The passage in Antonia Fraser's mystery Quiet As A Nun, in which her heroine, Jemima Shore, talks about the beauty of the chapel service at the Catholic girls school for All Saints Day with lights and fine singing and masses of white flowers which gives way to the somber mass for All Souls Day the next day is something I think about from time to time. I always liked those two feast days, the first and second of November, respectively. I grew up near a cemetery and the presence of the dead has always been strong in my experience. Go on, call me morbid, see if I care. Only the morbid aspects of it are something I associate with funeral homes, not the cemetery which has always been a place of quiet and thinking of the mystery of death.
I was planning on holding this recording about All Souls Day for the 2nd of November but am sufficiently desirous of annoying the usual dust specs today that I'm posting it now. I'll try to find something else to annoy them with on the day. The audio is of a dialogue between the eminent, heretic scientist, Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andrus, the Eighth Episcopal Bishop of California about the Christian feast day and related issues. I think their idea about incorporating the memory of dead species in Halloween is good, more useful and interesting than buying some Disney - TV commercial costume and poisonous extra calories to further decrease the life span of America's obese, otiose children, what American Halloween has degenerated into.
I hope it informs and inspires those who will find it inspiring and really annoys those who will be annoyed by it.
Well, it's certainly going to annoy the fundamentalist atheists (i.e., the on-line atheists).
ReplyDeleteWhich is what makes them as fundamentalists. This conversation indicates there is/was a fruitful conversation going on between science and religion, apart from the doctrinal arguments that constitute most discussions of religion in America (fundies v. evangelicals v. "true Christians," etc.).
That argument has been shouted down by fundies, in a true example of "both sides do it." Neither side, however, wants to admit to that.
It's nice to hear the conversation without that noise. I'm going to have to listen to this more than once.
Sad stories from the other land: "JR" left a comment at my blog which can only mean Simels is posting his "wit and wisdom" at Eschaton, and bragging about how he spoke "truth" in my "echo chamber."
ReplyDeleteChildren. Sand boxes. Some people really never do leave the playground.