ex cathedra: Vidi aquam

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Vidi aquam

Dancers of the Omega Liturgical Dance Company
prepare to pour water into the baptismal font.

Image from the November 2006 ceremony at Washington DC's National Cathedral for the installation of the new chief bishop of the American Episcopal Church, Katherine Jefferts Shori.

A consideration of this picture reveals much. Would be a fascinating projective test. I will spare you details and only repeat my mutterings about Episcopalians becoming Unitarians* in drag and to ask "Is there any value truly honored by this church which is not also de rigeur among Boomer Democrats of the leftoid variety?"

Puts me in mind of another unusual liturgical moment at a capital cathedral, Notre Dame in revolutionary Paris, November 1793 almost exactly 213 years earlier:

Freemasons enthrone the Goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame.

The posting title "Vidi aquam" is part of the traditional baptismal chant repertoire, from the Vulgate translation of the prophet Ezekiel: Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. In full and Englished, the text is sung, "I saw water flowing from the right side of the Temple".

In the context of the aforementioned festivities, I suggest an alternate "dynamic equivalence" translation: Vidi aquam exsanguinantem de templo a latere sinistro. "I saw water haemorrhaging from the left side of the Temple".

(Eat your heart out, Thomas Cranmer!)

*Some of my best friends are Unitarian.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.