Happy Valentine's From The Ice

 

Global Warming slammed North Central Texas this morning like a T34 opening fire on the Unter Den Linden or maybe the Tiergarten. Not that it looked like much to start with, just a light dusting of snow; Calgary in April sort of thing. But not so fast, scorners. Beneath the snow lay ice.

Blue Kodiak was eager to get out and off we stepped, skidding across the frozen tundra that was once a furnacelike temperate Texan town. Undaunted by biting, subzero wind we made it to the Shamrock, an Irish filling station owned by Nepalese and staffed by Mexicans. I like it because it's near, has an owl deity idol and good coffee, perhaps the best of its kind in town.

Shamrock complete, back into the icy blast and deserted streets of a farming settlement  blasted by the scourge of Climate Change. It was colder, if that were possible, on the way back to the Compound, but we powered through, thank Gaia.

After Morning Prayer I called on an elderly member of the flock to see if she needed anything. Yes, ground beef, beef broth, an onion and a bottle of wine. She was fixing to make soup. A short and very slow drive to the supermarket later, she had her supplies. Without charity, you see, everything else is but a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.

SovCom Armor in Berlin

Priests, and everyone else, take note. It's very easy and very enjoyable to get behind a cause, to pick up Martel's warhammer and lay waste to heretics, malfeasants and apostates. And quite right too, it's a target rich environment and the Faith needs defending. But the exercise becomes a hollow, white-washed sepulcher of a  pharisaical sham  unless grounded in divine love.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the warhammer, especially against the Bolshevik devil. But remember, the substance of the Faith is God Himself, and He is love. Evil cannot withstand its, His, inexhaustible fire, I am that I am. Of course I preach to myself.

Happy Valentines!

LSP

Truth

 

As I read LL's excellent sermon on the nature of Truth and Mathematics, my mind went back to the good old days of the Church of England, the days before womyn priestesses. In fact, to the day of a "viva," OK, interview, with the suffragan bishop figure of Tewkesbury, which is a picturesque town in Gloucestershire noted for hippies, a battle and an abbey church, now a cathedral.

"Can we say," asked the grey-clad prelate in his unpleasantly low-ceilinged 'lounge,' "that there is such a thing as right and wrong?"

It was a genuine question and the fighting monkey was young in those days, so I answered, "Oh, I think there is. Say I took a baby and skinned it, alive. Would that be right or wrong?" 

He muttered something like, "Ahem, yes," and moved on, doubtless mentally oppressed by the stifling lowness of the ceiling above him, and the ferocity of the monkey. I apparently passed muster, curiously.

Point of the parable? That there is such a thing as Truth, with a capital T, that which is, and our minds are in conformity with it or not. And, ultimately, this Truth is God, He who is, I AM that I AM, self-existent being which speaks all things into being. Try saying no to that and see how far you get.

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God. Reflect on that and do not dare, unless you are a fool, to go against it, reality Himself.

Here endeth the Lesson,

LSP