world of air and light.

.

and here after dark and yet gleaming out of that dark are irises by
the road.

.

and here are the shadows of gulls.
.

these today, yours
+Seraphim

Friends,
One more to share from visit on Sunday to Innisfree Gardens in Dutchess
County in the Hudson Valley. Yesterday we spoke of the bridge in the
garden, perhaps this picture suggests to us the elements of which all
the real or possible worlds are made, earth, water, air and the flowers
for fire...tree ,and rocks for metal, if one wants the chinese set...
among all these in the garden one may recover, unconsciously even, the
sense of oneself within the worlds and rising from them , as in an
image of vitruvian man projected on the stars
http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.6221069.4292/flat,550x550,075,f.jpg.
and then underlying this that from which they rise, akasha in the Indian
term for the fifth and first element,and yet beneath that in the garden
does one not hear the echo of a first word echoed in turn in the words of
the ancient Christian prayer:
"Great art Thou, O Lord, and marvelous are Thy works,
and speech sufficeth not to sing the praises of Thy wonders. For Thou,by
Thy will, from nothingness hast brought all things into being; by Thy
majesty Thou dost uphold all creation...Thou hadst framed the universe
out of four elements, as thou didst crown the circle of the year with
four seasons..."
+Seraphim
.

Friends,
'All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon
a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of the divine infinitude,
below them that of their own nothingness,'

I put that quote from St.Philaret of Moscow, with this picture of
Innisfree Gardens in Dutchess County New York which I visited the
other day because ...well of course there is a bridge and there are
two people on it but also because, is it too fanciful to say?, there is
a certain dislocation in place.it is the Hudson Valley but also somehow
the bridge the lake, and beyond the bridge the winding river into the
hills may suggest some other place...some China of dreams?

The one place folds into the other and both onto the square small surface
of a picture in which the two people are ,and are not. forever present.
in a moment of vertigo we realize ourselves between place and place,
inner and outer, what is and what is not, and feel with that
disorientation a refreshment as if touched by a cool breeze...

we turn then and continue across the bridge ,not looking back to see if
we are still there on a two dimensional surface , and walk uphill into
a wood of pines and it is quiet but the branches above rustle as stirred
by wind...
+Seraphim
.

Friends,
This is a photo yesterday of liturgy at St Gregory's in Wappingers
Falls. It is a church I have gone too rather often and taken a good
many photos of and seen others so that, if I may say so, the site
seemed used up for new images in some way.
But this one seems to me to ,at least for me, have something
additional...

.

Of course there is the Easter white, and the lilies mixing with
celebrants and saints on the back wall... made visible by the
absence of the heavy iconostasis (icon screen) many orthodox
churches interpose between altar and people. (the architect by the
way was Fr Alexis Vinogradov the pastor of the parish, here serving
with Fr Michael Plekon and Fr John Frazier)

There is also the suggested triangle of light in the cupola above...

I do not care for romanticizing the Christian liturgy in some ways, but
I think that without romanticizing either the action taking place, or the
place, or the past or the future, we can see in the image some reflection
of a further dimension of the world which all Christian, all
human, worship seeks to turn and open itself towards...

towards a Liturgy beyond the liturgy if you will...
here is ,and here a certain kind of romanticism surely enters, a sort
which I may allow ,and another may not, is a representation by Charles
Williams, from the novel "War in Heaven" of Liturgy beyond the liturgy.
( Read more...Collapse )

Friends,
I saw these blossoms on the ground last night with others still falling
from their tree. they look like...well like blossoms on the ground but maybe
enough like a fireworks display against the night sky or something to make
them worth sharing? So this but then also some thought on falling blossoms,
Tennessee Williams, haiku of Issa etc for anyone in the mood for a quick
ramble through that sort of thing...
( Read more...Collapse )
............
*a general remark added on the world declining/but blossoms etc.. perhaps beauty
can cleanse the eyes so that we see beyond our own mortality which projected on
the world makes it seem darker than it is... (to put to one side the question of
positive or negative eschatology which is too large for us here assembled maybe
in cyber space ) but adds our own projected shadow...and beauty removes that
and....if we are very clear sighted may guide to the life,to the immortality,at
the depth of our own mortality or as we say that "Christ is Risen!"

+Seraphim
.

My mother has suddenly lost the use of one of her legs- and it's uncertain whether she'll be able to stay in her 19th century farmhouse, which- among other inconveniences- is full of steps. Ailz and I will be spending the next few days/weeks doing what we can to sort this out- and I don't expect to be visiting LJ much- if at all.

I couldn't sleep last night. Eventually I gave up trying and got up and made myself a cup of tea. While I was drinking it I briskly polished off a cryptic crossword that had baffled me the day before. Who knew one could be so razor-sharp at two o'clock in the morning?

Friends,
I am going to post, what I have before, The Loves of Taliesin.
an ancient Welsh poem with some notes at the end --perhaps some
will stay for them, they are my thought.

"THE LOVES OF TALIESIN

The beauty of the virtue in doing penance for excess,
Beautiful too that God shall save me.
The beauty of a companion who does not deny me his company,
Beautiful too the drinking horn’s society.
The beauty of a master like Nudd, the Wolf of God,
Beautiful too a man who is noble, kind and generous.
The beauty of berries at harvest time,
Beautiful too the grain on the stalk.
The beauty of the sun, clear in the sky,
Beautiful too those who pay Adam’s debt. ( Read more...Collapse )

What strikes me is the richness of the interweave of light and shadow ,
as well representing the texture of life as almost any writing I know.
It is of course in terms of the world and society of its time but the
changeable changed the same vision,if attained, can hold today--seeing
beauty in things which even seem opposite, the light not negating the
dark or vice versa, the gentle and the stern and so on through all the
opposites. I think of Arnold Schonberg's string sextet "Verklarte Nacht"
Transfigured Night, whose text, a poem by Richard Dehmel, begins:

"Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;"

and ends

"Two people walk on through the high, bright night."

The eye defines the world for us and can transfigure it if we see and as
it were raise our spirit and vision to the level of Taliesin, or so it
seems to me on a rainy day, when I am not feeling also all that well, and
when there are things on my mind that are or would or will be heavy if I
let them...
and a photo I took on a road in Galway several years ago.
+Seraphim
.