Re: [HoB/D] Atonement doctrine]

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

> I recall Chesterton's image in Orthodoxy about the life of faith being
> like the myth of the chariot of the sun in the hands of Phaethon, wheeling
> and lurching across the sky...a marvelous way to think of how we live the
> development of our faith.

Thanks, +*****.  Beware the fate of Icarus.  See Auden's poem below.

Another image describes for me what passes as Orthodoxy in the current life of
faith in the Anglican Communion:  Talented, dedicated priests are swimming
comfortably in the pool called The Episcopal Church, demonstrating their
faith, following our constitution and canons at the local, diocesan and TEC
level, beloved by those whom they serve, when suddenly a dike we did not
even know about bursts and Lake Pontchartrain comes pouring over them and
over all their friends, removing many forever and befouling TEC for all.

Lutibelle/Louie
Newark deputy

Musee Des Beaux Arts

by W. H. Auden (whose homosexual identity we're not supposed to talk about
lest we impoverish Anglican contributions to poetry)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
  along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[You can see Breughel's "Icarus" at
http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/musee/museebeauxarts.htm -- Louie]