All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

With a leaf, and angels.

nature, poetry, prayer,

A LIST OF PRAISES

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.

Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

-Anne Porter

Restigouche River, New Brunswick, by Richard James Taylor

Man was also a culture-bearer.

books, culture, quotes, science, , , , , , , ,

The trees and bushes in my garden get bigger year by year, requiring more attention from me; and several other aspects of my present life prevent me from having the leisure I once had, to write reviews of the books I read. For example, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I only finished this month. It is the first post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read, published in 1959.

It made a big impression on me, which I probably wouldn’t be able to analyze or articulate to my satisfaction, so I didn’t even begin to try, but immediately moved on to a different book. (It’s my experience that reading books doesn’t require the same quality of leisure as writing reviews.) But O happy day! Jeff Bilbro mentioned the book, with a quote, in the newsletter of The Front Porch Republic, so I will just pass that on, with thanks to him. I also commend the other articles on that site, or their print journal, as worthy of your consideration. Here’s Jeff:

“I recently read Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and I found it a moving narrative exploring the proper cultural and religious conditions for rightly valuing knowledge. The novel follows a monastic order that forms in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, and they carefully preserve remnants of the former industrial civilization through generations of warfare until human civilization is ready to rediscover natural science and its applications. Can such knowledge ever be used wisely, or does increased technical know-how inevitably lead cultures to abandon religious and moral wisdom? Miller offers no easy answers. In this passage, an abbot of this monastic order reflects on the significance of the rising interest in their archives:

‘Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they become valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.’

“Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro”

Apocalypse by Albert Goodwin

At home our children are waiting for us.

church, feasts, quotes, ,

When Jesus and three of his disciples were on Mt. Tabor, and Moses and Elijah appeared as well — before Peter, James and John fell on their faces at the thundering of God’s voice, Peter suggested they build some shelters and stay a while. Just now I read this prayer prompted by that event: “Prayer on the Feast of the Transfiguration.”

“Come to us again, O Jesus—do not listen to Peter! Come down from Tabor and come to our homes, into our hearts! Come here, where we are suffering and laboring for our daily bread! Come here, where we are crucified by people, demons, and passions! If Peter does not want to come down, leave him on the mount and come to us, to our hearts!

“Teach us how to be saved, show us how to endure. Train us to carry our life’s cross. Teach us how to be crucified. Come and suffer for us, Thou Thyself be crucified instead of us, Thyself first taste the cup of death, show us a new way to salvation through suffering.

“O, how we would have liked to stay with Peter on Mount Tabor! But we bear a body, gasping from sickness, lusts and passions. In our breasts are hearts burning with hatred. At home our children are waiting for us, asking us for a piece of bread!…”

-Archimandrite Iachint Unciuleac

You can read the whole prayer: Here