Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold & Psalm 1 v. evolution

Last night I posted this to my face book, but thought I'd share it here too: Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire UK news guardian.co.uk It amazes me that here I am, deciding to learn Anglo-Saxon, to take a new archaeological approach to AS literature...and at the exact same time a guy is milling around a field in England with his 14 yr old metal detector providing a completely new set of artistic and archaeological data to this area of study!!

This morning I attended St Ebbes Anglican church. The message was an awesome exposition of Psalm 1 (when the podcast is up, I'll post the link). One point the speaker made is that 'wisdom literature' often speaks in absolutes; it takes away the grey areas of life in order to make things very clear. Psalm 1 makes it clear that a man or woman of God cannot believe like, behave like, or belong to the group of those who mock God (with their varying levels of unbelief). The speaker quoted a pop song which says 'Jesus didn’t die for you, what are you on?' to point out to what extent we as nations and individuals are willing to mock God & be generally influenced by that attitude....

....I won't relay the entire message. Fast forward past a lunch with some really genuinely nice guys to the part where I'm trying to find my way out of the church & get talking with a particle physicist. After a brief discussion (due to my pea-brained knowledge of physics) of the dismantling of our Super-collider, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva (which seeks to answer the 'what determines mass' question), Higgs boson, dark matter, and something about a point in time where there was an extremely high temperature (big bang?) I asked frankly 'how does this research and these theories interact with your Christianity?' Understanding my point, he said that he doesn't believe in a literal creation where God plopped everything down at once. He also said that he believes that God created the very earliest particles and we evolved, though he didn't know enough about evolutionary theory to bridge the gap between particle & man.

It's not the first time I've heard this. You can't be a Christian today without being regarded as someone who stubbornly refuses to accept the facts of science and even as a detriment to the progress of society at large if your not an evolutionist. The point isn't that these theories are totally illogical from a human perspective, they're just inaccurate in light of the word of God, Which was spoken - not plopped - to establish creation, Who became man to redeem us. That's the point. We can't have it both ways....or we mock God.

I'm not trying to create polarity & opposition. But how can the gospel be clear with its foundation so muddled.....I found the words of atheists and evolutionists most able to articulate this: read THIS and especially THIS to see what they say.

Settling in...

Sarah and I finally got all of our bags packed to Ryanair specifications by running them over to the walk-in and weighing them on the baby scale. We flew to Dublin via Amsterdam and stayed there for 4 days.

While in Dublin, we visited Trinity College, saw the Book of Kells (alongside the Books of Durrow and Armagh) & Old Library, helped celebrate the 250th anniversary of Guinness and ate and drank in several pubs. I also was introduced to European politics through the campaigning about the upcoming Lisbon Treaty vote (for which I am currently listening to BBC for the results).

We flew into Gatwick Airport & took a bus to Oxford, arriving with plenty of a sunny day left (really had great warm Autumn weather throughout). After losing half of our money at the exchange, we proceeded to a week of walking, shopping, eating and enjoying each others' company. We visited the Pitt Rivers museum with its intimate, eclectic collection from around the world - especially appreciated the fabric and snuff displays. We went to Oxford Botanical Gardens, walked through Christ Church meadow on the toepath of the 'Isis' (Sarah's favorite), had a few drinks with other freshers at the MCR and took lots of pictures of the old town.

Sarah helped me arrange my room and settle in. Having her leave re-unsettled me. But we're going to email and video Skype to keep in touch beyond our work & the 5hr time difference.

More on poetry.

The Kenyon poem is definitely one of my recent favorites, but not an all-time fav, nor does it represent all of my stated criteria for poetry - short, full of imagery, and musical. It meets them in her quiet, natural way, but couldn't easily be used as representative. So, I've thought about the poems I find myself repeating and thinking about - John Barbour's Freedom, or Burns' John Anderson my Jo - then another whole wave of poets and poems floods in and one is not enough....
When I'm thinking about poets, I invariably think of Jamison's study on manic-depression and the artistic temperament Touched with Fire, and how the illness effects poets more than those of any other creative field. I often wonder why. Today, I can't help thinking that her many well-balanced biological points such as:

For individuals who live with moods that change often and intensely, life is a tempestuous experience. The manic-depressive, or cyclothymic, temperament, carries with it the capacity to react strongly and quickly; it is, in sense, an alert and excitable system. It responds to the world with a wide range of emotional, perceptual, intellectual, behavioral and energy changes, ....Such chaos, in those able ultimately to transcend it or shape it to their will, can, however result in an artistically useful comfort with transitions, an ease with ambiguities and with life on the edge, and an intuitive awareness of the coexisting and oppositional forces at work in the world.

and:

....Research findings show that patients with manic-depressive illness do, in fact, have an increased sensitivity to light....(and) the inexorable changing of light patterns, the passing of the seasons, is one of the great and ancient themes of both life and art.

must be compounded by the facts that the poet has to be All-Artist - seeing the Japanese Maple leaf unfold with the eyes of a painter or sculpture and connecting that image to music of language within one set of words - to capture an all-sense art form, and the let-down of comparing his pile of words to the original sensual experience. Knowing his inability to transmit the world he sees to someone who doesn't, he takes one moment of it at a time, and tries.

Poem

We are being asked to bring a "favorite" poem to English class this week. I chose this one by Jane Kenyon:

READING ALOUD TO MY FATHER

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto -- he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking, I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.