Franciscus: The pope's funeral today. The great and the good will be there and by special invitation, prisoners and refugees will attend the final ceremony. A good man goes to his grave and the leaders and heads of state will witness this, speak the necessary words and then go back to the messy world we all live in. One who will not be missed Netanyahu, head of Israel, and who cannot travel outside his country because of his arrest warrant from the ICC.
Not having a religious bone in my body, I am still sad when the good go, the Catholic church, like our Protestant church balances itself on goodness. That those employed in the work of God are also considered sinners is a sad fact of life.
So, what else? An American friend said a nice thing this morning on F/B about the poems I find for my blog and I remembered it was how Paul and I got together. He collected poems on The Modern Antiquarian on the stones and I would find them for him. He also had his own site as well, which is on the right hand links bar - Megalithic Poems.
I wrote the other day how people loved to write and one could add to that also put words together in poetry, Language is a blessing, it describes our world in which we live but of course it describes the worlds in which people lived many centuries ago.
A favourite poetry book is by Ted Hughes with dark, mysterious photos by Fay Goodwin. The book is called 'Remains of Elmet'. Elmet was a small kingdom during the so called Dark Ages. It was around when Bernicia and Deira, the small tribal kingdoms were around here in Yorkshire. And then of course Elmet disappeared submerged into the greater kingdoms. Here is a paragraph of Hughes introduction to the Calder Valley.
The Calder Valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution of textiles, and the Upper Valder became the 'hardest working river in England'.
Even this book has a little history of its own. It was given as a present from someone from Ireland when he came over to visit Avebury. He wrote poetry himself and he in turn had been inspired by Julian Cope, founder of The Modern Antiquarian and singer of course.
Lastly, Landscape Story has written of his week and the Pace Egg festival up at Heptonstall. Now there are several blogs of this corner of the world, with Arctic Fox joining the company.
And lastly, lastly, there is this to read as well
I can feel so angry about religion since I stopped being Catholic. So many rules and so many lies told to keep control of people. Even seeing all of the cardinals in their fancy red robes makes me wonder about the great amounts of money that the church has that never makes it to the poor and needy.
ReplyDeleteI think I would have to talk about ceremony here Ellen. It is a nonsense all these religions, something men got their hands on and then made rules about and of course fought over. Last time, many years ago, I went to a funeral of an old friend it was in a Catholic church. Black plumed horses pulled the carriage, and inside the church the smell of incense as the censer was rattled at us, and then of course the Latin to confuse you.................
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