Tag: Religion

The Monk’s Vision

Kōgyo Tsukioka (月岡 耕漁) (1869–1927)

The Monk’s Vision

Aloft a brothel’s barge
with two beside
liquid lines processional,
embowered golden scents,
stood a painted courtesan
as in a vision the monk saw.

His chanting fingers trembled,
as if her subdued scarlet figure
were of a bride, pink as dew,
whom he had left to follow
the path of his enlightenment.

Fearful he took a closer look:
the vision turned, her gaze obsidian
and chill his blood like the Yangtze ran
his visage grayed like the Changjiang Plain
where she for him in dishonor won
his pellucid peace with her forsaken cries.

He made as to rise, prostrate to sink, reverent,
but she her glance of saber-scorn withdrew
and looking behind at her companion true
whispered, “There sits a saintly hooded fool!”

For dVerse’s MTB, synesthesia is the name of the game and I thought I’d add a bit of ekphrasis to it to spin an operatic tale. Be sure the check out Mr. Linky for more offerings in this vein.

Day 25 – Film That Inspired

In response to SandmanJazz’s 30 Day Film Challenge today, to wit, a film that inspired you, I like his repartee to the prompt: “Inspired me to what?🤣”

Exactly.

Inspired me to what?

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And that made me think of a movie I saw just in the last month on Amazon Prime: Healing River (2020), written & directed by Mitch Teemley. It’s a religious drama borne out of sudden tragedy. I hesitate to call it “religious” because that brings to mind the Hallmark pablum variety. This is more of a drama in the vein of Mike Nichols’s directorial debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). Although it’s no black comedy, Healing River socks it to you with its fluid cinematography, character psychology, acerbic, no-holds barred dialogue and – here’s where the inspiration comes from – brutal honesty about what it means to be a Christian.

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On Easter

Easter steals between the clouds
To waken weary hearts
From the sorrows of the night
Into glorious morn.

The light falls pale on frozen time
That on a graveside dwells;
The warmth it casts cannot be felt
Until the stillness breaks.

Death quakes to hear the voice of One
Who forever broke its chains
Rising o’er the sleeping world
And one whose heart is torn.

Eternal light throws back the shroud
And grief gives way to joy
As turning we greet the risen King
And hope where there was none.

When God Breaks In

There is a time in everyone’s life when God breaks in, when all the artifices of man crumble like so much dust. Culture, race, language, identity, and time itself melts alway before the eternal, incorruptible, all-encompassing  presence of God Himself. His timelessness steps into our time. The eternal Word takes on flesh to speak in a human tongue eternal truth. Grace and mercy descends to rescue a cruel and corrupt world. Love looks into our eyes with everlasting tenderness.

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Edge of Original

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I’ve been on the edge of “original” all my life,
she said, reaching for the top shelf in the grocer’s aisle,
and teetering on her toes, tips of her fingers on the jam
she hoped to coax forward but pushed further back;
still probing, she continued to ruminate long-
windedly while His gaze receded farther from her
who held her origin in His heart which alone knew
who she was apart from the jam, the cart, the grocer’s
aisle while she strained in pursuit of a receding jar
leaving behind uniqueness in the receding Light.

 

DailyPostPrompt: original

Struggle’s End

The lamb has yet to lay down with the lion
There is no peace in any day and age
Look beyond your walls! Can you not see
Enemies at the gates, barbarians rising
To receive as their bounty your life,
Your fortune, your freedom denied?

So cries one, and still another rages,
Voices of confusion and calamity.
Where will you go, with whom will you struggle
To find the security you seek within your walls
Where disease and misfortune and betrayal
Lurk at corners beyond your control?

Life in all its disarray where even within your soul
The enemy lurks to cause you to despair when hope
Seems all but lost, meaning all but gone, love
All but illusion – Where then to find the truth
That sets free? Who the author and the champion?
Who the founder and the deliverer – but God?

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John 3:16-17
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
DailyPostPrompt: Struggle

“The Lord’s hidden servants” by J.C. Ryle | Tolle Lege

There is much simplicity in a pure faith adorned not by the showy trappings of the religious who feel their faith only in the glare of ceremony or public service or a surrounding crowd, but by the genuine love of Christ Jesus. Such an understanding leads us into deeper faith. In the following excerpt from the 19th century Christian pastor and theologian J. C. Ryle, he sets out what simple faith looks like in its unobserved state.

“There are some true Christians in the world of whom very little is known. The case of Joseph of Arimathea teaches this very plainly. Here is a man named among the friends of Christ, whose ve…

Source: “The Lord’s hidden servants” by J.C. Ryle | Tolle Lege

The Pilgrim Shadow of Poe

Rather unexpectedly, the first thing that popped into my head at the DPPrompt for today – shadow – was Edgar Allan Poe’s Eldorado.

You may be one of many that had to memorize it at school or maybe you dimly recall it through shrouds of the distant past.

For the latter, I have no doubt at all that it will take just the first haunting lines will jog your memory:

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God Sings

It’s not so difficult to believe that God, the Creator of the universe, sings. After all, he made so many creatures that can sing including humans (to varying degrees), birds, crickets, wolves, frogs, dolphins, yes, even mice!

There is singing in all of creation in one form or another, the sounds of nature in the air, earth, and sea. There are those who have believed in the singing of the stars, the music of the spheres as they move about it space.

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