Templar Edification

An old memory recently came to mind at our Summer Bible Study on miracles. Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell it to you before. The summer after seventh grade, my family moved. The basement of our new house had yet to be finished, so we stored a lot of the boxes that we hadn’t yet gotten through down below, including quite a few packed-up books. Alas, when autumn came around, we learned that our fresh, clean, concrete basement had been built over a seasonal spring, and the whole thing flooded. We came home on the evening of my birthday to find three feet of standing water working its way up the stairs. My mother waded waist-high through the deluge, taking stock of the damage, when, looking down, she spotted something yellow and rectangular on the bottom. She reached underneath, soaking her entire arm, pulled the object up, and immediately grew pale. Our home congregation, which I’d attended ever since my birth and baptism, used bright yellow Good News Bibles for Sunday School and Youth...

I’ve had a poem stuck in my head of late: Samuel Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” with its evocative opening lines. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. The poet claimed to have dreamt it all up in an opium-induced slumber, after having read a description of Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol Emperor of China. Upon waking, he sought to commit his vision to paper. Alas, an unexpected interruption derailed his train of thought, such that he could not recall the bulk of it once he had returned—or so he claimed. The resultant incomplete fragment he shared privately with friends for nearly 20 years, before eventually publishing it in 1816. I won’t reproduce it here in its entirety, when it’s easy enough to find online [ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan ]. Suffice to say that “Kubla Khan” consists of three stanzas. The first describes Xanadu, with its fortified...

 Our exploration of the woodcuts used to illustrate the classic Grande Bible de Tours, etched by renowned French artist Gustave Doré, continues the drama of Calvary with  Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” -Luke 23:34-35 Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. That verse still stuns me. I need to stop and put my Bible down to breathe. The Romans had made death into an art. Who else could come up with something like the poena cullei—sewing someone inside of a sack with wild beasts, then tossing them together into the Tiber so that the animals in panic would tear apart the man? Who else could have imagined, let alone planned and executed, the symphony of death played out within the Colosseum? No matter how bad you may think...