What the eldils had told [Ransom] about the possibility of such discovery he had received, while they were with him, almost without wonder. In their eyes, the normal Tellurian modes of being—engendering and birth and death and decay—which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.” From their station, the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation, wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.

—C.S. Lewis, writing in That Hideous Strength, 1945

“The Light Which Fills the World”

Frederick Mathewes-Green recently linked a PBS introduction to the landscapes of Orthodox photographer Christopher Burkett. He painstakingly develops photographs using Cibachrome, a film no longer made by the manufacturer.* He purchased ten years’ worth of film, when the end of production was announced, in 2012.

Burkett shares more of his story in The Tapestry of Creation.

“I’m working within a very limited box, in terms of technical possibilities. It’s a form of discipline, but there’s a strength and depth that’s possible within that discipline that doesn’t happen any other way.”  Christopher Burkett

*Watching Burkett process film brought back memories of watching my father in the darkroom, so many Sunday afternoons.

Rogation Days

Dublin Community Church, May 2018

This week, we come once again to Rogationtide*, when clergy and members of the English church historically "beat the bounds" of the parish, both to pray for God's blessing on the crops and to remind people where the perimeter lay. Contemporary observances may be found on Youtube.

Given the time of year, it was fitting to focus on a church when I joined local urban sketchers downtown, a few days ago. (Note to self: next time, bring a chair.)

Below is an earlier sketch of the building, done from a different perspective.

*These are the dates observed by the Western Rite Orthodox Church. Since western Catholics and Protestants celebrated Easter a week earlier this year, rogation days (set just before Ascension Day) will be found May 7-9, on their calendar.

Dublin Community Church, July 2014

Rogation Days

From Steve Roud's The English Year, p. 176-177:

Rogationtide is the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday immediately preceding Ascension Day, the 40th day after Easter Sunday.....It was traditionally the time for the faithful to go in procession around the parish, led by the clergy, carrying crosses and banners, giving thanks to God, and blessing the fields, crops, and animals. This three-day festival was inaugurated in Gaul, in the late fifth century, ostensibly as a direct response to a period of earthquakes, crop failures, and other disasters, and from there it spread to Rome and on to other parts of the Christian world. It was introduced to the English Church in 747 [A.D.], and came to be known as Rogation, from the Latin rogare, 'to ask or beseech'.
The division of the country into parishes also took place about this time, and although it is not clear when it happened, the procession to bless the fields came to include the notion of checking the parish boundaries, and what is now called 'beating the bounds' was born....

Ascension Day will be Thursday, May 25, this year. This blog continues to take its name from the annual practice of walking the parish boundaries, in the days just prior to it.

Beating the Bounds, St. Michael's of the North Gate, Oxford

The  members of St. Michael's of the North Gate, Oxford, have beaten the bounds of their parish on May 1st, for the past 600 years. The priest blesses the inhabitants of the buildings holding the boundary stones, and the people tap the marking stones with willow rods. The annual reminder keeps the perimeter from moving or being forgotten. In the past, the lines were used to gather and distribute local taxes.

Easter song

Hallelujah Chorus

Royal Choral Society

God has moved, broken the boundary of death.

I Corinthians 15

Good Friday: the edge of time and eternity

Today Malcolm Guite shares his poems, the Stations of the Cross, which are found in his book Sounding the Seasons.

Fujimura on the value of limitations, boundaries....

Lent: "It's All in the Waiting" by Makoto Fujimura from Pilgrim Year on Vimeo.

Makoto Fujimura is an artist, a writer, and the Director of Fuller Seminary's Brehm Center.

Thank God for hard stones; thank God for hard facts; thank God for thorns and rocks and deserts and long years. At least I know now that I am not the best or strongest thing in the world. At least I know now that I have not dreamed everything.    G. K. Chesterton 

We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.      Simone Weil

Beating the bounds of art: Makoto Fujimura

Makoto Fujimura, from his essay Withoutside: Transgressing in Love:

What if we considered limitations as the beginning of our creative acts, to see the boundaries of life (and death) as the starting point of our discussion?  If we are to honor such a reality, then, paradoxically, we may see beyond them. Limitations can be a catalyst to find freedom.  That is what the Incarnation of Christ teaches us. Jesus “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.” (Phil. 2:6,7)  By humbling Himself, he lifted all of us broken human beings with Him. Following Christ is also to recognize and honor the limits and boundaries of being human; less is more.

In William Blake’s Jerusalem, he coined the word “Withoutside.” We vacillate between needing the boundaries of “with/outside” and needing the freedom of “without/side.” As we do, perhaps it is possible to expand the borders of art in both ends of the spectrum of human potential and brokenness.   But our call at first is to deal with the excess of our past, to turn towards humble, normative human acts.  Then, paradoxically, we must also seek excellence, to reach for the stars of artistic promise, to seek generative solution to cure the impoverishment of the language of art.

The first part of this journey, “with/outside,” will involve a willingness to volunteer restrictions on choice, such as honoring traditions and communities, to allow for the roots of our expressions take deeply in the soil of culture.   We may need to pause and give birth (perhaps literally) in order to be human now.  Even raising children, and other such self-discipline of not making art can be the “art form” of our new century. This could be the most transgressive art of our times. For if our starting point is no longer in our capacity to make (an Aristotelian definition of art), but also in our capacity to destroy (as in the Manhattan project), our Ground Zero lives should begin anew with the basics.  In such a time as this, our songs may sound more like lamentation than celebration. In facing the sinister, active forces at work in culture, our strategy may seem invisible to the powerful, and powerless as a newborn, our focus localized to the minute particulars of our daily lives.  And at such times, rebellion may look like ordinary human activities simply done in faith. We are, after all, attempting to draw life unto death by scratching our lines in the ashes of ground zeros all around us.  Perhaps we need to start with loving each other.

Read the whole article. (Originally published in Image Journal, Issue 60.) Fujmura has studied, and creates in, the Japanese Nihonga tradition.

More on Boundaries

The Rt Reverend Anthony Footit, in "Solomon's Seal," from A Gospel of Wildflowers, 2006, p. 50:

Law places boundaries on behaviour. On the sixth Sunday of Easter it is still customary in some parishes to beat the bounds--to process around the boundaries, and at the same time ask God's blessing on the seeds sown in fields and gardens. Hedges and walls and boundaries help to prevent trespass and acquisitiveness--wanting more than we need. "The law does not change the heart, but it does restrain the heartless" (Martin Luther King).

(The well-known British artist Pat Albeck illustrated Reverend Footit's essays with lovely floral watercolors.)

Beyond the Boundaries....

Opened Eyes, sculpture by Dr. James DeVries, donated to Cedarville University.
Opened Eyes, sculpture by Dr. DeVries, in Grand Rapids.  Additional views and angles.

Walking town boundaries. . .

. . . every seven years since 1651,  in New Hampshire. (State name is link.)

Rogation Days

From Steve Roud's The English Year, p. 176-177:

Rogationtide is the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday immediately preceding Ascension Day, the fortieth day after after Easter Sunday....It was traditionally the time for the faithful to go in processional around the parish, led by the clergy, ... giving thanks to God, and blessing the fields, crops, and animals....

.... the processional to bless the fields came to include the notion of checking the parish boundaries, and what is now called 'beating the bounds' was born....

....In the absence of effective record-keeping, the extent to which local officials were forced to rely on the memories of old people for evidence in local matters and legal disputes cannot be overstated, and this was especially true in the area of custom and tradition. 

This year, Ascension Day in the Western Church falls on Thursday, May 14. Rogation Days are May 11-13.