We were late getting to church today – we got up to the balcony to sit down just as the guest preacher was finishing up the Tolkien quote of the everything lately (from The Fellowship of the Ring):
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
at which point it was time for the girls to troop down to religious education. I went to try to find an order of service and it appeared that we were out, so there was of course a fair amount of being moderately lost and bewildered as to things until the fellow sitting next to me found a discarded order of service and we poked through among us and figured things out.
I had missed the opening reading, so I flipped through the hymnal to look it up.
And it was this, arranged as spoken piece with congregational response:
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
– Frederick Douglass
Some days it’s really easy to be a UU pagan.
Because that, there? That is not only Set, that is Set with symbolism straight out from Egyptian mythology. Because storm god, yes, but also the violence of the plow is explicitly a part of those symbols, that myth cycle.
Also I have an art project queued up behind the current project now.
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