I should be back within a week. Until then.
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We have just suffered through our first heat wave of the summer here in northwestern Hungary. Temps remained well above 32 degrees Celsius for the better part of a week, which really put a damper on working outside. Thankfully, we returned to more seasonable temperatures today, and it looks like they will continue to hold for the next week or two. So, how did I feel during this particular heat wave? Well, readers may remember my posts about Hirschl-Hirémy's Souls on the Banks of the Archeron.  Below is the "heatwave" version of the same painting.  I look forward to the solstices and equinoxes every year, but I can’t for the life of me understand why.
Perhaps there is something primordial ingrained into our consciousness, with some being more intrigued or sensitive to the movements of the earth around the sun and the lengthening or shortening of daylight hours. Today is the longest day of the year, with Midsummer’s Day a scant four days away. Though it will strike most as peculiar, when it comes to the idea of midsummer, I agree with Dr. Charlton’s assessment that the summer solstice/Midsummer Day marks the middle of the summer rather than its beginning. My garden provides ample “evidence” that this is indeed the case. The early blooming flowers have all withered away, while the later blossoming ones are now in full bloom. Though quite lush and green, the grass hints that it will soon take a break and dry out before engaging in a late all-or-nothing growth spurt toward the beginning of August. The fattened onion bulbs bulge from the soil while the tops grow brown and whither. Most of the tomato plants are bearing fruit, albeit still green. The lettuce continues to grow but is slowly going to seed. Yes, there are still many hot summer days ahead. Yet, I would argue that half of summer is already behind us and that people who take their summer holidays in mid-August are vacationing in early autumn despite all appearances to the contrary. The winter solstice as the middle of winter is an easier sell, particularly in northern countries where the days grow noticeably shorter, and the weather tends to turn for the worse after the Autumn Equinox in September. Although November is still “officially” autumn, people tend to regard it as a winter month, especially when the cold rains or first snowfalls arrive. By the time we get Christmas, we feel as if we have been in winter for a while, and very few people I know have ever declared the winter equinox or Christmas to be the beginning of winter. Adam Piggott has picked up on my criticism of professional development Over at his blog, he describes a particularly curious team-building activity involving white water rafting. It's well worth a read if you haven’t seen it.
Team building aside, reading Adam's post reminded me of the “deep thoughts” aspect of PD sessions, which serve as the pièce de resistance of those torturous events. Deep thoughts shared during professional development are meant to be earth-shattering, life-changing snippets of information that blow your mind and transform your thinking about life, the universe, and everything. You know they’re deep because they're usually followed by “learning nugget” activities in which the PD participants collaborate in five-minute “mini-sessions” with the learning outcome of “unpacking” the profound implications of the deep thought in question. Unfortunately, most of the deep thoughts expressed during professional development are deep enough to be essentially meaningless. Case in point, during one of the countless PD days I had to endure when I worked as a high school teacher, the “mistress of ceremonies” (yes, she referred to herself as that) shared the following deep thought: Seventy-five percent of the jobs our students will do in the future don’t exist yet. Our task as educators is to utilize our best practices to prepare our students for those nonexsistent jobs. After the sonic boom of the expressed deep thought subsided, I joined four of my colleagues in an impromptu learning-nugget mini-session during which we were supposed to brainstorm the implications of the deep thought. I looked at my colleagues and said, “Deep. Real deep. So deep, it’s meaningless.” It was the only learning nugget I could offer in response to the sagacity of the deep thought that had been expressed. I suppose it’s superfluous to point out that the very same leaders, managers, and experts who insisted on shutting down the world back in 2020, even if it meant saving just one life, are now virtually all on board the “let’s have a great big war” train.
I have nothing but respect for roofers. I spent a day shingling a 4x3-meter shed roof, and I cannot tell you how relieved I was to come down from the roof at the end of that day. Not because I suffer from any acrophobia but because roofing is demanding work. On the one hand, nailing shingles to boards is easy. On the other hand, the prolonged kneeling, squatting, craning, and climbing is quite taxing, to say nothing of the heat the shingles emit after the sun reaches a certain point in the sky. I have shingled many roofs in my time, and it never gets easier! I could not imagine doing that kind of work day in, day out. So, hats off to all the roofers in the world! The five new 12-week-old pullets I ordered in winter arrived last week. I set them up in a separate part of the run, and they appear to be doing great; however, they refuse to go into their coop at dusk and do everything short of tunneling to join the adult flock in its coop. I had to pick them up and carry them in the first five nights. I now coax them into the coop with my hands, but it would be much more convenient if they went in alone. Kids these days! I guess it rarely occurs to most conservative, reactionary, counter-revolutionary types that August Comte inherited the idea of society über alles from traditionalist stalwarts such as De Maistre and De Bonald. People avidly hire life coaches when they should be seeking a reputable death coach. Professional development sessions must fall under the jurisdiction of an incessantly malevolent class of demons specializing in ennui, inanity, torpor, and mindnumbing team-building starter activities. Has anyone out there ever attended a beneficial or engaging professional development session? Those answering in the affirmative should immediately seek the aid of an exorcist. An especially useful tidbit I gleaned from Berdyaev is that there are two ways of understanding apocalypse — a passive way and an active way.
Berdyaev observed that the passive way of understanding apocalypse has always predominated Christian consciousness via a sense of foreboding and passive waiting for the end because most Christians believe that the fate of the world is determined by God exclusively — divine judgment and all that. From another perspective, the end of the world is not an exclusively divine matter. Man also participates in the world, be it creatively or destructively. Seen this way, the end of the world also depends on man’s activity. So, how should man approach the end of the world? On the one hand, he can assume it is all in God’s hands and wait for the inevitable in passive terror or prepare for it actively and creatively. According to Berdyaev, apocalyptic consciousness can be conservative and reactionary or revolutionary and creative. The world is always coming to an end. At the same time, the world is also always beginning. The world has ended countless times in history and every time some movement in history drew to a close, another emerged. Movements of history aside, the individual world of every person ends in a personal apocalypse. The world may continue despite everything, but we know beyond a doubt that we as individuals will not, at least not in this mortal coil. Whether the world ends should be of secondary significance to the certainty of our mortal lives ending. How will we choose to face our individual apocalypses when they arrive? The same way we choose to face the end of the world apocalypse? Will we stare aghast in horror at the ruin of everything we sanctified, or will we greet our inevitable demise actively and creatively? Will we fixate on the end and see no more, or will we recognize the end as a beginning and concentrate on preparing for that beginning with creativity, hope, and love? If we spent more time being revolutionary and creative about the inevitable end of our personal worlds, we could change the tentative end of the world into something that it ought to be. A reader made me aware of Stefan Jäger (1877-1962), a Hungarian-born painter who identified deeply with his Danube Swabian heritage and made it the focus of his work, mostly sentimental/romantic/idealized depictions of pre-World War 2 Danube Swabian life in Hungary and Yugoslavia. If I had to classify Jäger, I would refer to him as the Norman Rockwell of my people, who no longer exist -- at least not in the manner in which Jäger depicted them. People tend to think that I am of Hungarian heritage, but I'm actually a full-blooded Danube Swabian. Of course, that means very little these days considering that Danube Swabian culture was all but wiped from the face of the earth during and after the Second World War. Since then, the descendants have all but assimilated into other cultures. The scenes Jäger portrays in his paintings are certainly sentimental to an extent; however, they also provide a glimpse into what Danube Swabian culture was like, something I can confirm from the many stories my grandparents told me.  Village Street in Winter  Visit from Grandma  Chatting on a Street Bench  Courting  On the Way Home  Swabian House Concert Nothing bores and disappoints me more than bloggers who insist that they are truly orthodox and that nearly everyone else is a heretic. This short Emo Philips gag helps explain why to some degree. To begin with, that level of discernment and judgment and its obsessive fixation on wrongthink as it pertains to adhering to externals hovers at about the same level as that utilized by the most raving, foaming-at-the-mouth leftist true believers.
Screaming heretic from the rooftops is not an argument any more than screaming racist or transphobe is an argument. It does not exemplify sound or creative thinking, reflects no modicum of internal spiritual movement or development, and sidesteps all the serious spiritual issues Christians should urgently concern themselves with today. First off, the accused is probably already fully aware that he is indeed a heretic according to the doctrine against which he is judged, so what exactly is the point of stating the obvious? It would be like screaming American at a person who understands that he is a citizen of the United States. Also, what many heretic accusers fail to understand is that the accursed heretic standing before them may very well be perfectly orthodox in the tradition that he follows, a tradition that informs him that his accuser, not he, is the real heretic. Hours of meaningful and engaging dialogue follow. Then there is the whole issue of Christians labeling people as heretics even though they switched denominations, sometimes more than once, meaning that such Christians were themselves heretics at some point. You would think that such individuals would have more sympathy for others’ spiritual journeys. But no, on the contrary, they are frequently among the most smug, arrogant, and vitriolic of true believers. Of course, we must not forget all the heresy accusations liberally being tossed about within one tradition or denomination. Don’t accept the current pope as valid? Heretic! Accept the current pope as valid? Heretic! And then there are the lowest of the low on the heretic ranking chart —the unaffiliated Romantic Christians like me who are generally dismissed as non-Christian or, sometimes, even anti-Christian because we insist on making our own way rather than submitting to one of the established denominations or traditions. The most common dismissal against such an individualized approach is that it is too subjective. Christians are permitted some idiosyncrasy within the religion; however, the level of subjectivity, discernment, and choice of an individualized approach disqualifies it as Christianity because at the end of the day, Christianity is a program — or a selection of programs — and the whole point of being a Christian is getting with a program. Yet getting with a program involves choice and discernment — yes, even for cradle Christians. The root meaning of heresy stems from the Greek hairesis “a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking; a deliberate plan, purpose; philosophical sect, school.” Choosing for oneself can involve submitting to one of the established traditions or eschewing all of them and going it alone. Either way, it’s choosing for yourself, entailing that all Christians today are heretics, regardless of whether they acknowledge that or not.  F.M Dostoevsky - Konstantin Vasiliev - 1976  The Audience - James Hoff - 1991 |
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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 closed for a while. Emails welcome: f er en c ber g er (at) h otm ail (dot) co m Blogs/Sites I Read
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October 2024
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