Orthodixie

That’s my youngest. Her older siblings have been away at Camp St Raphael, Session 1, all week.

As you can see, she’s getting older.

Should the Lord tarry, she’ll be ready to fly the coup for camp next year.

Theory is: Her Dad passed “camp age” long ago.

But, every 2 years or so, he feels the urge to test this theory by, once again, attending …

Trust me, he’s not quite aware of the fullness of his age yet, but — he soon will be!

Although I believe he’s roughly the same age as “Stevie Wonder” and “Toto” (pictured here from CSR 2008).

All of this is to say that I am at Camp St Raphael, Session 2, this week and beg your prayers.

😉

Having been asked to help with Camp St Raphael, Second Session, next week — and, more specifically, to head down river in rafts with teens for an all day outing, I remembered …

My last experience of all-day river rafting was 30 years ago.

Well, it was supposed to be all day. But, for me, it was only a few hours; for my rafting buddies it was 8 hours longer.

It was the summer of 1980. I was a college kid selling books door-to-door in Wisconsin for the Southwestern Book Company. I had two fellow book-selling roommates, whom we’ll call Bill and Jack. Bill, who’d done the job the previous summer, was our sales manager; Jack and I were first time book salesmen.

So, after a month of demo-ing our books for the proverbial Mrs Jones, the three of us decided to have a little fun …

Our river rafting excursion down the Wolf River, the week of July 4th in 1980, was to be an 8-hour tour. The man with the truck and the rafts dropped us off at our launch point at 10:00 AM. Yes, I said RAFTS …

What can I say? Although there were only 3 of us, we had one raft for us and one for the, uh, cooler.

Anyway. Mr So-n-so let us out, got us in the water at 10 am, and we were expected back at the raft rental place by 6:00 that evening.

Bill and I were in the lead raft and Jack (who really was a hard person to like, if you get my drift) was in the rear raft with the cooler, which was tied to ours by a rope …

AND,

Whoa!

Jack’s raft suddenly swung ‘round toward shore and hit a low lying tree limb and — psssssshhhhhh ... a hole was punctured in the side!

Mr So-n-so’s truck could still be heard heading down the gravel road, but it was too late (and too early in history for cell phones!).

There we were, with 8 hours of river rafting ahead of us: three college kids, with one sinking rental raft (complete with cooler) tied to one healthy raft …

And, we soon found out …

The Orthodixie Podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

Image Source

The following is from AOL News. Call me old-fashioned but, for this post, I’ll let St Paul have the final word.

(June 27) — The crucifix is the defining symbol of Christianity, a constant reminder to the faithful of the sacrifice and suffering endured by Jesus Christ for humanity. But an extensive study of ancient texts by a Swedish pastor and academic has revealed that Jesus may not have died on a cross, but instead been put to death on another gruesome execution device.

Gunnar Samuelsson — a theologian at the University of Gothenburg and author of a 400-page thesis on crucifixion in antiquity — doesn’t doubt that Jesus died on Calvary hill. But he argues that the New Testament is in fact far more ambiguous about the exact method of the Messiah’s execution than many Christians are aware.

“When the Gospels refer to the death of Jesus, they just say that he was forced to carry a “stauros” out to Calvary,” he told AOL News. Many scholars have interpreted that ancient Greek noun as meaning “cross,” and the verb derived from it, “anastauroun,” as implying crucifixion. But during his three-and-a-half-year study of texts from around 800 BC to the end of the first century AD, Samuelsson realized the words had more than one defined meaning.
Gunnar Samuelsson says the New Testament is far more ambiguous about the exact method of Jesus’ execution than many Christians are aware.

This iconic image of Christ dying on the cross may be misleading, according to theologian Gunnar Samuelsson, who says crucifixion was more rare than commonly thought.

“‘Stauros’ is actually used to describe a lot of different poles and execution devices,” he says. “So the device described in the Gospels could have been a cross, but it could also have been a spiked pole, or a tree trunk, or something entirely different.”

More here.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, love this thesis!

A Roman Catholic responds.

Mr Samuelsson said: “That a man named Jesus existed in that part of the world and in that time is well-documented. He left a rather good foot-print in the literature of the time.

“I do believe that the mentioned man is the son of God. My suggestion is not that Christians should reject or doubt the biblical text.

“My suggestion is that we should read the text as it is, not as we think it is. We should read on the lines, not between the lines. The text of the Bible is sufficient. We do not need to add anything.” [Source]

‘There are simply no description of Jesus or anyone else in that time being crucified’ Samuelsson says, ‘the whole thing is based upon imagination and myth’. [Source]

Some discussion here.

St Paul: I was determined that while I was with you I would speak of nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. (1 Corinthians: 2:2)

I am not a “Jungian” (Carl Jung himself said: “Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian”), but I have always been fascinated by the life and work of the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology.

Jung died 20 days before I was born. My birthday present for myself this year was to register for an evening lecture at The Jung Center on the significance of the recently released Liber Novus (The Red Book).

As my son was at Scout Camp and my youngest went with a friend to Galveston for the weekend — I dropped my wife and teen daughter at the movie theater and proceeded to my lecture …

Though this was my Plan A, a Plan B had originated — which was later changed, allowing for the original Plan to proceed.

You see, my wife — on a whim — called a radio station and won two tickets to a concert in The Woodlands for the same night. However, when we found out the seats were on the lawn (y’all, this is Houston in the summer), enthusiasm waned. We gave the tix to others.

Who was performing?

Sting — singer/song writer and former lead singer and bassist of the rock band The Police — with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra on his Symphonicity Tour.

Why do I even mention all of this?

From Wikipedia: “On the cover of The Police’s final album, Synchronicity, which was named after Carl Jung’s theory, Sting is seen reading a book called “Synchronicity” by Carl Jung.

[For those unfamiliar with the concept: Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The phenomenon of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s.]

About the picture: These figures stand beside my computer in the church office. Freud was given to me as a birthday present, years ago, by Fr Mark Mancuso (whose birthday is the day after mine, June 27th); Jung, I bought a while back. Buzz … a Christmas gift from my son.

Buzz?

Well … sometimes a toy is just a toy.

The following snip is stolen from the website of John Sanidopoulos —

The earliest written chronicle of the life of Saint David comes from his contemporary, Saint John Moschos, in his Leimonarion or Spiritual Meadow. Saint John together with his disciple and companion Sophronios the Sophist travelled to Egypt in order to record the great deeds and wise sayings of the Desert Fathers from the monastic authorities of the desert of the late 6th or early 7th century. He records how he met Abba Palladios in Alexandria and tells us the following:

We went to the same Abba Palladios with this request: “Of your charity, tell us, father, where you came from, and how it came about that you embraced the monastic life”. He was from Thessalonika, he said, and then he told us this: “In my home country, about three stadia beyond the city wall, there was a recluse, a native of Mesopotamia whose name was David. He was a man of outstanding virtue, merciful and continent. He spent about twenty years in his place of confinement. Now at this time, because of the barbarians, the walls of the city were patrolled at night by soldiers. One night those who were on guard-duty at that stretch of the city-walls nearest to where the elder’s place of confinement was located, saw fire pouring from the windows of the recluse’s cell. The soldiers thought the barbarians must have set the elder’s cell on fire; but when they went out in the morning, to their amazement, they found the elder unharmed and his cell unburned. Again the following night they saw fire, the same way as before, in the elder’s cell – and this went on for a long time. The occurrence became known to all the city and throughout the countryside. Many people would come and keep vigil at the wall all night long in order to see the fire, which continued to appear until the elder died. As this phenomenon did not merely appear once or twice but was often seen, I said to myself: ‘If God so glorifies his servants in this world, how much more so in the world to come when He shines upon their face like the sun?’ This, my children, is why I embraced the monastic life.”

It should be noted that although Saint David was the first ascetic known as a “dendrite” (one who lives in trees) …

Read more about St David — HERE.