Kulubi Gabriel

 

Yesterday was Kulubi Gabriel. Kulubi is an important Ethiopian Christian Orthodox pilgrimage site in the Oromo region. The faithful make their pilgrimage in the name of Saint Gabriel. 

I was baptized there at Kulubi.

My baptism it is an interesting story. My godmother had vowed to Saint Gabriel that she would have me christened there (of course, before I was even born). And she did so at my birth, taking a young baby and her parents to that far-off place, at least far from the Addis Ababa where we lived, and certainly a long car ride for an infant. 

The Dancer

Waiting in the Wings
Ralph Grady James

I did well in my endeavors in Dover College, my secondary school in the beautiful port city with the impressive, and famous, White Cliffs. 

I was awarded the poetry prize one year. I was fifteen. I wrote about a dancer on an empty stage, where I used a lone dancer braving a stage as my theme. I looked up some of the words in Roget’s Thesaurus, and I found the right “big” words. The poem was me, in disguise. It is my story, my touch of doubt, my entrance, my lively conveyance, and my realization that this is going to be a fight. 

In fact, my winning the prize was a testament to my perseverance. The usual body of applicants were my adversaries. I was the odd one out. But, I submitted my piece anyway, and I won, much to the consternation of my loftier competitors.

The Dancer
By: Kidist Asrat

With gliding entrance, and touch of doubt,
The dancer makes her entrance.
As supple as a feline, ready for attack
She lunges into lively conveyance.

Hers is the stage, an empty stage,
Earthly, and void of enchantment.
A magical message she has to disclose,
And does so with fiery entreatment.

One perceives a sudden change of mood,
And the stage has lost its drear.
Her audience now she tries to lure
As her final act draws near.

Dover College
England
1978

Source: Departures: From Memoir - Westward Bound, Western Bond

Merry Christmas!

Square One, Mississauga - Christmas

[Photo By KPA]

Logos for Christmas - By Larry Auster

Comments on Christmas by Larry Auster, from The View From the Right

December 24, 2012

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Richard O. writes:

Merry Christmas, Larry.

You are an immense pleasure to read each day. I treasure your gift to see what is and your courage to describe what you see.

These are such strange times where we are awash in wholesale delusion and deception. More so the former. Delusion and deception are part of the human condition but these days it’s a constant challenge to understand the “wholesale” part. It’s utterly fascinating to witness and to try to comprehend.

If one burns one’s finger in a candle, it invariably imparts a lesson that the injured owner understands and remembers. The previous century of grisly political disease and slaughter, plus almost 1,400 years of Islam’s presence on the planet, however, have not been instructive in the least to millions—indeed to our entire civilization. And now we will all experience the catastrophes of economic collapse, population convulsion, internal war, and full-bore jihad. The least prophylactic measures are unmentionable.

So clarity in any corner is appreciated.

Warmest regards for a healthy and productive new year.

LA replies:

Thank you very much. I would add that the ability to see and articulate the nature of what is, is closely connected to Jesus Christ. Christ is the Logos, usually translated as the Word. But the deeper meaning of logos (lower case) is the principle of intelligibility: through words, through logical thought, we articulate the nature, the structure, of the things that are. God through the Logos (upper case) created a world in which the things that exist have the property that they are intelligible, that they can be made sensible. And it goes both ways: through the logos (lower case), the things of this world are intelligible, and through the Logos (upper case), God, the creator of the world, is made intelligible. Even as Jesus Christ, the Logos, through his person, reveals the Father to us, makes him accessible to us, Christ is also the principle through which all things are made accessible, intelligible, to us.

When we are making sense of things, we are using the ability that was imparted in us by God through his Word, his principle of intelligibility.

So, to return to your comment, what does it mean that the West seems to have lost the ability to see and articulate the nature of the things that exist—particularly the grossest, most palpable, and most evil things, such as Islam, the religion of conquest and slavery, or Leftism, which has resulted in poverty and tyranny wherever it has been tried? It means that the West has turned away from God, turned away from his Logos, and as a result has become hopelessly blind.

Further, it’s not just that the formerly Christian and now liberal West has turned against God, the source of being, and thus has lost the ability to understand things. The liberal West has specifically turned against the divine Person called the Logos (upper case), and against the divine property of things called the logos (lower case). The logos makes accessible the nature of reality. As I discuss here, part of the nature of reality is that all things in their various respects are closer or less close to goodness than other things, in what I call the vertical axis of reality, and that all things and classes of things are in their particularity different from other things and classes of things, in what I call the horizontal axis of reality. Because the highest principle of liberalism is equality or non-discrimination, liberalism denies both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of reality in which things are differentiated from each other.

And that is why liberalism, in its very core, consists of willful blindness—willful blindness to the difference between good and bad, willful blindness to the differentiating particularities of different things and different classes of things, and thus, ultimately, blindness to the massively evil and alien things that are destroying our civilization.

LA continues:

At first I wasn’t going to post Richard’s comment here, because I felt that his introductory compliment of me made the comment inappropriate for this “Merry Christmas” entry. But then I realized how Richard’s praise of clarity and his lament for the West’s suicidal lack of clarity were highly relevant to the Christmas message.

December 25

Larry T. writes:

Well done, Larry!

Your Christmas day teaching about the Logos was a nice gift to your readers on this blessed day.