Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (The Forty Part Motet) by Thomas Tallis.

Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te

Deus Israel

qui irasceris

et propitius eris

et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis

Domine Deus

Creator coeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram

I have never put my hope in any other but in You,

O God of Israel

who can show both anger

and graciousness,

and who absolves all the sins of suffering man

Lord God,

Creator of Heaven and Earth

be mindful of our lowliness

Put on some good headphones for ten minutes and tell me you don't get goosebumps.

Let the Christmas season begin

"Every mother who, profoundly feeling what she has done in bearing a human being, knows...that the Spirit of the church, the Holy Spirit, dwells within her....Such a woman also sees Christ in her child - and this is that inexpressible feeling a mother has which compensates for all else.  And in like manner each one of us beholds in the birth of Christ his own higher birth whereby nothing lives in him but devotion and love; and in him too the eternal Son of God appears....And this is the very glory of the festival, which you wished also to hear me praise."

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve

Johnson's Hit Pike Place

 Marie was impressed by the lamb tongue.  And by

impressed I mean horrified. 

 T at the flying fish counter.

 Mr. J, Mrs. J, Marie, and Drew at the flying fish counter.

 Sunset outside Pike Place

 Fresh, hot, handmade doughnuts!

The first Starbucks!

More Seattle Blizzard

Apparently this is why everyone freaks out when it snows in Seattle: although the amount of snow and ice are similar to what I am used to in North Carolina, it's the Seattle hills that make all of the difference.  So yesterday morning when we woke up and went walking around our neighborhood with the Johnson's, it was like walking through the movie "I am Legend."  There were abandoned cars everywhere, cars in yards, cars on the sidewalk, cars that were parked at one point on a hill that had slid from the ice down the hill and into other cars...it was chaos.  We heard on the news that the night T tried to get his family from the airport, the interstate was SO blocked by traffic that people slept in their cars on the interstate or abandoned them after they ran out of gas.  There was an overturned bus and 18-wheeler truck too.


Chaos.


This video is of a car on Monday night that we saw Tuesday morning.  It was literally right outside the front door of Nick and Michaela's apartment. 


This video is 6 minutes of a guy standing on his front porch, watching car after car, after bus, after ambulance slide past his house on the ice.  Seriously, it's insane. 


Here are a few photos from our day together yesterday:

 View from Kerry Park

 SUV on sidewalk.

 The Johnson clan at Kerry Park.

 Kite Hill at Gasworks Park.  People were wearing helmets while sledding.

That's hardcore.

 Drew and Mrs. J

 The scene at the top of kite hill.

 Pile of destroyed sledding implements.  Torn up trash can

lids, laundry baskets, cardboard.  Anything you can think of

to sled with, these people were trying to use.

Johnson family original atop Kite Hill.

So all of you that read this on the East Coast that are having close to 70 degree weather, you better be enjoying it. 

Seattle Blizzard

I don't like snow.  

Seattle, you promised.  2008 was just a freak thing, it wasn't supposed to happen again.

 7:30 am (don't mind the blue tint): view from our window.

 Caught T on his way to work.

 A little bit later - our neighbor's yard.

6:30 this evening: outside our apartment.

 6:30 this evening: down our street.

 Seattle!!!  Stop snowing! 

Just so you know, the Johnson's are on their way over. Yes, Mr. J, Mrs. J, Marie and Drew.  T couldn't pick them up from the airport because it literally would have taken him 6 hours because of how bad the traffic was.  So they are on the train downtown from the airport as I type this.  And T is sitting in a Starbucks downtown waiting to pick them up from the train station.  This is my husband (and I quote),

"I feel like I'm in New York!  Sitting in an all-glass Starbucks across from Macy's and snow everywhere."

At least one of us can find the joy in snow. 


It's still going strong.  The weather currently states it is "25 degrees and feels like 13 degrees."  Awesome.

"Beautiful Work"

This is lovely - a Vancouver based non-profit.  Anyone wants to get me a Christmas present - get it from here.

Watch their video.

Shop their store.

Visit their website.

p.s.

I'm closing out the day expressing my frustration with Google blogs.  Either I'm an idiot or blogger sucks.  Bear with me as it may look different every time you view it in the next few weeks.  I change things around, it doesn't look how I want, I can't get it back to how it originally was, and then I'm pissed, so I leave it alone until I have the patience to deal with it again.

Whatever.

I've had this urge over the past few months, but especially in recent weeks, to read poetry.  I have a few favorite poets, but I honestly haven't been exposed to many.  With all that extra free time I have, you can imagine I've really been able to dig in and find some good stuff.  Yea.


In Theology today, however, my desires were affirmed as we began to explore the concept of the Incarnation through visual art and poetry.  We read a quote that said,

“Poetry cracks open our everyday lives, the mundane worlds in which we spend so much unconscious time, and it releases the extraordinary, bringing us to  different level of attentiveness.” - Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

and another,

“The job of the poet is to draw up out of the unconscious an awareness of something that is greater than anything that can be expressed in words. It might even be called a revealing of God’s presence, or God’s incarnating in a particular way to this particular poet, whose task it is to articulate the experience and pass it on. To surprise you. To shake you up. To renew your sense of wonder at your being, and God’s being, and the mystery of creation.” - Kathleen Norris

All this to say.  Read some poetry - on my behalf.

Making the Impossible Possible (Theology in art)

Canadian sculptor, David Robinson

Circuitous Precipice

We were shown Circuitous Precipice in class today, and read A Blessing for the New Baby by Luci Shaw:

Lightly as a falling star, immense, may you

drop into the body of the pure young girl like a seed

into its furrow, entering your narrow home under the shadow

of Gabriel's feathers.  May your flesh shape itself within her,

swelling her with shame and glory.  May her bellow grow

round as a small planet, a bowl of golden fruit.

When you suck in your first breath, and your loud cries

echo through the cave (Blessing on you, little howler!),

may Mary adorn you with tears and caresses like ribbons,

her face glowing, a moon among stars.  At her breasts

may you drink the milk of mortality that transforms you,

even more, into one of your own creatures.

And now, as the night of this world folds you in

its brutal frost (the barnyard smell strong as sin),

and as Joseph, weary with unwelcome and relief, his hands

bloody from your birth, spreads his thin cloak 

around you both, we doubly bless you, Baby,

as you are acquainted, for the first time, with our grief.

(I imagine the figure in Robinson's sculpture being the falling star, dropping into Mary's body.  Not only does he land in the womb to develop and be born, but as the sculpture indicates, the Baby is there to pull out humanity; to work it over as a gardener does the earth.  To pull us out of ourselves, out of our humanity into something bigger and greater.  I don't know if I experience that, but I would like to.  I want to believe in the imago dei - that, in being created in the image of God, we remain as the Living God in a sense).

More of Robinson's work:

 Retrogenesis

To the wall

The self contained

What do you see?

Hiatus

FYI, good folk, my posting over the next few weeks is likely to be quite sporadic.  If you could flip through my planner, you would understand why.  Maybe I'll post a picture of my planner to get my November post-count up.  


School work abounds.  And when I say abounds, I mean consumes.  And when I say consumes, I mean devours.  


School work devours.