A nuisance

This is why it is important, from my point of view, to have discovered God. In a way I would say it is rather a danger, very often a nuisance. One could very well live with less trouble without a God than with a God because -- particularly with a God who has accepted solidarity to the point of death, love to the point of forgetting Himself and in addition to this, is vulnerable, helpless, despised, beaten -- God tells us coldbloodedly; this is the example which I give you -- follow it. Or he says, here are the beatitudes: you will be hungry, you will be thirsty, you will be beaten, you will be cast out, you will be persecuted -- and that is the best you can have. That kind of God is not always a discovery that brings ease in our lives. The point is not whether God will be useful, the point is whether it is true that He exists.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 93 & 94

"Why hast thou forsaken me?"

The Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) on one of Christ's seven last words.

Big time computer problems

Don't know when regular posting will resume.

An Orthodox churchman

Funny stories, etc. from Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia :

From the archives

November, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge.

The poetry of autumn

David B. Hart at First Things' On the Square blog provides us with some of his favorite seasonal verse.

Vigilium nativitatis Dylan Thomas

To commemorate the occasion of the 95th anniversary of Dylan Thomas's birth, here is the voice of the poet reading "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London":

Catholic jokes

from fisheaters.com

The bilbo?

Emma Thompson learns English in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989):

Oddly prophetic

Somewhere toward the end of Dylan Thomas's poem "Lament," as the "old ram rod" is on his deathbed, he hears churchbells:

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath

These lines were oddly prophetic. As Dylan Thomas lay comatose from his excesses, and from a doctor's unwisely injected morphine, he had the prayers of nuns for the welfare of his soul. He died in a Catholic hospital in New York. And chastity did indeed pray for him, and innocence not only "sweeten[ed] his last breath," but perhaps also rescued him from hell and brought him to the mercies of purgatory. We can hope.

(It is worth noting that the doctor who injected the morphine was not affiliated with St Vincent's Hospital, but was an unscrupulous character who would give the drug to just about anyone who complained of pain.)

Dylan Thomas in Italy

The heat! Old Elbanites on their flayed and blistered backs whimper about the heat. Sunblack webfooted waterboys, diving from cranes, bleed from the heat. Old scorched mineral-miners, fifty years in the fire, snarl at the heat as they drag the rusty trolleys naked over the skeleton piers. And as for us! The children all sun-and-sea-rashed, Brigit peeling like the papered wall of a blitzed room in the rain. And I can hardly hold this pen for the blisters all over my hands, can hardly see for the waterfalls of sweat, and am peeling too like a drenched billboard. Oh, oh, oh, the heat! It comes round corners at you like an animal with windmill arms. As I enter my bedroom, it stuns, thuds, throttles, spins me round by my soaking hair, lays me flat as a mat and bat-blind on my boiled and steaming bed. We keep oozing from the ice-cream counters to the chemist's. Cold beer is bottled God. If ever, for a second, a wind, (but wind's no word for this snailslow sizzle-puff), protoplasmically crawls from the suffering still sea, it makes a noise like H.D.'s poems crackling in a furnace. I must stop writing to souse my head in a bedroom basin full of curded lava, return fresh as Freddie Hurdis-Jones in Sodom, frizzle and mew as I sit again on this Sing-Sing-hot-seat. What was I saying? Nothing is clear. My brains are hanging out like the intestines of a rabbit, or hanging down my back like hair. My tongue, for all the ice-cold God I drink, is hot as a camel-saddle sandily mounted by baked Bedouins. My eyes like over-ripe tomatoes strain at the sweating glass of a Saharan hothouse. I am hot. I am too hot. I wear nothing, in this tiny hotel-room, but the limp two rivers of my Robins'-made pyjama trousers. Oh for the cyclonic Siberian frigidity of a Turkish bath! In the pulverescence of the year came Christ the Niger. Christ, I'm hot!

Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters (Macmillan, 1985), pp. 656-7