Well, so it’s Friday. Grey skies, kids with the flu, still not entirely sure the Nobel thing isn’t some kind of Facebook hoax.
Am I summing up your day here? Thought so.
We need cheering up. And you know what they say: when things get tough, the tough sit down and go tappitty-tap and find themselves at Ebay.
Not religious, but Nobel-laureate-ish. (FOLKS THIS IS NOT REAL MONEY YOU CANNOT SPEND IT)
As we all know, God is everywhere, so technically this would be true, no matter where you put it. Still . . .
One universally-recognized brand name deserves another.
Go ahead, rush the season. Bring Baby Jesus some cupcakes.
You’ll want this to go with it.
Here I’ve been letting my kids use all the bottle caps for dolly dishes. Little did I imagine the money-making inspirational-craft potential.
More confusion about angels; or, does this not look more like a symbol of the Trinity?
Uh, you know, you can dress up as, like, the Pope or a priest or whatever . . . one of those religious dudes that wear, like, a great big huge giant white cross on the front of their shirts . . . yeah, one of those guys.
Or you can let your fingers walk the walk.
In the no-kidding category: Lord’s Prayer Craved Throughout
There is something melancholy about a family photograph which has lost its family. On the other hand, you could write a novel about these people . . .
A good deal on Teaching Company audiotapes.
From a distance, this looks just the tiniest bit like a baby asleep inside a Venus flytrap.
Oh, look. Sun’s out . . .
October 9th, 2009 | 10:39 pm
[...] eBaywatch: Staving Off Despair » Icons & Curiosities | A First … [...]
October 10th, 2009 | 1:01 am
Last Sunday just as we were getting started on a “Life Chain”, a new priest from that church came dressed in a beautiful black habit with an exquisite chain cross fixed on at a angle. He looked just like the picture of martyr priest that I had seen as a child.
Anyway there was a small group around him and someone asked him about his habit and as he was almost finished, I spoke UP and said, Yes and he’s in the habit of wearing “IT” all the time!
Everyone was wide eyes cause I really did not know any of them and one lady to break the ice simply said, “Good One!”
I’ve met this priest on about four or five occasions and my other “Faces” were just as bad if not worst but God’s Children can take “IT” don’t you think Sally?
God Bless
Peace
October 10th, 2009 | 1:48 am
The priest pope religious costume reminds me of the Halloween costumes everyone used to wear when I was a kid, which were a plastic mask and then a plastic smock with a picture of whoever you were supposed to be. I always thought it didn’t make sense, because Wonder Woman doesn’t really wear a picture of herself. Maybe those girls were some kind of votaries of Wonder Woman, or Wonder Woman’s helpers.
The “Jesus Inside” thing and some of the other piously irreverent things I’ve seen here remind me of a half-baked pet theory of mine, about Evangelical Protestants and knick-knacks. There seem to be a lot of those little objects with “Jesus” or scripture verses on them. It’s because owing to their fear of idolatry, Evangelicals have been deprived of what Catholics call Sacramentals, sacred objects that make us feel connected to Heaven. Without any rosaries, crucifixes, etc., they have a hankering for something religious they can see and hold (other than a Bible). So they’ve started producing an endless stream of religious tchatchkes– but without any sense of the objects themselves being sacred, they end up making the objects trivial and silly, which must make them unsatisfying. Hence the constant need for novelty.
Hmm, I don’t think that St. Therese medal could really be a Civil War relic, because didn’t she live sometime after the Civil War?
Thanks for the cheering up.
October 10th, 2009 | 8:34 am
As Nancy Mitford says, there is nothing quite so poignant as old family groups. You would love to know the story behind every one.
Old movies are rather the same- I’m a huge silents fan and it is always a little sad to think that everyone you’re watching is dead. Memento mori, I guess.
I sent a note to one vendor- that’s a medal of St. Therese of Lisieux, so it cannot be a Civil War relic. Hate to be a pedant, but didn’t want him to make a mistake that would hurt his excellent feedback.
I love your eBay posts.
October 10th, 2009 | 11:35 am
Yeah, I wondered about that medal, too. Hard to put somebody on a Civil-War-era medal who wasn’t born yet. And then I wondered whether it was actually THAT Saint Theresa, and then I forgot to go researching . . . the kids really have had the flu, so I’ve been even more distracted than usual.
They did apparently dig it up on the site of a Civil-War encampment, but obviously other folks have trodden that ground since the war.
Sarah, your theory about sacramentals and “stuff” makes a lot of sense to me. It’s hard to envision religion without a material culture — all the stuff of this world that grows up around a cultus and helps to embody it, in the everyday world, for its adherents. Repudiate one material culture, and another will inevitably take its place. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a kitschy one — there’s plenty of that in Catholic culture, too, of course — but often enough it is. And if the cultus is positioning itself in an anti-historical or anti-traditional stance, as doesn’t always happen but often seems to — well, you see what you get.
October 10th, 2009 | 10:25 pm
Personally speaking Sally, I’m in no danger of ever worshiping any of these symbols. My Jesus and I know that “IT” is just a form of respect and they do really help me on occasions to meditate on “The Holy Family” and other Saints.
Peace
October 10th, 2009 | 10:32 pm
Yes, I shouldn’t bash Protestantism– it’s not like Catholics corner the market on good taste. Maybe the blame should be put on our age of mass production, where everything is cheapened. Still, there’s a particular kind of religious object which, rather than doing a bad job of being sacred (the way a plastic Sacred Heart statue does) seems deliberately not-sacred and thus self-defeating. Kind of points to an inner contradiction. Unlike, maybe, the Islamic prohibition on images of God, giving rise to a tradition that has integrity–all the beautiful abstract and calligraphic art. But it would be nice to learn about religious objects used by Protestants before industrialization. I wonder how many of them were holdovers from Catholicism (I remember hearing that Luther prayed the Rosary) and how many were their own expressions from within a tradition of their own– the equivalent of some of those good old Protestant hymns. I wonder what they would be, and whether any of them are on e-Bay.
Oh, I hope your kids are all over the flu soon, and that you escape it!
October 10th, 2009 | 11:20 pm
Oh, Victor, I know nobody’s worshipping statues. And I feel as you do, that they help me to worship the One who should be worshipped. That was something which drew me very strongly to Catholicism, actually — I needed the iconography.
Sarah — probably depends on which kind of Protestants. My grandparents, Methodists all, had very little in their houses that was religious or devotional in nature, at least in the way of material artifacts. They were a loooooong way from Luther and his rosary. Church itself was very plain, hymns and a sermon, no fancy vestments or ornamentation, and expressions of religion outside of church were also plain-to-minimal.
I think you’re right about the fundamental divide between poor attempts at sacramentalism and attempts to sacramentalize just whatever, by putting a Christian slogan on it. The latter seems more like self-expression: this is my identity, this is my t-shirt/bumper sticker/kitchen wall plaque, etc. I remember visiting some people years ago whose house was heavily decorated in this manner: the wife had plaques and aprons in her kitchen that said, “Cindy’s Christian Kitchen!” And I thought, well, what’s so Christian about Cindy’s kitchen — except that Cindy’s in it, of course?
I mean, not that my van isn’t plastered with bumper stickers my kids have put on it, and not that that’s not the same thing. I’m in no position to point fingers at anyone else’s stuff-ism. But I agree with you that there’s a real divide between the “So-and-So’s Christian Kitchen” thing and a shrine in the kitchen.
Thanks for the good wishes. We’re still in the thick of it, but it’s not too bad so far. Two are still running 100+ temps, and another started coughing and looking peaky tonight, so I imagine we’re all in for it, in succession. Hope everyone else out there is staying well.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact