Beards over babies

Blessing all the birds that died so I could live

Update on this post from 4 years ago:
Sometime during the last year, I have started referring to myself as a woman. Not intentionally. It just feels right now. Yeah.

Rhythm and space

On Sunday I attended morning liturgy at St Luke's. It turned out to be a rather startling experience. I was there half an hour early (accidentally), so had time to sit and reflect and enjoy the place for a while before the service. If any of you have seen the church I normally go to, you'll understand why I so appreciated the grace and beauty of this place, as I sat listening to the pipe organ, contemplating the artwork and watching the candles flicker, trying to reckon myself close to God.

When the service started, I got choked up almost at once. Partly because real incense is so wonderful, partly because there's a sort of emotional freedom in being anonymous in a crowd (that is, about 40 people), and partly because I guess I'm still not over the loss of being able to really participate in these kinds of things (blah blah, old story I know).

My heart felt very at home; something in me was answered by the gentleness, the dignity of it all. I like the rhythm of it, the annual cycle of the liturgy, the way it reminds you that you're part of the earth and the changing seasons, the regularity, the cleansing and starting afresh, the wonderful simplicity of what is said and done, the feeling of being part of a community. There was a pleasing blend of both privacy and togetherness. When I was brought to tears by the feeling of standing around the altar with the congregation, bathed in shafts of sunlight that suffused through stained glass and clouds of incense as I bared my heart to God, it was a very personal experience, but one that was somehow shared by those 40 strangers at the same time. I felt very welcome, and that I could be myself there, even though I was the only person there under about 45 years old, and the only one dressed like a hippy.

My poor mind, of course, couldn't completely settle, but only God needs to know what was in me, what I meant when I read the words off the page, why I stayed silent sometimes, what I meant by taking communion.

Edit: on rereading this a day later I find it sounds really wanky. Sorry about that. Take with a grain of salt.

June 11

1184 BC: Troy was sacked and burned, according to the calculations of Eratosthenes.

Roman Empire: 5th day of Vestalia - festivities in honour of Vesta, goddess of the hearth.

1509: Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon.

1572: birth of Ben Jonson, English playwright.

1776: committee formed to draft the Declaration of Independence.

1776: birth of John Constable, English painter, of whom I'm rather fond.

1815: birth of Julia Margaret Cameron, English photographer, of whom I'm rather fond.

1864: birth of Richard Strauss, German composer.

1901: New Zealand annexed the Cook Islands.

1959: birth of Hugh Laurie!!!

1984: birth of me, around 1pm sometime, resulting in my mother's doctor missing out on his lunchbreak.

2001: Timothy McVeigh was executed.

2008: festivities at Katherine's flat. Around the hearth and everything. Plus maybe I could make some kind of chastity rules in memory of the vestal virgins. Those failing to comply for the duration of the evening will be buried alive in the Campus Sceleris.

Points for awesome

One of those bloody annoying ads on facebook that gets its annoyingness written off due to making me giggle:

"(5) new messages: 2 people have a crush on you. 3 people think you're ugly and hate you, sorry."

DevenPort

Looks like I miss out. I can't compete with Natalie.

However, I have to admit it's pretty cool.

On universal morality?

"When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. ... The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but [psychologist Jonathan] Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture…

"All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

"The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

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