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These are nicely complementary:
Joy & Strength
(For higher resolution, click on the images or follow the links.)
Here is a good one from Wendy Widder’s commentary on Daniel:
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My three-fourths of a century here can attest to that! It’s not always fun (there are certainly times when it is ; - ) and sometimes it’s quite hard, but it is always good. What’s the saying, “God is seldom early, but he’s never late!”?
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Joy & Strength (For higher resolution, click on the image or the link.)
Yes, Merv, I know it applies to me – ‘more than a little’ is understatement.
While looking up Mike’s reference (Psalm 82:6-8), a worthy read (as is the whole Psalm, “Read the full chapter”), interestingly, the search engine, transposing digits, also yielded Psalm 62:8. It’s one of my favorite verses:
The first verse:
“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”
― E.B. White
I read this some time ago–but it occurred to me in reference to @mitchellmckain 's discussion on humor.
Thanks.
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This is just a bit of a mind exercise, but it occurred to me that we could insert “faith” in the above quote, and wonder if there’s a similar outcome. I’m not sure; it’s not that faith isn’t valid, but that it expresses so a wide part of our psyche similarly, in a different way. And it’s still very valid to analyze it. I am just wondering why I run into a brick wall when I try. Maybe it’s because both humor and faith illustrate very important, core parts of our beings.
Thanks.
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It also applies to most of lit crit, maybe including poetry.
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Randy I like it. Faith isn’t just blind loyalty to tribe, God isn’t just like an infantilizing father and neither is transcendence nothing but an afterlife celebratory party of the kind most Star Wars movies end with once the good guys have thwarted the bad guys again. It really does give Christianity a black eye to represent in such reductionist ways. I appreciate you speaking up against it in a such a graspable way.
I’m almost sorry I shut off receiving notices when people post on this thread because of the way a very few have turned into their personal urinal, always seeking to plaster their mark over anything they disagree with. Keeping the forum safe for their anti intellectualism. This isn’t anything I care to see as it’s come to be used.
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I appreciate your developing the thoughts, Mark; that helps, too. I suspect that any belief system is so personal that we can disrespect it by being reductionist, as well.
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I’ve been “reading” the Sherlock Holmes tales again by listening to them on Audible, read aloud by Stephen Fry. It’s been a treat. However, I find myself torn between delight at Holmes’ brilliance and Doyle’s humor, and the perception of what is more important. At times, Holmes seems offensive-- as he quotes,
“L’homme c’est rien–l’oeuvre c’est tout.” (“Man is nothing–the work is everything.”)
I think that Doyle’s point is the tension between pride and caring for others–and that’s why he juxtaposes Watson and Holmes–the caring and commonplace with the brilliant, drug addicted introvert. Each learns from the other. Will caring win in the end, over hard intellectualism? It’s difficult to know.
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I finally remembered enough of it to find it online. Thought you might appreciate it now, @Jay313, though I imagine you know it well.
The Flower
By George Herbert
How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
Oh that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring shower,
My sins and I joining together.
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide;
Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
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First time I’ve seen it. Thanks.
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He lived just 40 years so long ago.
George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England.
Wiki
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All fixed. 
A beautiful poem, thank you for sharing.
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Thanks so much, Liam. Appreciate it.
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“because of the way a very few have turned into their personal urinal, always seeking to plaster their mark over anything they disagree with”
It seems like a reoccurring pattern here for Mark to get offended with “anti-intellectual” defenses of the Christian faith.
Mark is not the only one who is bothered by how dumb so many defenses of the Christian faith are, so am I. It’s a pretty regular theme.
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Like revivals, there are some poor examples out there.