Orthodixie

Here’s some snips from Kathleen Parker’s rant about blogs, Lord of the Blogs:

Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

Bloggers persist no matter their contributions or quality, though most would have little to occupy their time were the mainstream media to disappear tomorrow. Some bloggers do their own reporting, but most rely on mainstream reporters to do the heavy lifting. Some bloggers also offer superb commentary, but most babble, buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents competing for the Ritalin generation’s inevitable senior superlative: Most Obsessive-Compulsive.

They play tag team with hyperlinks (“I’ll say you’re important if you’ll say I’m important) and shriek “Gotcha!” when they catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight. Plenty smart but lacking in wisdom, they possess the power of a forum, but neither the maturity nor humility that years of experience impose.

You can read it all H E R E.

HT News Forum
Pic Flame Warriors

This site (hypered above) is up and running. Please give it a look. Being the newbie on the block, I’ve only had the pleasure of attending one meeting. Though we didn’t sing KumBaYa (thanks be to Yah), having clergy from all canonical Orthodox “jurisdictions” gathering together to discuss the pastoral needs and ministry opportunities in the area is beyond refreshing.

Christ is Born!

New Site! Highly recommended!

O bird that somewhere yonder sings,
In the dim hour ‘twixt dreams and dawn,
Lone in the hush of sleeping things,
In some sky sanctuary withdrawn;
Your perfect song is too like pain,
And will not let me sleep again.

I think you must be more than bird,
A little creature of soft wings,
Not yours this deep and thrilling word —
Some morning planet ’tis that sings;
Surely from no small feathered throat
Wells that august, eternal note.

As some old language of the dead,
In one resounding syllable,
Says Rome and Greece and all is said —
A simple word a child may spell;
So in your liquid note impearled
Sings the long epic of the world.

Unfathomed sweetness of your song,
With ancient anguish at its core,
What womb of elemental wrong,
With shudder unimagined, bore
Peace so divine — what hell hath trod
This voice that softly talks with God!

All silence in one silver flower
Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks
The moon in heaven, yet hath power
To tell the soul the thing it seeks,
And pack, as by some wizard’s art,
The whole within the finite part.

To you, sweet bird, one well might feign —
With such authority you sing
So clear, yet so profound, a strain
Into the simple ear of spring —
Some secret understanding given
Of the hid purposes of Heaven.

And all my life until this day,
And all my life until I die,
All joy and sorrow of the way,
Seem calling yonder in the sky;
And there is something the song saith
That makes me afraid of death.

Now the slow light fills all the trees,
The world, before so still and strange,
With day’s familiar presences,
Back to its common self must change,
And little gossip shapes of song
The porches of the morning throng.

Not yours with such as these to vie
That of the day’s small business sing,
Voice of man’s heart and of God’s sky —
But O you make so deep a thing
Of joy, I dare not think of pain
Until I hear you sing again.

— Richard Le Gallienne

This poem, and the one below, taken from Great Poems of the English Language (New York: Tudor, 1927).

Not she with traitorous kiss her Saviour stung,
Not she denied him with unholy tongue;
She, while apostles shrank, could dangers brave,
Last at the cross and earliest at the grave.

Eaton Stannard Barrett’s poem, Woman, found in Great Poems of the English Language (New York: Tudor, 1927).