Wednesday & Shadow
Yesterday from This Day in History I saved a couple of events. One I personally remember how stunned and unbelieving I was in hearing, that President Roosevelt was dead. It was April 12, 1945, the Battle of Berlin was raging, Hitler frantic in his Bunker with several of his henchmen and generals, Marshal Zhukov pressing in, General Eisenhower leading our Allied effort from the West - - Robert remembers being on the playground at Cove School, I was outside in the Guy's backyard next door, and Bill's grandmother, Mrs Burgin, whom Bill called Nanny, came out and told us, "President Roosevelt is dead".
To me it was incredible, seemed impossible for such a one, he had been President all my life, in his Fourth Term, I'd thought of him as permanent and forever, what would happen to America now in the War with Germany and Japan? At nine years old I perceived President Roosevelt as the hero of all creation and our confidence for victory, would we now lose the War? Life is perception. Life is personal, very personal, and it is perception.
I'm thinking of the people in the New York train car where the shooting took place yesterday. Thinking of the people hiding, taking refuge in a basement in Ukraine, and Russian soldiers burst in. Life is fear, terrible fear, and pain. Life is perception, it's different for everyone, and it's very personal whether you are nine or eighty-six, whether you are looking out a window at a beautiful view, across a beloved Bay, or a boy too young to realize that governments go on, or you are looking at an enemy soldier or fellow train passenger pointing a gun at you, and, frightened and sad, knowing you are about to die, sudden and painful. Life is personal, one person at a Time.
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At the moment, three official boats are contemplating the burned out wreck of a shrimp boat just offshore from 7H.
Wind and whitecaps, it appeared that they were trying to move or shift it from its position, then moved on away. Not a good pic, I tried too hard to zoom in.
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The other thing I saved from yesterday's This Day in History is their short essay about Galileo. It's copy-and-pasted below, scroll down. Besides The Inquisition itself, Galileo is my favorite irrefutable proof of the consummate evil of religious certainty, forcing others to conform to your way on threat of punishment, excommunication, disowning, shunning, imprisonment, even execution, death. Over the centuries of the Christian church, the power of religious authorities in various places at certain Times, their exercise of power to abuse people, to define "sin" to punish "sinners" to cut people off from community even family. Even left in the dust by science and evolving knowledge, the church holds on and on and on, clinging to its tenets of faith as if they were absolute knowledge, and clinging to brutal authority, again Galileo, The inquisition, the Catholic Church in Ireland, the Anglican Church in Canada, other Christians against Quakers in America. In today's America, christians of a specific ilk moving through legislatures and the judiciary and the executive, to force people to comply with their certitudes. In my own denomination, compassion and humanity seem to try to overcome, in many areas, not in all areas, but in many areas, and in general.
My conviction: political and religious certainties are the greatest sin; and humanity's greatest evil is religious and political certainty forced upon others. This is Holy Week, Wednesday in Holy Week, a day to contemplate ourselves.
This collect for the day, from Prayers For An Inclusive Church, authorized and used here and there throughout The Episcopal Church, is far superior for our day, age, and Time to the BCP collect (page 220), which reflects the nineteenth century piety in which it was composed.
Lord, you let us convert you
into currency and commodity
so that you can pay the price
beyond all accounting:
may we offer our misused powers to you
knowing that you can transform them,
knowing that even this betrayal
is still a kiss;
through Jesus Christ, the passion of God.
Amen.
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My shadow again. What's real of me, body sitting here typing, or shadow? What's permanent? IDK, but I think the shadow.
RSF&PTL anyway.
T
Beside me at the window: Linda's amaryllis
Scroll down, Galileo
Galileo is accused of heresy
On April 12, 1633, chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, begins the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.
This was the second time that Galileo was in the hot seat for refusing to accept Church orthodoxy that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe: In 1616, he had been forbidden from holding or defending his beliefs. In the 1633 interrogation, Galileo denied that he “held” belief in the Copernican view but continued to write about the issue and evidence as a means of “discussion” rather than belief. The Church had decided the idea that the sun moved around the Earth was an absolute fact of scripture that could not be disputed, despite the fact that scientists had known for centuries that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
This time, Galileo’s technical argument didn’t win the day. On June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world.”
Along with the order came the following penalty: “We order that by a public edict the book of Dialogues of Galileo Galilei be prohibited, and We condemn thee to the prison of this Holy Office during Our will and pleasure; and as a salutary penance We enjoin on thee that for the space of three years thou shalt recite once a week the Seven Penitential Psalms.”
Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy.