If I were to define the Wandering Baron as anything, it would be as a light painter.
I would not go as far as to declare László Mednyánszky a great painter; however, I am still enamored by his uncanny ability to capture certain qualities of light.
If I were to define the Wandering Baron as anything, it would be as a light painter.
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One of my 24 hens has gone broody, which is another way of saying she now feels inclined to incubate eggs rather than lay them.
Incubating eggs and hatching chicks have never been part of my overall game plan in the coop, so I researched some ways to break a hen of broodiness. After considering four or five methods, I decided upon the most natural option — let it ride out and see what becomes of the seven eggs. Since there is a rooster in the henhouse, some of the seven may be fertile. I’ve marked the original seven to distinguish them from eggs the other hens will inevitably lay in the nest. The only thing standing between the possibility of hatched chicks is time, about three weeks’ worth. We’ll see what happens. The ongoing disintegration of Christian externals has prompted some to experience what could be called a crisis of faith. At the core of this crisis sits the glaring and palpable discord between internal and external sources of faith.
After all, how is one supposed to nurture an internal faith in Christianity when virtually all Christian externals continue to decay, dissolve, disintegrate and degenerate? How are Christians to maintain their internal faith when virtually all the people and places representing Christianity’s external faith are corrosive and corrupt? Of what use is one’s internal faith if the outside world does not mirror it? Can such internal faith — barely supported or utterly unsupported by exterior factors — even be considered valid? Christians have grown accustomed to the idea that externals like politics, society, and nations must reflect and align with their internal faith. Or, more accurately, that their internal faith must reflect and align with externals like churches, liturgies, politics, society, and nation. I say accustomed because the alignment of internal and external Christian faith was certainly the case historically, which has led many to conclude that the breakdown between interiorized and exteriorized faith heralds the inevitable end of Christianity as we know it. Although this sounds terminal, it does not exclude the possibility of Christianity continuing and developing further in other forms, and I believe this is where Christianity is now. Conventional, exteriorized Christianity may indeed be ending, but a heightened, interiorized Christianity capable of a new religious consciousness may emerge. However, it can only emerge when Christians overcome the crisis of the external and begin to have faith in their inner faith. In a faith that is noncontigent on externals. Not in the sense of defeating, outwitting, or putting one over on me, but in the sense of absorbing and engrossing the best parts of me and leaving little left over.
Spring and summer are my busy seasons. I spend most of my free time outside tending the garden or working on seemingly endless home renovation projects, and I invest the bulk of my “best” energy in these activities. Unfortunately, this has a rather detrimental effect on my other pursuits, including blogging, but working on your property in the warm sun and open air provides something blogging cannot. Still, I know I’ll strike a balance between the two in the coming days or weeks. My wife likes to listen to the radio in the kitchen when she cooks. Well, she doesn’t listen. The radio merely serves as background noise. Lately, she has kept the dial tuned to Retro Radio, a station that — yeah, you guessed it — focuses exclusively on oldies spanning the sixties to the nineties. The other day, the station played “You Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive. I hadn’t heard the tune for years, and my memories inevitably turned to the song’s video featuring the band’s flamboyant and openly gay lead singer. I found myself wondering what became of him when the band’s flash-in-the-pan success quickly cooled and faded. Here’s how I remembered the chap. And this is what became of him. ![]() The information I read claimed he became addicted to cosmetic surgery. Some cite that addiction, replete with many subsequent botched jobs and complications, as the real cause of his death from cardiac arrest in 2016.
I had been ignorant of all of that. I kind of wish I still was. Thanks, Retro Radio! Things coming to a point should inspire a re-evaluation of motivations. Ideally, shallow motivations should give way to deeper motivations. At the very least, shallow motivations ought to be recognized and acknowledged as shallow. The absence of that leaves little room or opportunity for repentance, to say nothing of nurturing deeper motivations.
Overcoming shallow motivations is often difficult, primarily because they can be so easily replaced with other, equally shallow motivations. Thus, prevailing over one shallow motivation often does little more than create space for some other trivial impetus. The reasons for this are many. Suffice it to say that shallow motivations reflect our innate weakness and the innate imperfection of mortal life in this world. So, we should not punish ourselves for failing to overcome all our shallow motivations, but we must also resist making excuses for such failures. We must be sincere about our shallow motivations — see them for what they are, recognize where they fall short, and repent our inability to renounce them and look deeper. Most of all, we must not allow ourselves to be lured by the temptation to characterize shallow motivations as deep ones. Giving in to this temptation is a clear sign of intentionally “missing the point.” Created by the artist Jenő József Percz to mark the resting place of fellow artist Vilmos Aba-Novák.
Honestly, I am not immensely interested in what Plato and the Platonists have been banging on about for the past two thousand five hundred years. What interests me is what Jesus said two thousand years ago.
In my book, Jesus’ two-thousand-year-old words created a cosmic shift that should have tempered the incessant five-hundred-year-old Platonic drumbeat and cast it in an entirely new light. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Men utilized Plato — and many other systems, models, and ideas — to "correct" and amend the cosmic shift, thereby muting and obscuring its simplicity and significance in man’s thinking. The magnitude or reality of the cosmic shift is still there, but it has been obscured in much the same way the moon obscures the sun during a solar eclipse. Men have been staring wide-eyed into that eclipse for over two millennia, believing the dark circle and its dazzling corona to be the source of all light. Nearly all have been unwilling to comprehend that the true light emanates from behind the dark orb. Men have been partially blinded. A prolonged eclipse has a way of doing that. I first became aware of the home design and building TV program Grand Designs during my nine-month teaching stint in the UK. For those unfamiliar with the show, it basically chronicles the construction of unconventionally planned residences in Great Britain.
The bulk of these grand designs qualified as what I personally refer to as architorture — you know, ghastly rhomboid concrete structures with unsightly-angled roofs defying all geometric logic. However, every now and then, the show would feature the painstaking restoration of a medieval ruin or abandoned lighthouse, which was always intriguing viewing. Regardless of what the grand design was, it unfailingly featured enormous windows, panes of glass, or supersized glass doors, all crafted to “open into nature,” thereby fusing and blending interior and exterior landscapes. Every week, I would watch UK homeowners gleefully throw open thirty-foot high French doors or crank up fifty-foot-wide panes of glass and then inhale deeply as they basked in the glory of their practically open-air homes seamlessly becoming one with the Yorkshire Dales or the Cornish countryside. I wish I could live like that. I really do. Unfortunately, if I accidentally leave my regular-sized entrance door open for more than thirty seconds, half of the insect population of my village inevitably comes rushing into the house. The same goes for an open window if we happen to forget to pull down the screen. Open the (regular-sized) terrace door? I did that once to air out the house and received a rather unwelcome visit from a backyard garter snake (in addition to the insects, of course). The only thing that is always somewhat open is the cat door with the swinging flap mounted onto the back door, but the cat only uses that when she wants to sneak a live mouse or bird into the house for playtime. But good on those Grand Design folks. They have all managed to fuse and blend their houses with the natural world in ways I can only dream. |
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Blog posts tend to be spontaneous, unpolished, first draft entries ranging from the insightful and periodically profound to the poorly-argued and occasionally disparaging. Comments are welcome but moderated. Please use your name or a pseudonym in comments. Emails welcome: f er en c ber g er (at) h otm ail (dot) co m Blogs/Sites I Read
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July 2024
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