all the gold in the world

Lovely intangible carefreedom.
The evening light is like some lost day of childhood.
With a little imagination I'm right back in the Summer of 1976.
A gracious innocence shines over everything.
I'd almost thought this feeling could no longer exist.
Like Eden before the fall.
All of the evils of the world had made me forget that the power of God is still here, still beautful, still eternal.
The lake water is rippling full of the setting sun.
A cool breeze stirs the leaves.
People are strolling.
It's perfect.
Six baby swans, all downy and cute, are snuggled together, eyes shut, amid bracken at the water's edge near the bench where I sit.
A mother swan is standing on the path, occasionally issuing warning signs to passers by who wander too close to her little ones.
The big swan looks at me.
Then she enters the water.
"Wait," I say.
She paddles off.
This is unusual.
They don't normally leave the babies.
The mother flaps her wings in the middle of the lake and rises out of the water.
She doesn't quite take off but she builds up quite a speed, skimming over the surface.
Now she's really gone.
"This is too much responsibility," I murmur plaintively, watching the sleeping babies.
Mid way down the lake she veers into shore.
There is another adult swan there.
She is with him for a moment.
Then ever so gradually she turns in the water and begins moving back towards me.
The other swan follows her.
What an odd vignette.
It's as though she actually left me to mind the babies while she went to fetch her mate.
They take their time swimming back.
Presently they pull up abreast of me off shore and wait.
The little ones awake and one by one file happily into the water where they form a little flotilla, a line of six, between the mother in front and the father behind.
They sail away into the golden lake.

david wood versus adnan rashid

A quite illuminating piece of intellectual discourse is currently unfolding via internet between the Muslim commentator Adnan Rashid and the philosopher David Wood.
Their debate is not unfolding face to face but on videos and video responses.
It is nonetheless dramatic, relevant and interesting.
Adnan Rashid is measured and formidable in his arguments.
His critiques of Christianity are often built on sound insight and reasearch.
He is robust but civil in the representation of ideas.
David Wood is probably the foremost scholar and critic of Islam in the West. He and his ideas are viewed by some elements  within Islamic culture (including on occasion governments, Imams, Jihadists, and individuals) as an existential threat to their religion.
To his credit, he has played a significant role in enabling many in the Muslim community worldwide and in other faith communities  to begin to question their own culture openly without being terrorised by the notion of questioning itself.
His scholarship and his showmanship are equally striking.
But with Adnan Rashid he has perhaps met his match.
Their mutual parrying regarding the Christian concept of the Trinity as an understanding of God got my attention a few weeks ago.
Adnan Rashid noted that the justification for the concept of the Trinity is scant enough in the Bible.
He cited an interpolated verse specifically mandating the Trinitarian concept which was apparently added to the King James version of the Bible in 1604.
Mr Rashid is absolutely correct in this. But I would suggest that the verse in question was never the lynchpin of belief in the Trinity which predates it in the observable witness of all Christian communities.
The mandate for the Trinity is not just Biblical. It is personal. It is inherent to the tradition as passed on by supposed witnesses and their linearly descended students. It is what was taught by the Gospel witnesses and by those who knew them from the word go.
How else do we explain its consistent presence in Christian churches at every corner of the globe, at every point in history?
Mr Rashid is nonetheless quite acuitive and makes legitimate points in touching on what sometimes seems like very scant specific justification for the notion of the Trinity even in the non interpolated texts, the gospels and so on.
I would admit that it can seem there is no precise affidavit in the Bible from the Almighty endorsing the concept of the Trinity, but I would suiggest that everywhere in the Gospels such a reality is implicit.
For example when Jesus is reported to have said: "Before Abraham was, I am."
Or: "The Father and I are one."
Or: "When I go to the Father I will send you a new comforter, the Holy Spirit."
And the most ancient witnesses who founded the most ancient Christian churches all concur on the matter regarding there being one God and three persons in the one God.
A prayer summary of Christian beliefs including this concept called the Nicene Creed was promulgated in the year 325 at the Council of Nicea and clearly predates the King James Bible by 1300 years.
I would maintain that an earlier Creed known as the Roman Creed which evolved into a form we now call the Apostles Creed, may actually have been written by those who knew Jesus.
David Wood and his associate Sam Shamoun answered Adnan Rashid's arguements regarding the Trintniy with erudition, conviction and elan.
But I don't think they quite refuted him.
When their confidence was most shaken, they were reduced to dismissing Adnan Rashid's perspectives as malicious and manipulative.
I think they were wrong in this.
They also suggested that Adnan Rashid's career as a commentator was over.
They are definitely wrong in that.
They further suggested based on their own selectively scrupulous reading of certain Quran verses that Adnan Rashid had himself apostosised from Islam.
I think that suggestion merely meant Adnan Rashid had really rattled them both.
So it goes.
Adnan Rashid has for his own part put his finger on Mr Wood's possible weakness in critical analysis, that is to say on Mr Wood's over reliance on ridicule to make his points.
The paradox is that while Mr Wood is undoubtedly courageous in his defiance of Muslim conventions regarding respect for the Prophet Muhammed, it is difficult to doubt, that if he wished to, Mr Wood could similarly cast aspersions on personnages in the Bible. For example with very little effort he could ridicule King David, one of God's great ones in the Jewish Old Testament, a shepherd boy who became the greatest of warriors, a ruler of Israel, writer of Psalms, father of the proverbially wise Solomon and yet one who might at various times from the accounts we have, be described as, er, well, somewhat lacking in certain virtues.
I'm suggesting that the overuse of ridicule is a poor analytic because if the mood takes you, it can be applied to anyone or anything.
The debates between Adnan Rashid and David Wood in all their frankness, freedom, daring and spectacle are unprecedented in the last 1300 years of known discourse between Muslims and Christians.
I commend them to your attention.

feldwebels are not the only unteroffizier

The noble Heelers is standing in the grounds of Kilcullen church, gazing at the edifice.
I'm wondering how long they're going to keep the thing locked.
I miss my weekly posing in pew Numma Wan.
And there's some important hamming up I want to catch up on with the Almighty.
Ho hum.
The churches are closing down all over Ireland.
We shall not see them open again in our lifetime.
What the Nazis, the Communists, the Penal Laws and the Jihadis couldn't accomplish over two millennia, the abortionists of Fine Gael managed in a couple of months with the Corona Virus panic.
I mutter a few imprecations liberally spiced with eftsoons and cee words as is my wont.
Suddenly.
A dramatically pretty dark haired girl runs up to me.
I have time to hope I haven't been excoriating too loudly as some women are put off by men who rant aloud to themselves in public using cee words and eftsoons.
"Are you a priest?" she asks all Charlotte Bronteily. "I need to confess."
She looked like she'd just come in from a breathless chase around the moors with Heathcliff.
It was a good look for her.
I think her bosom actually heaved.
Something did anyway.
A real Charlotte Bronte no less.
Or more Biblically speaking, Abishag the Shunamite on a good hair day.
A strange, distant, mystic look comes into my eyes.
It is the look that says: "Here's larks. This one is going to confess her sins to me. And I am going to be mightily entertained. We owe it to ourselves to live a little."
Am I priest?
There is an Irish expression "That fellow would say mass," which is occasionally applied to me.
How to answer her without actually lying.
I could say without affirming or denying: "What is it my child? How can I help you?"
That old gag.
Instead I mumble: "Er no, try at the manse."
"Try at the what?" says she.
"The house thing over there," sez I.
"Oh," sez she and departs mansewards.
Knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted she would ever come back.
On the other hand if she does, or if any other sexy Charlotte Bronte or Abishag the Shunamite bim asks me to hear their confession, next time I'm going to take that ride.

from the heelers sex romps

James Healy and American shyster lawyer Gloria Allred are in media res.
(Stick with me. I'm taking this somewhere. As the actress said to the Bishop. Or more precisely, as the Australian police said to Cardinal Pell when they framed him for child abuse.)
Things are getting intense.
"Heelers, how do you know I consented to this?" pants Gloria Allred suddenly.
""Well," says James, "when you stuck my head between your bajungas and said give it to me big boy, it kind of seemed like a form of consent."
"I know, I know," says Gloria Allred. "But now I'm starting to think it might have begun as consensual but that later you might have manipulated me."
"Ah the gambit used in the posthumous slander of Jean Vanier."
"Exactly."
"But Gloria! Darling! Manipulated? Moi? How?"
"You know how."
"No seriously. How?"
"By being such a devastatingly irresistible stud."
"Oh that. Now I'm starting to feel manipulated."
"Maybe we should sue each other."
"Yes and we can get your daughter to represent us both. You know the one that engineered the shakedown of Bill Reilly at Fox News. That way everybody wins."

epitaffee

(Selected epitaphs)

"Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard, Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector here
Long years ago. A church stands near.
By the road, an ancient cross.
No marble, no  conventional phrase.
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life
On death
Horseman pass by."
(WB Yeats)

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
(John Keats)

"Here lies in a horizontal position the outside case of
George Routledge
Watchmaker.
Integrity was the mainspring and prudence the regulator of all the actions of his life. Humane, liberal, generous, his hand never stopped till he had relieved distress. So nicely regulated were his movements that he never went wrong, except when set going by people who did not know his key. Even then he was easily set right again. He had the art of disposing of his time so well till his hours glided away and his pulse stopped beating. He ran down November 14th 1801 aged 57. In hopes of being taken in hand by his Maker, thoroughly cleaned, repaired, wound up, and set going in the world to come, when time shall be no more."
(Epitaph in a churchyard at Lydford, Devon. As quoted in The Friendship Book Of Francis Gay 2001.)

"Beside this lake
Beneath these trees
Lies all that's left
Of Samuel Pease.
Pease ain't here.
It's just his pod.
He shelled out his soul
Which flew to God."
(Apocryphal. A version of this is said to be found in a graveyard in Natucket, Massachusetts commemorating Jonathan Pease and dating from the 1880s.)

"Here lies the body of Owen Mulkare
Died eating at a hamburgher fair.
With the pushin and shovin
He fell into the oven
And here he rests medium rare."
(My brother Barn wrote the above when he was a child.)

"Beneath this slab John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads and not the road."
(Humorous verse by Ogden Nash.)

"Nash's ashes."
(Ogden Nash's suggested epitaph for himself.)

"I told you I was sick."
(Spike Milligan's suggested epitaph for himself.)

"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Suggested epitaph for the universe by British humourist Douglas Adams in his Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy books. It was the title of the fourth book in the series)

"A power is passing from the earth
To Breathless nature's dark abyss
But when the great and good depart
What is it more than this:
That man who is from God sent forth
Doth yet again to God return.
Such ebb and flow must ever be.
Then wherefore should we mourn/"
(William Wordsworth's epitaph for William Wilberforce who was instrumental in persuading the British Empire to abandon slavery.)

"Here lies,
Dust, Ashes, Nothing."
(An anonymous Cardinal of the Catholic Church. I found this in Rome. By the Cardinal's instructions, there is no name on the grave.)

"Cast a cold eye
On life
On death
Horseman f*** off."
(James Healy)