Lilacs

Lilacs by Pierre-Joseph Redouté

 

Lilacs by Mary Cassatt

 

Our lilacs are blooming in Maryland. Here is an article on the history of lilacs. Lilacs were much loved by Marie-Antoinette. And here is an excerpt from the poem "Lilacs" by Amy Lowell:

Lilacs in dooryards

Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

Lilacs watching a deserted house

Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

Above a cellar dug into a hill.

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere.

You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver.

And her husband an image of pure gold.

You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—

You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

When a ship was in from China.

 (Read more.)

 

More lilacs at East of the Sun, West of the Moon. 

Lilacs by Dora Koch-Stetter

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The Case for the Most Obvious Promotion in Washington

 From Amuse on X:

Pam Bondi is out. Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, steps into the interim role while Washington cycles through its familiar ritual of speculation, audition, and delay. The question of who should permanently lead the Department of Justice is already being asked in conservative circles, and the right answer requires very little searching. She is already confirmed by the Senate, already winning in court, and already doing things as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights that MAGA America has been demanding from the federal government for years. Her name is Harmeet Dhillon, and the case for elevating her to Attorney General is, once you examine her record, almost embarrassingly obvious.

Start with the story that crystallized for millions of conservatives exactly who Dhillon is and how she operates.

On January 18 of this year, a mob stormed Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The congregation was mid-service. Protesters flooded the building, disrupted the worship, and targeted the church because one of its pastors reportedly worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Former CNN anchor Don Lemon was there. Not as a passive observer, but as someone who had attended an organizer briefing beforehand, kept the church location secret until his live coverage began, and was, according to the federal indictment, blocking a door and preventing congregants from exiting. Within 48 hours, Dhillon went on television and made a statement that electrified conservative America. “Come next Sunday,” she said, “nobody should think in the United States that they’re going to be able to get away with this.” She was not posturing. She meant it. (Read more.)

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Sacred Art and the Coming of Islam

 From Hilary White at the Sacred Images Project:

And yet, despite the chaos, the sacred arts flourished. In Constantinople, the domes of Hagia Sophia shimmered with gold and glass mosaics that captured the uncreated light of heaven. In Ravenna, Christ gazed out from apse and arch with the serene confidence of divine kingship. Processions of saints in jewel-toned robes crossed the walls of sanctuaries like heavenly courtiers. The image of God made visible, incarnate, and triumphant had become the cornerstone of Christian art.

To the west, Britain and Ireland, far from the imperial centres, were stirring with new creative energy. Missionaries and monks were carving a fresh Christian identity into the raw material of a post-Roman world. The Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the carved stone crosses of Iona emerged from this wild frontier of the faith, filled with patterns and symbols that spoke of eternity in knots and spirals.

But across the deserts of Arabia, something was stirring, something that would soon cast a long and complex shadow over the entire Christian world.

Within a single lifetime, Islam would rise from obscurity and sweep across the old heartlands of Eastern Christianity. Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, centres of theology, pilgrimage, monasticism, and sacred art, would fall under a new religious power. The sea that had been a Christian sea, ringed by basilicas and monastic foundations, would become the heart of an Islamic empire.

The world had changed, and Christian culture would never be the same. (Read more.)

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Easter Cakes

 From Country Living:

Easter is a time for dressing up, attending church services, decorating eggs and making Easter crafts. But it's also for planning tasty menus for Easter dinner or Easter brunch. And it isn't an Easter celebration without an over-the-top, fancy spring Easter cake! We've rounded up some of our favorites, from easy recipes that'll feed a crowd to simpler ideas for smaller gatherings. From light and refreshing spring flavors like blueberry, citrus, and coconut to down right decadent and rich chocolate cakes, there's something for everyone. This list has simple cakes, festive cakes, and elegant cakes that make gorgeous Easter centerpieces! (Read more.)

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Irish Easter

The old Irish celebrated Easter on a different date from the continental Church for two centuries or more during what is known as the Dark Ages. This has fascinated me ever since I did a book report on the Synod of Whitby (664) in college. It was at Whitby that the conflict between the different customs of Celtic and Roman Christians in the British isles came to a head. Most of the north of Britain had been converted by the zealous Irish monks, led by Saint Colum Cille. The Irish monks wore a tonsure different from the Roman monks; the Irish had their foreheads shaved from ear to ear, with long hair trailing down their back, while the Roman custom was to shave the crown of the head. The Irish claimed that their tonsure came from Saint John the Evangelist whereas the Romans claimed to have inherited their tonsure from Saint Peter. The tonsure, however, did not cause nearly as much problems as the date of Easter. Members of the same family, depending on whether they followed the Celtic or Roman practice, would keep Lent and Easter at different times. This caused no end of inconvenience for those who had to cook the meals.

According to Edmund Curtis in A History of Ireland (1936):

Under the papal authority the Paschal date had been fixed for the Church by Victorius in 457, but the Celtic churches adhered to the Paschal term as fixed by Anatolius in the third century. As a practical result the Irish were found keeping Easter from the fourteenth to the twentieth of the lunar month and the Continental church between the sixteenth and the twenty-second. On this matter of controversy many letters had passed between the Irish leaders and Rome. Popes Honorius and John IV had urged the Irish to conform and had been answered by Cummian and by Columbanus. The latter, writing to Saint Gregory the Great, boldly maintained the Irish position over Easter, but conceded to the Holy See a primacy of honor and a measure of supreme authority, adding, 'it is known to all that our Savior gave Saint Peter the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, and that Rome is the principal seat of the orthodox faith.'

By the middle of the seventh century southern Ireland had accepted the [Roman] Easter and only northern Ireland and Iona, strong in the name and memory of Columba, stood out. (pp.15-16)

Iona finally gave in around 716 and northern Ireland followed suit. After the Synod at Whitby had brought most of northern Britain into the Roman calculation of Easter, the Celtic monks in Scotland and northern England had withdrawn to Iona. What intrigues me about this controversy is that there were great saints who vehemently disagreed with each other on ecclesiastical matters.

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How Some Puritans Saw Easter

 From The Earl of Manchester's Foote:

Much like their more famous ‘war on Christmas’, some hardline Puritans of the early 17th Century also had Easter in their sights.

It has been said that the transformation of Easter into a secular festival second only to Christmas has accelerated in recent years. With the long weekend affording many families the chance to come together, commerce has not been slow in sensing an opportunity to capitalise and the profusion of Easter-related paraphernalia – gifts, cards, and confections – only seems to grow. “Easter”, one commentator wryly noted, “is the new Christmas”.

This would have been no surprise in late medieval England, where Easter outranked Christmas as the key festival of the Christian year and was surrounded by a schedule of feast days, public events, and rituals.

But the English Reformation saw much of the Roman Catholic ceremony associated with Easter striped away, in favour of the more austere – and, to the Puritan mind, more fitting – fasting, contemplation, and prayer.

Historian Ronald Hutton traces the downgrading of Easter to the lead-up to the English Reformation led by its chief architect, Archbishop Sir Thomas Cranmer, who energetically pursued a policy of destruction of many of the medieval rituals associated with the festival, such as the dressing of special ‘Easter sepulchres’ – an arched recess generally in a church’s chancel which, from Good Friday to Easter day, would have had a crucifix and sacred elements placed within it – a long standing English tradition that was effectively snuffed out as early as 1548. (Read more.)

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Anastasis and Transfiguration

  

From Hilary White:

The Anastasis, literally “a rising up” or “standing up again in Greek. It is the icon that shows us what happened beyond the view of living men after the Crucifixion. Christ has descended not as a lifeless corpse but as a radiant figure, full of divine power, bursting with the Uncreated Light, reaching down into death itself to rescue Adam, Eve and all the righteous held captive since the beginning of time. In this image, Holy Saturday is not a pause. It is an explosion.

The Anastasis is one of the most commonly repeated of all iconographic prototypes in the Eastern tradition. It is not merely a depiction of an event but a visual proclamation of victory, a theological image so central that it appears again and again in apses, narthexes, chapels and manuscripts across centuries and empires. (Read more.)

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The Pirates Of The Red Sea

 From AND Magazine:

The Houthis are Yemeni rebels and allies of the Iranian regime. They recently entered the war with the United States and Israel and began to fire missiles at Israel. To date, however, they have refrained from shooting at shipping in the Red Sea. Right now, tankers filling up with oil at Yanbu, the Saudi port on the Red Sea, are in many ways the world’s lifeline. Thirty tankers at a time are docked there, taking on oil brought across Saudi Arabia in a pipeline. This allows oil to flow out of Saudi Arabia and bypass the Iranian stranglehold on the Straits of Hormuz.

Why? Why have these Iranian allies not closed the Red Sea to shipping? The answer tells you a great deal about how the Middle East works and what the word “ally” really means in the region.

In 2023, Saudi Arabia and Yemen entered into a Road Map deal to end fighting between the Houthis and Riyadh. Saudi Arabia now sends tens of millions of dollars to Yemen every few months. Ostensibly, this is support for the Yemeni government, but a big chunk of this money goes to the Houthis directly. The Saudis pay the salaries of the Houthi fighters.

We call this protection money.

The Houthis don’t make any serious effort to disguise it as anything else. Earlier this year, the Saudis were behind on their payments to the Houthis. Houthi fighters were not being paid. There were reports of famine in some Houthi-controlled areas. Acting de facto Prime Minister Mohammed Ahmed Muftaf, speaking in place of Houthi de facto President Mahdi Al Mashat, then delivered a strongly worded warning to Saudi Arabia. He urged Riyadh to release funds to pay Houthi salaries as a “basic right” and said that “time is running out and patience has limits.” (Read more.)

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Tragic Abundance: Spring Cleaning as Mortification

 From Matriarch Goals:

It is true that I love interior design and making things look nice, but my husband and I are terrible at home organization and at keeping things nice. We are both descended from legit hoarders, which does make us susceptible to imbalance when it comes to material possessions. But more than our genetic misfortunes, we both suffer from a similar type of impatience and a hatred of maintenance that really just amounts to a wholesale failure to keep up appearances.

My husband suffers from a true Spartan hatred of material possessions, which you’d think would deliver us unto minimalism but it doesn’t work that way. I suffer from an overabundance problem, too many hobbies, too many interests that lend themselves to collections and displays. My brother-in-law calls my particular brand of garden and home design tragic abundance, and nothing could be more true. I love old stoves and chimneys and decaying structures that lie out in people’s yards, curing, covered with roses or lilac bushes. That’s the dominant art form around the California Gold Country: natural, botanical abundance growing over the old steel and wood skeletons of a previous civilization. In some ways all of California is late-stage Republic in its artistic presentation, but this looks better in the northern part of the state because we have the granite boulders and hollowed out industry to give it a more romantic setting than the “this is basically Mexico” deserts of Southern California. (Read more.)

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