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p/c Toa Heftiba via unsplash
The connection with fire is not unimportant, it is not a scribal addition, nor is it a signal that what Moses is recording is a “stream of consciousness” mode of divine speech —like YHWH could have profited from cue cards. No. There is in the mind of YHWH a unique link between household fires being kindled and the sabbath. And though there are several things we could do with this link, there is one that I have become fixated on as of late…
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from Sabbath Morn, by Edward Robert Hughes (1851–1914)
…We use the concepts of “24” (hrs) and “7” (days a week) but under a regime of 24/7 those numbers become meaningless. What makes a week a week? Why stop counting at 24? What makes a day a day? Jonathan Crary notes that although “[c]onventional and older durational units persist (like “nine to five” or “Monday to Friday”)” theses are all ultimately subordinated to “all the practices of individual time management made possible by 24/7 networks and markets” (2014: 57)...
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Here is the sketch of an altarpiece, a Triptych if you will, I’d create if I was the master of a medieval artists’ guild. It is also a theological reflection on Pentecost… after all: all art is a theological reflection, for better or for worse.
Pannel 1. ‘Over the waters of the Deep’
The Spirit, painted in bright lazurite chiaroscuro and gold-white against otherwise total darkness…
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When we say the Creed we are giving eye-witness testimony: I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead because I see that same Life at work in me, and in us…
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p/c Christina Rumpf via unsplash
The rainbow is a creature of light, established by God in the heavens as a sign of his mercy and his promise never again to flood the entire earth (Gen 9:13-17). The colors, the range of brightness and hue, the blurring and fading, and twinkling of the rainbow is a part of the glory of God. A rainbow radiates from the sacred fane of the One seated on the Throne of Heaven (Ezek. 1:27; Rev. 4:3). There is a rainbow of mercy and loving kindness which diadems the Living Lord. It is both mercy and beauty that draw us to Him. The very act of hanging-up his bow of war emboldens us to draw near with faith (Heb. 4:16).
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p/c Coronel G via unsplash
…Having witnessed the papal election, news media and pundits have begun taking the project farther still: they intend to predict action and the course of the Roman Catholic Church. So high is their estimation of their own powers of probabilistic ramification that the pitch has already reached a kind of drunkenness. Far behind us is the terminus of sanity, long have we been riding in the realm of derangement…
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Jesus rises from the dead, trampling down death by death, and yet, in all that trampling, he still bears the marks of his own being trampled-down. The risen Christ is a wounded Christ. If Christ is the Image of the Invisible God, and if seeing Jesus means seeing the Father (Jn. 14:9), we must bear it being asked, “what does it mean that the hands of the Hand of God have holes in them?” We hail Christ as the “Wounded Healer” mustn’t we pause to wonder more simply “what is a wound?” …
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On the bread we use for Holy Communion we stamp the ancient Christian motto: IC XC NI KA at the four corners of the Cross.
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p/c Chris Karidis via unsplash
In the beginning humans are created in a state on deep and utter union: Adam and Eve share communion with God, communion with one another, a kind of communion with the rest of the created world, and —often forgotten in theological accounts of prelapsarian life— unified within themselves. This is, in God’s words, “very good” (Gen 1:31). It is a blessed state (Gen 1:28). Union is, also, not just how we are made, it is what we are made for.
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p/c Karsten Würth via unsplash
We should recall from Exodus (25:31–39; and 37:17–24) that the lampstand in the Tabernacle, which was a picture, a microcosm, of the heavenly throne-room, was made in the likeness of a tree. Each of its arms were branches that bloomed into almond blossoms on which were set the seven lamps. It was a tree whose fruit was light. It was another burning bush, but a burning bush that had grown into full maturity.
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