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marie therese 1

Seamus Heaney

Poet

Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIA was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Wikipedia

Born: April 13, 1939, Castledawson, United Kingdom

Died: August 30, 2013, Dublin, Ireland

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It's strange. As I post this I find myself weeping. Of late he had a profound influence upon me as a poet. I respected him. His 'essay' of 'Admonition' spoke deeply to me and I am grateful for his writings.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

Silently across our drinking water

(As they are shaking now across my heart)

And vanished into where they seemed to start. ~from Glanmore Sonnets: IV

Born on 13 April, 1939, on a family farm in the rural heart of County Londonderry, he never forgot the world he came from. "I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss," he recalled in Personal Helicon...The very first poem in his first major collection was called Digging, and it described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. It ended...

"But I've no spade to follow men like them./Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it."

Now it's high watermark

And floodtide in the heart

And time to go...

What's left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love. ~Obituary: BBC

He recently suffered from ill health.

His 2010 poetry collection The Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke and the central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness. Recalling how he had been lifted up and down the stairs to his bedroom, the poet eulogised the biblical characters who carried a paralysed man to Jesus to be healed.

In an interview with the Today programme's James Naughtie in early 2013, Heaney remembered how he felt when he first discovered poetry.

"It was the voltage of the language, it was entrancing," he said.

"I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on."...

Mr Heaney is survived by his wife, Maire, and three children Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.

A funeral mass for the poet will take place on Monday at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Dublin.

This will be followed by interment in Bellaghy. ~BBC Notice

marie therese 1

High School Teacher Gets 30 Days for Raping Student WhoCommitted Suicide

Something is desperately wrong with our judicial system when an adult only receives a month in jail for raping a minor. When the crime is committed by a teacher, I think he/she should receive a stiffer sentence because our children are entrusted into the teacher's care. These instructors need to have the fear of God in them so they won't do any harm to the young people they are hired to teach and so parents can feel secure when they send their children to school.

When I was a child, my parents NEVER feared that any teacher would harm me. Times have certainly changed in the last several decades.......

marie therese 1

Better Living through Beowulf | How great literature can change your life
Excerpt:     Please, pray for Robin, her father, and her family....
The passage they found had to do with rain since it’s been raining all summer in Sewanee, with rainfall 22 inches above normal. I share it here because the description of the rising flood waters in A. A Milne’s “Surrounded by Water” chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh also captures my sense that we are all about to be submerged:
It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness how old—three, or was it four?—never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days.

At the end of the chapter, of course, there’s a miraculous rescue as Christopher Robin and Pooh turn an umbrella into a boat and save Piglet. I’m pessimistic that there will be any miraculous rescue here. This feels more like William Cowper’s “Castaway,” about sailors looking on helpless as a fellow crew member drowns before their eyes:
He shouted: nor his friends had fail’d
         To check the vessel’s course,
But so the furious blast prevail’d,
         That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.
Some succour yet they could afford;
         And, such as storms allow,
The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
         Delay’d not to bestow.
But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,
Whate’er they gave, should visit more.

The hospital is doing all it can and yesterday intervened as my father’s pulse started racing. But it feels is though the medical staff are just postponing the inevitable.
In the end, it may be our own metaphorical immersion in depression that we fear the most:

No voice divine the storm allay’d,
         No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
         We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

Pray for us.

marie therese 1

Georgia Public School says God is dead. My responses:

'Man plots and plans while God laughs.' -Mexican proverb
That old argument from the 18th century atheists who had to revel in free sex with the lie that 'those old commandments didn't really exist' since, uh, well, ya know...there's not really a God...it has reappeared in every generation...The scenario and the argument hasn't changed since the serpent enticed Eve to eat the apple...
Seriously, though, I am not surprised it's coming out of Georgia where the center for law and justice has been brokering as much atheistic, socialistic thrust in every avenue of American society as it can get away with..in the name of 'freedom'...have to put all those young eager-beaver-legals to work...

marie therese 1

The Bible and Treating the Elderly with respect
Excerpt:
...treatment of the elderly needs to be an area of great concern to all of us.
There seems to be two views of age in today's society. The most prevalent view seems to be that of repulsion. Age is looked upon as an incurable disease. We fight against aging, we do not want to be reminded of what time can do to us. Thus, the aged elderly person is cast from society. They are made to feel useless, a burden to family, and often are cast off, avoided except on rare occasions of birthdays and Christmas morning. Another view is that age is beautiful. That age demands respect and dignity. That the elderly are giants of the forest, wise, full of experience, worthy of our praise and adoration. This is the view the Bible holds on age...

marie therese 1

We Are One
Excerpt:
I am Christian and I learned a few things about and from abusers. Abusers use the knowledge that I am Christian to their advantage. They tell me I am being unforgiving when I place boundaries to protect myself from their cruelty. They say that being Christian means I turn the other cheek and the other one and the other one. Parent abusers say to Honor your parents without behaving honorably. Abusers are knowledgable of religious beliefs and use them to their own advantage to keep down their victims. I understand Bible bashing from another perspective by those that use the Bible to manipulate and hurt others. For a time, I stopped reading scriptures because I saw how they were used negatively. Christ knew of my experience and prompted me to keep reading and studying and opening my heart to all He had to say. One of those passages is where He counsels to put on the Whole Armor of God.....He wants me to wear Armor....He is not expecting me to be defenseless.
........
Truth is the clarion call to recognize the behavior of abusers. Meeting their lies with truth reveals them for what they are and protects who we are...