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Let the Lord guide and protect him; prayers have been sent.

Greetings, everyone: I hope your Second Sunday went well.
I finished the Imitation of Christ over the weekend, and have now begun to read a glorious work by Edward P. Jones called "The Known World". although it's not as "vintage" as the Imitation, it's very well written. The story is that of an African American slave in the 1800s who was enslaved to two white masters, and now is the overseer slave for a black master. Mr. Jones effectively stimulates my thinking about the arcane moral complexities of slavery and "the price of man", if you will. Although I've read but 42 pages, I would already reccomend this book to anyone who has any resemblance to a passion for history.

Fascinating, by all accounts.

Hmm..

It's written by a 15th century monk, mostly as advice to other monks (i.e. he uses phrases such as "You have entered the monestary in order to find your God"). The thesis statememnt, if i may use the term, is a basic Christian ideal:

"My son, to the degree that you can leave yourself behind, to that degree you shall be able to enter into Me."

have to go now. I'll talk more later.

It was written between 1420 and 1427, but the "vintage Spiritual Classics" edition was published in 1984.

Alas. 'Tis fun: if you've read Life of Pi, it's referenced there a bit, and has influenced much of what we have in christian writing today.

Good morning, everyone. Please excuse my recent absence: I'm generally fairly good about staying current in threads. Lately, days have been slightly stressful. I would, however, still like to congratulate everyone (who celebrates) on the first week of the Advent: I've noticed that people of all religions have been a little peppier lately. :)

On another note, has anyone here read The Imitation of Christ? It's most commonly attributed to Thomas a Kempis, but the original author was so insistent on humility that he didn't actually tell anyone he wrote the book. Anyone who has read it: I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts, if you don't mind: not too many people around me have heard of it.

To those of you who haven't read it, I sincerely reccomend doing so: although some ideas are foreign to me, I think everyone can get something out of it.

YIM--You Inspire Me.

Cherubim descend, majestic flight

Held precious in the tranquil, moonlit night

Remember Him beaneath the twinkles bright

Iridescent stars that grace our sight,

Sweetnes jingles and our ears delight

To hear these choirs of precious, floating light,

Mankind is lifted to that peaceful height

As prayers are more than things you just 'recite',

Signal to us that all shall now be right.

Hello, everyone. Happy Monday. If I may, I'd like to share a couple new poems and some wisdom my priest passed to me recently.

Wisdom (Paraphrased respectfully): "As a teenager, I was friends with a Jewish boy who was in my math class. He was decidedly better at math than I was, and so I often asked him to help me with my assignments. He graciously helped me every single time, despite the fact that almost every problem I cam to him with was one of the simpler, more tedious ones to his eyes. But the friendship I had with him did not sprout of our mathematical studies. Every time I worked with him, he told me stories about his synagogue and his family. I was curious about his experiences, and so I listened almost more attentively than I listened to his math lessons. One of the more moving stories I heard from him was this:

"A small group of young children in hebrew school was having a conversation with the rabbi. Most of the children were about five or six, which meant they were barely starting to learn Hebrew. The rabbi, who was about to open the ark for them (for, mostly, the first time) and reveal to them what was behind it. But first he decided to let them guess. He went around in a circle, asking the children what they thought was behind the curtain. The more sensible of the kindergarteners said, "The Torah, of course." Some of the more pious insisted that God dwelt there. But one, after looking at the closed curtain for a moment, said, "There is a mirror there that lets us see our lives through the eyes of God."

"I (the priest) was touched and impressed. The story led into an intricate conversation about the presence of God inside the human soul and the human world. Interestingly, our different beliefs did not come between us. Quite the contrary; we were mutually enlightened because of our differences. After all these years, I have decided that much of spiritual life is made up of mirrors, and people only have to know how to find them."

Poems:

The Bell Ringer

The bell ringer paces the corridors dreary,
His steps like a lion grown ancient and weary,
No longer the gold that its ancestors bore,
Nor youthful and bright like the lion before:
But still he goes on, in the windowless drafts
Like arrowheads scattered and bare of their shafts,
He walks ‘till it’s time for his work at the church
Ringing the bells at his bell tower perch.
Come time by the water-clock’s telling, he goes
Though time needs not tick to alert him: he knows
When he should walk up that shuddering stair
Winding in spirals, in need of repair,
The path to the bells, those great heavenly voices
At whose solemn sound all of nature rejoices,
He knows when their song is in need to be played,
As farmers can tell when the cow’s milk is made,
So into the dust sent by cracking wood floors,
The sound of the churchbells’ necessity soars,
They want to be played, and they want to be rung
They want every song that they know to be sung—
And whose wrinkled hands shall be pulling their rope?
The bell ringer, with his obedient lope.
He loves them insanely: they’re close to his heart,
Like children, they cannot survive when apart;
The ringer is loved, for each trek that he makes,
For every perfection, for all his mistakes:
Who ever imagined this blest adoration
That comes in between every monk and salvation?
He pulls on the rope, and releases the sound:
A hideous noise, such a clash, so profound!
Alas, what a racket the bells had in store
Behind all the majesty in their décor:
A sound like the wars of the black ages past,
A sound none predicted, no seer forecast
To ring in the bells of the future, as chimes
To call men to prayer at such dignified times,
Where tribes made no battles against pagan gods,
Where no one was murdered, and none were at odds—
What evil had come to pollute this ripe song
Come down from the bells, out of tune for so long!
And still pulled the bell ringer, harder this time
So the sound may be louder, exalted, sublime
In mania dragging those shrieks from the bells
As monks came in order, to prayer, from their cells.
The bells are off key in this city of prayer,
And yet, it would seem that no one is aware,
For the people come crowding, and always respond
To the call of the Greater, the Far, the Beyond—
The bells do not ring with the Greatest Divine
But the capital letters still ring, and still shine.
Perhaps we are all ringing bells out of tune,
From dead, shrouded midnight to sun-splattered noon,
Some of us know it, and some never will
But the bells are forever, no matter how shrill.



Untitled
(On Winter)

The glassy surface of a frozen lake
Reflects the gently clouded skies, as if
A bird had flown up to the highest height
And draped a gentle white across the heavens,
As if it dipped a brush into the stars,
Diluted that unearthly light, and dropped
A cold cascade upon the silent forest,
Typical to canvases, to songs:
What lies beneath this peace, what turbulence
Makes it so eternally appealing?

To drop my weight beneath the barest tree,
And lie with eyes cast up towards its branches,
Spread like crooked, peeling rays of sun
Imperfect. Behind the silhouette, a gentle dawn
Crawls childlike, on all fours, about the sky
Her shining handprints on the cloudy soil
Left as our beacon and our morning light:
Her smile, and her abundant curls all present:
They can just be glimpsed above the tree.

The daytime snow—in flurries coming down,
Almost as if a giant cloth is trembling
Side to side, instead of wind and air,
And drawing in the heavy atmosphere
A path for snow’s lithe dancers to come forth,
Along the sunbeams sent like lighted spears
To penetrate the fog and mist of winter,
Many, many paths the snowflakes know
And memorize by heart each coming year,
Until their grand performance, three months long.

If all the world was made to be a stage,
Then winter is the curtain of the world:
When drawn, the Autumn crouches, anxious, waiting,
As dark anticipation drowns the lands,
And then, the final chime, the final leaf
Of dying conversation falls to dust:
And now the theater gathers close together,
Warm, and ready for the coming show,
No whispers are allowed; the lights grow dim:
The great white curtain moves into its place.

The winter folds and morphs its velvet body,
Sweet vitality. It falls on treetops,
Clothing them in dancing gowns, so that
All nature and the earth can join the song,
A grumbling, heavy harmony, but bright:
Uplifting to the heart and soul, its colors
Shining brilliantly beneath the white.
Here I remain, beneath this ancient tree,
That morphed so many times throughout its age,
And still, with every winter, joins the dance.

No somber meditation stalks this place,
Of frailty and joylessness: such thoughts
Are trapped behind the curtain. Now, the dance,
The great performance plays on heaven’s brow,
The lives of man are small in all this greatness,
But not as small as outcasts on their icebergs,
Drifting in the anguished, violent sea,
But rather as this curtain’s tapestry
Where every thread is put there for a reason.

Excuse me...

www.savedarfur.org

hmm...www.savedarfur.com?

Just wanted to share an interecting activity you might want to consider for Thanksgiving. My little brother was playing a game with his friends which is similar to "I'm going on a picnic..." Instead, however, it is called "I'm thankful for..."

Going in a circle, each person says something which he or she is thankful for, in alphabetical order. For example, if person 1 said "Apples", then person 2 would say "Apples and Bubble Baths," and person three would say, "Apples, Bubble Baths, and Cable TV." The game would continue in this manner until the entire alphabet was covered, and would then begin again if desired. An alternative to playing with a group is to list things you're thankful for for a few alphabets worth until several letters run out, then omit those letters until you're down to a few letters that still can be used. (Warning: I filled five pages doing this.) :D

The Beachcomber

The waiting shores enjoy my prayerful walks,
Their sand like somber elegies pulled forth
From some arrangement in a minor key,
So wondered I, musician close at heart,
What tunes and keys the ocean played across,
And what its range in notes: I longed to know.
So hurriedly I dropped my rosary,
And left it there, in moonlight, on the sand,
As if I thought the waters would come forth
And lift it from its place, to count the beads
That I had counted time and time again,
So now the string was frayed, the colors faded:
The force of all my quiet songs to God.
So now, I watched the seas spill forth their sound,
The voices of that great abyss, like lights
Come dancing, jubilant, above the ground
And carrying their melancholy plights.
I calculated every note they sang,
Melodious, in their concocted lines
As if the choir of heaven had come down
To stroke the seas in music. Let us sing,
The many ships there shipwrecked now implore,
Let us be lifted up, not lying dead
Beneath fragmented lyrics on the shore,
Let us rise up in harmony instead!
And I—I took the rosary again,
Once only said on long, deserted trails,
But now I spoke again. With every prayer,
I etched some human marks into the sand,
Where tides had not yet come, where men had walked,
But only once and never walked again:
With every word I spoke, a music note
Came tumbling forth out from a rotten twig,
I’d chosen to write music with. Now I
Observed these nine set paths I’d drawn across
The wilderness of beach, these music lines,
And on them tiny notes—what could they conquer?
Still, I wrote them where I once had made
Great fortresses of sand, with walls and motes
And selling, at their gateways lemonade,
No more of castles: here come music notes.
And yet, I knew the greatness of the sea
Could not be reprimanded when off key.

Good Morning :)

I like this (The Drum)immensely. My only critique would be a couple minor repeating words, but then again I wouldn't be sure what to put instead of them.

Yam: You Amaze Me
(Several Yams here...)

Hmm...Where to start?

I started writing actively when I was in third and fourth grade, and obsessively in fifth. This is probably due to the fact that my Dad, the loving intellectual that he is, was reading Frost, Keats, Eliot, et cetera aloud to me since I can remember. After a while, I decided that the written word was so magical to me, I just had to experiemnt with it on my own. Thus a few poems and short stories were produced, which evolved into the hundreds of pages I have today (not all noteworthy, but some are reasonable.)

Typically, I write long-ish, rhythmic/often rhyming poetry (i.e. the field of William Carlos Williams is something beyond me). I enjoy reading everything in print and out of it, and I like volunteering for things. Hobbies include music (piano and voice), rock climbing, debate, politics, philiosophy, literature, swimming, psychology, and religion.

I'm looking forward to geeting to know everyone. :)

Thank you: I appreciate it. I'm a little new to all this.

PIP(Poem in Progress)
The Translation

Two translators and an archeologist
Went traveling beneath the rising sun,
Behind the broken pyramids of Egypt,
Searching for a treasure in the dirt
Laboriously covering the sands of time.

They wandered for a while, halfhearted
Talking about Israel and Mecca
As if there was nothing here worthy
Of making a pilgrimage to:
Historians are often peculiar.

And then, to awake:
The scrolls were there, shining and golden,
Dripping in value like butterflies
Drenched in precious, diamond dew
The ink a faded purple, like the shades
Of leaning shadows cast across the plains,
An ancient cursive hand, archaic tongue
The translators alone could understand.
Inside those microscopic drops of ink
A thousand light bulbs, every one a glow
With fingers luminous, extending out
To shake the hands of their descendant children,
Little ladybugs, buzzing with age
And wit and work and wonder—
Dripping still. The photons in their day unnamed, unknown,
Like tiny sparrows in their migrant flight
Those incandescent bulbs not yet invented,
Spilling light across the songs of men,
The voices of the dead remain alive,
Whispering into the ears of death:
Enchanting her, persuading her to dance
And flaunt her mystery between the eyes
Of living generations, staring straight
Across a vacuum to the spirits dead—
The written word can cut across the sky,
That endless barrier, celestial wall,
And speak as if the earth were born to hear
And listen to these light bulbs of the past,
And time shall spill its mercy and its tears
For young Narcissus, dead before his age,
And left with but a flower as his tale—
“Tell my story,” shout the haunting dead
Through what is left of them. The genocide
And persecution suffered at their cause
Will wreak its havoc well, but once or twice
Will pause in face of glory and rethink
The tread of fate, a looming thing of darkness
Barely present, yet the vital force
Behind these thousand flowers on their tombs,
These carcasses in turmoil without breath,
These living forces sanctifying nature
With their fragile light bulbs. Fate controls
All that is ours and will be; fate records
Our secrets in her stolen tapestries.
Hung as an offering to heathen gods,
The well of history is scant and dry—
The bucket weighs more than the water does,
Yet every handful of its lighted store
Will echo for eternity, will shine
Even in days when none are there to hear.

The translators sat there a while,
They thought in tender choirs and Hallelujahs,
Pondering the meaning of it all,
Each sat to work, produced a different scroll,
In his own native tongue, so all could read.

But then they found that each
Had translated the text a different way,
And rose in argument: they fought alone,
With unembellished words, and spoke alone,
The ancient scrolls untouched, upon the sand.

Hmm...
You've probabluy done all these but..

To Autumn; his other odes, J. Keats

On His Blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent"); Paradise Lost (if you can), J. Milton

Daddy; Mushrooms, S. Plath

The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot

Sonnets of Shakespeare, preferably all, but LXXIII, XVIII, CXXX,LXXI are some of the more circulated. Good Website for this: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn01.htm

Remember; C.G. Rossetti

E.A. Poe, All

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; T. Gray

"Lewis Carrol", All

A Prayer For my Daughter; When you are Old; The Second coming; Leda and the Swan; The Lake Isle of Innifree; Among School Children, W.B. Yeats,

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Birches; After Apple-Picking; The Road Not Taken; Acquainted with the Night, R. Frost

The Tyger; The Little Black Boy; A Poison Tree; Auguries of Innocence, W. Blake

It goes on. These are the ones that come to my mind first.

Two translators and an archeologist
Went traveling beneath the rising sun,
Behind the broken pyramids of Egypt,
Searching for a treasure in the dirt
Laboriously covering the sands of time.

They wandered for a while, halfhearted
Talking about Israel and Mecca
As if there was nothing here worthy
Of making a pilgrimage to:
Historians are often peculiar.

And then, to awake:
The scrolls were there, shining and golden,
Dripping in value like butterflies
Drenched in precious, diamond dew
The ink a faded purple, like the shades
Of leaning shadows cast across the plains,
An ancient cursive hand, archaic tongue
The translators alone could understand.
Inside those microscopic drops of ink
A thousand light bulbs, every one a glow
With fingers luminous, extending out
To shake the hands of their descendant children,
Little ladybugs, buzzing with age
And wit and work and wonder—
Dripping still. The photons in their day unnamed, unknown,
Like tiny sparrows in their migrant flight
Those incandescent bulbs not yet invented,
Spilling light across the songs of men,
The voices of the dead remain alive,
Whispering into the ears of death:
Enchanting her, persuading her to dance
And flaunt her mystery between the eyes
Of living generations, staring straight
Across a vacuum to the spirits dead—
The written word can cut across the sky,
That endless barrier, celestial wall,
And speak as if the earth were born to hear
And listen to these light bulbs of the past,
And time shall spill its mercy and its tears
For young Narcissus, dead before his age,
And left with but a flower as his tale—
“Tell my story,” shout the haunting dead
Through what is left of them. The genocide
And persecution suffered at their cause
Will wreak its havoc well, but once or twice
Will pause in face of glory and rethink
The tread of fate, a looming thing of darkness
Barely present, yet the vital force
Behind these thousand flowers on their tombs,
These carcasses in turmoil without breath,
These living forces sanctifying nature
With their fragile light bulbs. Fate controls
All that is ours and will be; fate records
Our secrets in her stolen tapestries.
Hung as an offering to heathen gods,
The well of history is scant and dry—
The bucket weighs more than the water does,
Yet every handful of its lighted store
Will echo for eternity, will shine
Even in days when none are there to hear.

The translators sat there a while,
They thought in tender choirs and Hallelujahs,
Pondering the meaning of it all,
Each sat to work, produced a different scroll,
In his own native tongue, so all could read.

But then they found that each
Had translated the text a different way,
And rose in argument: they fought alone,
With unembellished words, and spoke alone,
The ancient scrolls untouched, upon the sand.

(This could get me into trouble...the nature vs. nurture debate is killing me these days...but oh well.)

It's largely human nature to "enjoy" seeing people die (esp. gruesome deaths)because it's woven into our psychology to think "Hey, that guy is A) suffering something I'm not, so I have it easy, B) guilty of something and therefore deserving of punishment, and C)A part of society that needs to be eliminated.

Can people really help feeling a need for violence/catharsis/revenge? I'm not sure.

Erm...It might not have been abuse intentionally, but if the kid truly registers it as homosexual abuse, someone has to intervene. On one hand, we are dealing with people's personal emotions, and on another hand we are dealing with political chaos. It's the reporters choice what percentage of what to put where. The media, however, has obviously gone too far with that. But we have known all along that news coverage has become a fraction of what it's supposed to be, to any extent. It has become a catalogue of interesting opinions as opposed to "fact".

I would go into a rant about the absurdity of the word 'fact', but I think it's unneccessary.