Orthodixie

This week’s episode of the Orthodixie Podcast, an “oldie but goodie”, is about that big event of summer. (I’m away at Camp St Raphael this week; prayers coveted.) For all the Old Marrieds out there, here’s a little chuckle someone sent me a while back:

A wife was making a breakfast of fried eggs for her husband.

Suddenly, her husband burst into the kitchen.

“Careful,” he said, “CAREFUL! Put in some more butter! Oh my gosh!

You’re cooking too many at once. TOO MANY! Turn them! TURN

THEM NOW! We need more butter. Oh my gosh! WHERE are

we going to get MORE BUTTER? They’re going to STICK!

Careful. CAREFUL! I said be CAREFUL! You NEVER listen

to me when you’re cooking! Never! Turn them! Hurry up!

Are you CRAZY? Have you LOST your mind? Don’t forget to salt them.

You know you always forget to salt them. Use the salt.

USE THE SALT! THE SALT!”

The wife stared at him. “What in the world is wrong with you?

You think I don’t know how to fry a couple of eggs?”

The husband calmly replied, “I just wanted to show you

what it feels like when I’m driving.”

* * *

Love is in the air … goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna … take out the papers and the trash … you may kiss the … love stinks! The missing parts, and the glue that holds it all together, this week (all the way from 2009) on …

The Orthodixie Podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

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An outbreak of dancing plague, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance or epidemic chorea, began on this day in 1374 in Aachen, Germany.

Stolen from the Writer’s Almanac …

From Aachen it spread across central Europe and as far away as England and Madagascar. Dancing mania affected groups of people — as many as thousands at a time — and caused them to dance uncontrollably for days, weeks, and even months until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some danced themselves to death, suffering heart attacks or broken hips and ribs. Most outbreaks happened between the 14th and 17th centuries, though there are reports of dancing mania as far back as the 7th century. The 1374 outbreak was well-documented by several credible witnesses who reported that dancers sang, screamed, saw visions, behaved like animals, and experienced aversions to the color red and to pointy-toed shoes.

At the time, people believed the plague was the result of a curse from St. Vitus or St. John the Baptist, and so they prayed to the saints and made pilgrimages to their shrines. Exorcism was another treatment option, as was isolation, and many communities hired musicians to accompany the dancers in the hope that it would help them overcome their compulsion; it usually just resulted in more people joining the dancing. Scientists today are still at a loss to explain it, putting it down to economic hardship, ergot poisoning, cults, or mass hysteria.

For more on The Writer’s Almanac – go here.

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“After Mass someone came up to me and said, ‘What about ironing boards?’ So then I started saying it would be a blessing of surfboards, boogie boards, skate boards, skim boards, ironing boards, school boards, executive boards and even two-by-fours. We got them all except school boards and executive boards.“

Uh. There’s more.

HERE.

Thanks to FWD from Bob Born.

Fr. Charles Baz, Pastor of St. John Orthodox Church, Levittown, New York, writes:

“I have received the sad news of the falling asleep in the Lord of His handmaid, Mother Christina Baz, Abbess of the Patriarchal Convent of our Lady of Saidnaya in Syria. Not only was Mother Christina related to me (her mother and my grandfather were siblings), she was known to several people in our Archdiocese, to priests and bishops, to His Eminence Metropolitan Philip, and to all who visited Saidnaya Monastery in the past. She reposed on All Saints Sunday, most fitting for a nun who lived the monastic life all her life, especially when we heard the Gospel on Sunday, the Lord Jesus saying: “And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundred-fold, and inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).

Among the Clergy Brotherhood in our Archdiocese, I am her only living relative.“

May her memory be eternal!

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The image of me & Mother Christina, above, is from my visit to Saidnaya in April 2010.

A while back, commenting on the sad state of a former rock star, I wrote:

I believe it’s possible to take one’s struggles and temptations and turn them into a craft: poetry, prose, lyrics and art. The muse might possess a bit of madness but, as long as the madness is wrestled with, art is born.

Yet, in a fallen world, the madness itself may become the quest. Instead of the hound that drives a man toward greatness, it becomes the sole possession of a man blinded by self.

A commenter wrote:

Ooo, madness becomes the quest. Can you expand on the next sentence a bit? The part about the hound …

I responded:

It seems to me that many “creatives” exorcise their demons, so to speak, by creating. Once you embrace the demon, (again) so to speak, then the creativity is lost and you and your art are the worse for it.

In other words, would that the former rock star have continued to struggle metaphorically and poetically rather than polemically and politically.

Or, as another blogger wrote: “Shut up and sing!”

For what it’s worth, a further thought:

Creatives are always tempted by escape: drink, drugs, food, sex, crime, sloth, etc. That’s because the muse can lie. But, when we dance and do not consummate, metaphorically speaking, we can create. Art mirrors Creation. It is a reflection born from the continual dance; whereas “consummation” brings death. There has to be a healthy medium — a certain tension, an expression of continual inner struggle — for art to be made manifest.

Or, in much the same vein …

The Orthodixie Podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

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