Let’s re-focus for a sec. (Tho’ we are not finished yet with Richard Burton.) This is the triple-decker pulpit of St. Oswald’s Church at Ravenstonedale way way up in northwest England. I think the picture speaks for itself.

A blessed Ascension to you all!

It is interesting how conservative Christians so deeply "concerned" for women and LGBT people as soon as they can use our struggle to demonize Muslims.

Lord help me be brave enough to meet You at the foot of Your cross

Gratefulness is used by capitalism to create a sense of false scarcity amongst the people. We are told to be grateful for what we have in comparison to what others don't have. We are told we must protect and horde our "blessings" lest they be taken from us, because there isn't enough to go around.

The truth is we should be grateful because God can sustain everyone. We are abundant in blessings. We have a capacity to feed every mouth, to house every body, to make sure every person is cared for. We can not individually possess God's blessings, they belong to all of us.

The Jenny Lind Chapel in Andover, Illinois. Once belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod, a predecessor body of the ELCA, the chapel was named for a famous Swedish opera singer. The churchyard holds the body of Rev. Jonas Swensson, second president of the Augustana Synod, and his wife Maria.

Images and information not mine.

i dont think i can be a catholic at least not at this part of my life (simone weil moment) but every year when i see / think abt people confirmed at easter vigil my entire body is wrecked with fomo and longing. is this god calling me to the church or what.

i have the exact same issue! i had a long talk with my mum about it on holy saturday- we watched the vatican solemn mass and saw eight adult catechists be baptized, and i did read to her something simone weil wrote that i return to often:

I owe you the truth, at the risk of shocking you, and it gives me the greatest pain to shock you. I love God, Christ, and the Catholic faith as much as it is possible for so miserably inadequate a creature to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives-apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider as saints. I love the six or seven Catholics of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites, and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love. I am capable of sympathizing with those who have this love, but I do not feel it. I am well aware that all the saints felt it. But then they were nearly all born and brought up in the Church. Anyhow, one cannot make oneself love. All that I can say is that if such a love constitutes a condition of spiritual progress, which I am unaware of, or if it is part of my vocation, I desire that it may one day be granted to me.

it may be that you and i suffer from the same peculiarity, a love of God and not necessarily of the church. the church is a community of people who love God: you can love God without a church, and that does not invalidate your personal relationship with him at all, many people do benefit from a sense of fellowship and community. what do you find yourself yearning for when you see baptism and confirmation? for God, or for God in others? for God, or for the community of believers?

I hold these tenets to be true in my heart; they are my lamp when I am in the darkness:

God loves us.

Our home is with God and we inevitably return to God in one way or another.

We cannot return to God with our egos intact. We must be emptied like Christ on the cross.

I hope this can be a comfort to you as well.

ELCA female clergy participate in a service celebrating 50 years of women’s ordination during the ELCA Churchwide Assembly on Aug. 9, 2019, in Milwaukee, Wisc. Photo courtesy of ELCA

These people were concerned with the Word of God to suffering humanity — not with secondary nor tertiary issues.

Our etheric body is very complex and contains all our memories, ready to present them to us when we recall them. Even those things that have sunk down into the depths of the soul, things we are not aware of in waking consciousness, are contained in the etheric body in some way. Our whole life in this incarnation is retained in the etheric body, is really present in it.

Rudolf Steiner, The Presence of the Dead on the Spiritual Path, pg. 2

We know what we perceive when we are awake in this world, which we call the physical. But what fills our perception when we dream, as events and material things fill our daytime experience? It is what we call the etheric world, the etheric substance permeating the world with its inner processes and with all that lives in it. That is the essence, as it were, of our perceptions when we dream.

Rudolf Steiner, The Presence of the Dead on the Spiritual Path, pg. 1-2

One could never get sick of this guy!

Creation isn't a theory about how things started; as St Thomas Aquinas said, it's a way of seeing everything in relation to God. Whatever you encounter is there because God chose that it should be there.

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief, pg. 37

Lancashire Hotpot courtesy of Yours Truly

i grew up in the bible belt and perhaps this is why the zionist pinkwashing argument has never been convincing to me. i get (usually straight) zionists telling me how palestianians actually deserve to die because they "hate people like me." they tell me that israel is actually "the only place in the ME that is "safe" LGBT people" (a blatent lie btw) and that this gives the state of israel the right to do horrific things to palestinian people.

i have experienced more outward homophobia from my own community than any of the palestinians i have had relationships with. my community doesn't deserve to be wiped out because homophobia is embedded in our culture. and neither do palestinians. there is literally no justification for displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. it literally doesn't matter how homophobic someone is, they don't deserve to be displaced or murdered.