Make your heart a monastery.
There sound the semantron, there call your vigil,
cense and whisper ceaseless prayers.
God is next to you.
(PFP: St. Catherine of Siena)
hello all of God's beloved. i have several names but most people know me as one of the following: mariam/mary, sofia, lea, or vera. i go by she/they, i live in Western Tennessee, and i am queer (trans, lesbian, ace). I am also celibate, though that doesn't say much given my natural asexuality.
if it isn't obvious, this is a Christian blog. specifically, i am primarily dedicated to traditional Eastern theology and practice, and though i was Orthodox when i began this blog, i am now a Greek Byzantine Catholic who attends a Roman parish due to a lack of Eastern parishes near me.
I am generally Side B. I keep my blog safe and welcoming for queer people, but don't expect me to dissent from Church teaching.
no DNI because, as many other people are realising, they don't do anything. my main thing is that i tend to either block or not engage with christopagans or traditionalist catholics.
my favourite saints are St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Maria Skobtsova, St. Joan of Arc, St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Archangel Raphael, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Peter the Apostle! i also love Julian of Norwich despite her not being an official saint.
some interests of mine beyond Christianity and theology are history, sociology, linguistics, photography, writing, HEMA, and music. i also think vampires are extremely cool and underrated for Christian allegory, hence i write a lot of psychological horror involving vampires that is subtly Christian allegory.
i make a lot of music. i have two raw black metal projects (Ordre Wampyrica and Düüsterwark Hexenfüür), both on hiatus and the latter of which i regret as it came out of a deep resentment towards God when my detransition failed and i had to leave the Orthodox Church. more currently, i run the screamo/emoviolence project iguessthisisit. and a concept soundtrack project named Windward, which sorta defies genre categories but it is heavily inspired by Toby Fox and ZUN's music, with some tracks leaning more into SNES-ified versions of specific genres like black metal and J-core. i also run the Christian tanzelcore project Inklusin Gottesfreund.
sometimes i post on politics, but it is not a primary focus of this blog and i do not fit neatly into any particular political ideology, and i think that politics should flow naturally from the Gospel rather than conforming to fit an ideology. if i had to give some specific stances, i believe in distributism/guild socialism, some sort of integralism, and i oppose all forms of oppression and violence in a consistent life ethic (aka i am pro-life and no, i dont want to argue about it).
i support decentralised monarchy based on pre-absolutist theory and i am opposed to democracy, which i see as a rejection of personhood and the Imago Dei in favour of rule by abstract ideas, as well as antagonistic to Christian morals around humility. generally, I'm not fond of the Enlightenment or secularism, and i tend to line up with Catholic Social Teaching.
feel free to send asks, messages, or prayer requests my way; i keep a prayer list.
"As a woman and a lover, however, I am moved by the sight of my Beloved. Where He is, I want to be. What He suffers, I want to share. Who He is, I want to be: crucified for love."
Look, we all know this is true. But there isn't a SOURCE for this, and the graph itself is basically illegible beyond "ooh colors". If we want to be good stewards of our informational resources, we need to cite our sources.
From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:
All clearly show a sharp rise in temperature beginning around approximately the 1980s, which corresponds with the graph in OP's post. But now we know where this data came from, and we can verify its validity accordingly.
i like the term "gallows humor" because it always makes me think of someone getting sentenced to death and being like "i have GOT to be the funniest person at my public execution"
The Story of St. Lawrence's death, patron saint of comedians
The prefect was so angry he told Lawrence that he would indeed have his wish to die—but it would be by inches. He had a great gridiron prepared with coals beneath it, and had Lawrence’s body placed on it. After the martyr had suffered the pain for a long time, the legend concludes, he made his famous cheerful remark, “It is well done. Turn me over!”
It seems there’s some strong contenders here. After review I also thought of St. Peter Martyr being struck on the head by an assassin and writing “Credo in unum Deum” with his own blood on the ground, as well as St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows scaring off bandits with his handgun skills. Bl. Miguel Pro also T-posing on the haters when he was martyred as well
I would like to add to St. Lawrence's execution the reason why he was being executed in the first place. The Emperor demanded all the treasures of the church, so Lawrence rounds up a bunch of Widows, Orphans, Disabled, and other destitute people and says "these are the treasures of the church" and the emperor got so mad he had him grilled alive.
I've been reading a bit about the theology of St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross and it honestly blows me away how similar it is to Eastern theology. John especially would pass as a Byzantine theologian if I didn't know who he was. I suppose similar conclusions will always be reached from the same truth and source - that is, the Holy Spirit
liberalism and all other forms of individualism are not just bad but attacks on the image of God in every person btw
as Persons we are icons of the Holy Trinity. the Persons of the Holy Trinity exist in relation to each other and cannot be separated from one another. similarly, human personhood is formed entirely in relation to other people. we do not and cannot exist as isolated individuals.
for the record this goes for any secular ideology that attempts to redefine or reduce persons, including Marxism (denying the spiritual, reducing people to economic units) and all forms of fascism (denying human dignity and equality)
This is pretty much where I'm landing as an anarchist Christian. While I still consider myself a Communist, I'm starting to be disenchanted with Marx. All he did was take what ingenious cultures and monastic communities have been doing for centuries, inject atheism into it to make it edgy, and claim he invented it.
pretty spot on as a former ancom myself, i've summarised marxism (and secular charity/activism in general) before as "borrowing Christian morality without saying grace," yet food is still a gift of God even if you neglect to say grace
Catholic Social Teaching and Liberation Theology address the same concerns as Marxism but with far better grounding as they are anchored in God and the Church. and there is no greater grounding for morality than literally Goodness Himself
Christ would have become incarnate for even a single person. So if we manage to help one child, one woman, one person in difficulty move forward, the effort will have been worth it. We do what we can, without setting spectacular statistical expectations, because that’s not possible, but recognizing every success as something that justifies all our charitable and social work[.]
Emilio Rocha Grande, O.F.M., Archbishop of Tangier (interview with The Pillar)
“As we enter Heaven, we will see them, so many of them, coming towards us and thanking us. We will ask who they are, and they will say ‘a poor soul you prayed for in purgatory.’”
while i was walking out of church i saw the priest devesting and i waved at him and he waved back and looked so happy :) everyone looked so happy at church tbf, it was very beautiful
"The process of secularization tends to reduce the faith and the Church to the sphere of the private and personal. Furthermore, by completely rejecting the transcendent, it has produced a growing deterioration of ethics, a weakening of the sense of personal and collective sin, and a steady increase in relativism. These have led to a general sense of disorientation, especially in the periods of adolescence and young adulthood which are so vulnerable to change. As the bishops of the United States of America have rightly pointed out, while the Church insists on the existence of objective moral norms which are valid for everyone, “there are those in our culture who portray this teaching as unjust, that is, as opposed to basic human rights. Such claims usually follow from a form of moral relativism that is joined, not without inconsistency, to a belief in the absolute rights of individuals. In this view, the Church is perceived as promoting a particular prejudice and as interfering with individual freedom”.[59] We are living in an information-driven society which bombards us indiscriminately with data – all treated as being of equal importance – and which leads to remarkable superficiality in the area of moral discernment. In response, we need to provide an education which teaches critical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values."
-Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium
There is the music of Heaven in all things @mariam-en-christo - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
