George’s Neighborhood

A Moment

something pinches inside
hot tears tear
what is it
God

i am lost

something eases inside
calm overtakes
it is you
God

i am found

As Time Goes On

Beholder
Nov 30, 2009
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New
becomes old

Obsession
fades away

Everything
dust crumbles

Only
you remain

only you only you only you only you only you only you only you only you only you only you only

Feeling Small

Beholder
Nov 29, 2009
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i shrink into the middle ground
trapped on one side
penned on the other

light mixes with the darkness in my eyes
still blind i fall into the silk-soft trap
of my own filth

it brushes against my skin
rushing up my nostrils
saturating my lungs

i suffocate
without you
God

life stirs again
you find me and i grasp
weak

cling tight
i let go
let go of your love

and death devours me
until i open to you again
God

see your face blur in the distance
you aren't blurred
i am

you are here
i forget to close my eyes
to see you are close

closer than my sight
my breath
my heart

you are life
no one dies in you
God

The Wedding was Good; The Marriage was Bad: Art and Writing

Beholder
Nov 21, 2009
4 comments

   When Fr. Joseph Honeycutt spoke at the Winter Youth Retreat a couple of years back, he talked about how, when he was working on his doctorate. He told one bishop about his idea and what he was trying to show about it in his Thesis. The bishop - who was not very fluent in speaking English - replied: "The wedding was good; the marriage is bad."
       This came to mind on Wednesday after I spoke with my drawing professor about class. I told him I felt like my conceptual abilities were ZIP!!
       We got on to talking about how I'm an English Major, Art Minor. I told him I felt like my "writing self" was tugging me in one direction and my "art self" was tugging me in another. If I focus on my writing, I feel like I'm sacrificing my art, and if I pay attention to my art, my writing suffers.
   "Your first mistake was separating those two," my drawing professor said.
       It was a definite light bulb moment.
       I need to use my strengths to work together instead of setting them against each other. It made sense (yes, I can be very dense sometimes). Still, I had no idea what to do.
       I made my way to the computer lab, to the tower for lunch, pondering.
       Finally, I realized: I need to get married!! XD
       My "writing self" and "art self" have only really flirted with each other. And, they've mostly been separated. But now, I discovered, it's time to go down for the long haul.

A Dark Morning

Beholder
Nov 16, 2009
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    This morning was unusual. The cloud cover was dense and it was grey and windy. Squeezed close. Not cold, but not hot, either.

      There's a sort of death, walking through the world, not noticing. The rhythm, the wind's dance, the trees as they grow, paying head only to the sun's warmth.

It's so easy to forget.

On Sunday, she stood on the patio, alone, and watched the sun gently touch the Wild Olive's leaves, fanned wide. Open, ready, waiting. Expectant.

"The Beholder," that's what some crazy chick with a blog calls herself.

She used to notice.

On this dark morning, she woke up.

What apathy has infected her? Has infected the world?

"Follower of Christ" and "Light Bearer" that's what her name means.

It means when the morning is darkest, she should still see the light.

Let's See How this Works

Beholder
Nov 10, 2009
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Although I've had this blog sometime, I've only had my posts viewable to a few of my closest family and friends, which means I haven't been getting a whole lot of readers lately. Seeing as I'm a writer, I enjoy when there's an actual audience for my writing.
So, the thought occurred to me that I could possibly get more viewers if I 1) make my posts viewable to the public, and 2) post the links on my facebook so that people who I actually know will see them!! :D

I know, I'm a GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ^.^

Seedtime and Harvest

There is a season for all things, a time for every purpose under heaven the preacher says. I've had this blog up for two years and have not made a single post so far. So why start talking now? No special reason, except that now (unlike then) I have something to say that I think is worth saying. That's important. I don't like blogging just to blog, or blogging without a clear purpose. I've tried that and one runs out of worthwhile things to say pretty quickly...at least I do. So what is this thing I suddenly feel up to saying? It is simply this, I want to explain to those of my family and friends who have known me for many years why I became Orthodox. Others who have heard my story know why this might be a useful approach given my propensity for digression and over meticulous backgrounding (lest I be misunderstood). There is no minimalist approach, no way to explain this decision in a nutshell that does it any justice. Besides, it has been almost 15 year since I decided I wanted to be Orthodox and set out to discover just what that would mean. So, it is about time I would say.

First Things

I blame it all on my mother. She planted the seed that grew into my embrace of Orthodoxy back in my preschool years. We were Southern Baptist, and knowing in some vague way that not everyone was Baptist I asked my mother one Sunday why we were Baptist. She replied that she and Daddy believed that what the Baptist Church taught was the closest to what the Apostles believed and taught back in Biblical times. That thereafater became my measuring stick, my metric, for all spiritual life. Whatever I came to believe in the many years since that time I believed because I was convinced those beliefs where those closest to or actually held by the Apostles during their earthly ministry. Boiled down it is really a question of authority and authenticity. Authentic Christianity must bear an apostolic stamp. But what is that stamp? What determines what is or is not the faith in the midst of many competing truth claims? What if anything distinguishes the Baptist claims from that of the Methodists, Reformed, the Mormons, or the Catholics, or any other group that self identifies as a Christian Church? It is at this point most "discussions" break down into squabbles over biblical interpretation, the idea being that the "truest" or "closest" church will have the best and least assailable biblical arguments in defense of it's beliefs. Of course, in my experience winners and losers are determined more by how good and knowledgeable a presenter/apologist one has enlisted in any given theological fray. In short the presumed answer to any question of theology is expertly argue the Scripture, which is believed to be so clear as to be easily understood by anyone who is diligent and who has ears to hear. Funny how so many assiduously diligent hear so many different things. How could that be? How could the Spirit teach so many conflicting things. That has long been a problem for me...but one for which i had no answer until I encountered Orthodoxy.

You see if somewhere in the welter of Christian belief there was one which was more right... substantially more right than the others, and if for some reason it was not what I currently believed, then how could I know if what I held was in greater or lesser degree some species of theological error? All honest readers and searchers of Scripture that I came to know over the years thought they had it right, that they were led by the Spirit into all truth. But there was no reconciling the certainties of my earnest Mormon friend with that of my earnest Baptist, Reformed, or Catholic friends (who while united in opposing the Mormon faith were united in little else). What I eventually came to learn from this was that I could be wrong. It was certainly incumbent upon me to try and "be right" in my beliefs, but my sincerity was no guarantee that I would get it right. After all there were millions of others who differed from me in all sincerity and in some great exegetical detail, and if I was right, then wherever we had substantial difference, they were wrong no matter that they thought God had opened the Scriptures to them. If God was no respecter of persons, then I had no grounds to believe my faith had of necessity any firmer theological foundations.

My conclusion was that either God cared far less about what I had come to think of as "dead doctrine" or I had missed some important consideration along with several million of my closest and dearest friends and co-religionists, or perhaps both. How could we know after 2000 years which interpretive formula was the right one. Which was authoritative, if any?

I had no idea how many questionable assumptions there were in my arguments and my questions and in those of my contemporaries. It just took a while to discover them...to wake up to the walls of "intellectual" box I and so many others were ignorantly trapped in. However, I was not mistaken in this...the need for an apostolically established measure of truth and Christian experience. Only what could it be? More on this next time.

Astronomy!

Justin
May 19, 2009
5 comments

For those who don't know, I'm currently in Gunnison, Colorado, and will be until next Wednesday. I, along with 10 other physics students, are here using the observatory to study exoplanets (planets around stars besides the sun). On the side we are using the CCD's to take pictures of other astronomical objects, and also possibly studying a bit of cataclysmic variation.

ANYHOW,

Last night was the first time we used the equipment, mostly for orientation since people were a bit traveled out from the trip. But even with that short amount of use while we were exhausted, it was INCREDIBLE. We took a quick look at M3, and it was just an incredible number of stars in a cluster. There are so many stars out here it's just unbelievable. The facility we're using is relatively new, and completely equipped with red lights and all sorts of other astronomy technology, which we're figuring out right now.

My job here is to be one of the two photometer operators. When our professor informed us of this job, he introduced it by pausing, chuckling, then informing us that it was like trying to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. So yes it is very precise and very fragile. Dropping or jarring a photometer will destroy it, pointing one at the sun even while it is off will destroy it, even pointing it at the moon while it is on will destroy it. I have to attach two of these to the telescope after using a series of three different eyepieces, a tracker, and a photometer mount to find the star with the utmost precision. While attaching these I cannot let the telescope be budged AT ALL. eeeek. Then I have to make sure it is centered using two different sets of X-Y axis knobs, without being able to see the star; rather I will have to watch the photometer readouts to get this to work. Then it's time to take data.

So that's what I'll be doing in a nutshell, but in between operations like this we will be finding awesome formations and taking amazing pictures. Those who were taking AIP (astro-image processing) at UD using the UD telescope inform us that our quick orientation lookarounds last night gave us better quality images than they had seen their entire time at the UD observatory. So I hope we get some awesome images. Friday we will give a presentation to a group of locals here at Gunnison, and later we will apparently give another presentation to the group here for the mayterm astronomy course.

So, our outing tonight begins at 9 pm (mountain time), which gave me a quick time window to write this VERY quick update. There's still tons more to say though about this trip in general, but that's for later.

By the way, for anyone interested in astronomy, if you haven't already, look up and download Stellarium. It's quick, free, and awesome.