Second Breakfast

Today we observe an important fictional event, and an ancient feast in the Christian church.

In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, March 25th, 3019 T.A. (Third Age, also 1419 in Shire Reckoning) is the date of the destruction of the One Ring, and the defeat of Sauron and the downfall of Barad-dûr. I know this because I’m a total geek (albeit one with an imprecise memory). One year later Frodo and his friends returned home to the Shire, and year after that Sam and Rosie celebrated the birth of their daughter, Eleanor.  You’ll find these and other useful and entertaining facts at theonering.net.

March 25th is also the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is informed by the Archangel Gabriel that she is to bear the Messiah.  Mary’s response of obedience and praise to God is known as the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [Luke 1:46-55]

The timing of this feast conveniently aligns with nine calendar months before December 25th, when the Church celebrates the nativity of Jesus.

We will celebrate tonight with a feast of our own, and raise our glasses both to Frodo and Mary, whose obedience and faithfulness helped to liberate their people.

According to this Theological Worldview quiz, I’m an “emergent/postmodern”.

I’m not even sure what those words mean together. I’m also wondering which answer I gave got me points in the fundie category.  To be fair, I didn’t think through some of these questions that intensely.

The interesting part will be to see how different my husband’s Calvinist theology is from mine.

A postmodern joke from Disinfotainment:

How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas - such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be determined empirically, all of which makes a discourse which further marginalizes the already disenfranchised.

Props to Heather R. at Holy Vignettes for pointing out the quiz. She’s got a kick-ass sermon there on the 9th chapter of John that’s definitely worth checking out.

We’ve become slightly-addicted to Lost at our house recently. Well, my husband has become addicted, and I’ve been traveling so much over the past month that it is really interfering with his ability to get his fix.

I like Lost, to be sure. I like it much better than a somewhat similar long-arc drama on Fox, Prison Break. PB started out well enough (and there’s some reward of eye-candy), but there’s no emotional pay-off. Its just one bad thing after another. After a while I felt so tense anticipating the next bad thing that I just gave up.

So we’re into Season 2 of Lost, and there’s an important reunion of two characters, and some real emotional payoff.

Me: See, that’s what I like about Lost versus Prison Break. There’s a payoff for all of this struggle. There are real moments of redemption for all of this struggle.

Alan: Wow, you’re such a slave to narrative.

Me: I’m a Christian, honey. We’re all about narrative.

Alan: QED.

Hopefully the amazing work and life stress issues will calm down a bit and and I write a bit about what I’m reading.

I heart LOLCATS.

moar funny pictures

I’m in a mostly-black church, and we’re starting to sing gospel hymns. I pick up the hymnal and I know it is going to be unfamiliar, and I can’t find the hymn I’m looking for, so I give up and just start singing along. We’re walking around the sanctuary singing, and I see a pile of little books of published sermons in the corner with ornate cover frontispieces that tell me that the church I’m in is in Ypsilanti, MI. Everyone is friendly and I feel welcome despite the fact that I’m in an unfamiliar place among strangers.

The song we’re singing is a 1-4-5-1 gospel number, and the leaders who are singing the verses are mostly white people, who are singing about the evils of racism. The chorus (I could still sing it when I woke up, but as the morning has progressed I’ve forgotten it), went either “A-li-bah-mah” or “A-li-ham-brah”. The former is of course a southern state, the latter is either a bluegrass band, a Moorish fortress in southern Spain, or a city in Northern California.

I awoke, singing.