i love you 'cause i love you 'cause i can

j | they/he/ze | little-c catholic and contemplative

[bennurising]

this blog has been pretty inactive for a while, but i figured i'd still let y'all know that i've moved to @silencehymnal!

[sagradofemenin0]

“Some loser brought a ladder and ripped the pride flag off my local church”, 2023

[cruciform-solidarity]

Käthe Kollwitz

[gender0bender]

“God dwelleth in me, and I in him. And now I see that to love, to cloth the naked, and to feed the hungry is enough.”

— A Cambridgeshire woman in 1653, according to Margaret Spufford’s account (via theinwardlight)

[i-have-a-hunger]

Visit Original Link

The angel Gabriel from heaven came, His wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame, All hail, said he, thou lowly maiden Mary! Most highly favoured Lady, Gloria! [x]

[owenbroadcast]

hey tumblr. what’s up. so, i worked on this for almost two years and just finished it. it’s a full Catholic liturgical calendar. it’s done in the traditional latin mass style, so it uses the older dates / names / observances. i made the font(s) for it, laid it all out, this easily took me hundreds and hundreds of hours. it’s also the largest thing i’ve ever made - the full print is two feet by three feet, or it comes in four 12x18 quarters. ill post more about it, but i was hustling to get it together in time for the holidays. it’s in my shop at:  https://owen-cyclops.myshopify.com/collections/calendar also, i just wanted to show some people that would be into it or think its cool so, thanks for taking a look. hope your advent / winter vibe is unfolding well

[apocrypals]

Loooooove this

[hymnsofheresy]

“In Advent… we relearn the lessons of the first covenant: that we cannot make God, however we long for him; that we must be surprised, ambushed and carried off by God.”

— Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness (via rotgospels)

[ordocarmelitarum]

taken from Carmelite Devotions and Prayers for Special Feasts of the Liturgical Year, compiled by a Carmelite Tertiary, (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1956).

[moonlit-archeress]

A statue showing a Hindu interpretation of Mary, in meditative pose.

Sanskrit inscription: 

“Salutations to beloved goddess Mary!  May your blessings be showered upon us.”

Self-Realization magazine, 1960

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

So all jokes aside, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ZT"L captured my actual position on the matter of biblical literalism so much better than I could say it:

Living traditions constantly interpret their canonical texts. That is what makes fundamentalism — text without interpretation — an act of violence against tradition. In fact, fundamentalists and today’s atheists share the same approach to texts. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to betray God’s deeper purposes.

[Source: The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning]

Or, as I put it indignantly to my pastor once all the way back in high school: "If you treat the Bible as a historical newspaper, you've missed the damn point."

(He was amused by this, by the way. And agreed!)

[m1male2]

Geghard Monastery, Kotayk, Armenia, partially carved out of the mountain, was founded in the 4th century.

[vitabreva]

[headspace-hotel]

What finally put the nail in the coffin for me on the concept of "biblical inerrancy" was fully realizing how impossible it is for the meaning of any written piece of language to be consistent or even intelligible across times, places and cultures

I have sat through sermons about Jesus's teaching that you have to be "like a little child" to enter the kingdom of heaven that interpreted it as meaning, like, "innocence," or pure unquestioning belief like a child's belief in Santa Claus, but in college I took a 300-level course on Ancient Rome, and realized that being "like a little child" would have meant something totally different for a Roman or Roman-influenced society

The Romans were ridiculously hierarchical. Like, present-day American society is hierarchical but the Romans took it to the next level. Everything was all about your position on the totem pole relative to everyone else.

And children were at the bottom of the bottom. They were completely without legal rights, as in "the head of household can legally just kill his son and it's fine because he's the father."

that class made me realize just how much of the actual teachings of Jesus are centered on subverting social hierarchies, and just how intense they are about it. and this is no exception: it is a statement about upturning society so that the least valued people are most favored by God

[headspace-hotel]

my dad (former pastor with a master's degree in this stuff) likes to point out a lot of instances of this subversion of cultural hierarchies, but one of his favorites is the first witnesses to the resurrection being women, in a time where a woman's testimony wasn't considered valid in court

[treasure-of-the-ancients]

Inscribed gold ring depicting Jesus exiting the tomb, England, 15th century.

Inscription outside of ring "The well of pitty, the well of merci, the well of confort, the well of gracy, the well of everlastingh lyffe". Inscription inside of ring, "Wulnera quinq dei sunt medicina mei pia / crux et passio Cri sunt medicina michi jaspar / melchior baltasar ananyzapta tetragrammaton". (The five wounds of God are my medicine, the pious cross and the passion of Christ are medicine to me, Melchior Baltasar Ananyzapta)

from The British Museum

[enchantedsleeper-deactivated201]

Joan of Arc in Prayer (1836), Hermann Anton Stilke

[unmattata]

The Madonna through the eyes of Goanese artist Angelo da Fonseca.

[bennurising]

i’m designing a sticker whose general vibe has been in my head for literal years, but now i’m stuck, because it involves drawing the eucharist. i want to make it subtly anglican without it being Exclusively so, and the only way i can think to do it is a) involve the anglican compass rose in the design (which no one will understand) or b) make the bread a loaf (which would probably exclude catholics because y’all don’t do that). idk i might just have to let it stay the way it is