Fred First at Fragments From Floyd blogs on the topic of vultures today. We get more than our share around here. They fly the thermals coming off the ridge line of Skyline Drive back behind the house, circling for road kill on Browntown Road, or letting us know that one of our older sheep has gone on to her last reward. The native turkey vultures are with us all year. We are on a migration route for black vultures. It is not unusual to have a tree full next to the driveway, roosting until the air warms up on spring mornings.

Last summer we had a young black vulture with an injured wing on the farm. He would never let you get close enough to catch him, but he had the run of the place for the month or so he was here. An odd sight, a giant ugly black bird running through Susan's rose garden. I used to see him standing on a large rock in the pasture, looking for something dead. I always wondered, if he did find food, would he walk around it in big circles first? I never did find out what happened to him; did he heal and fly off, get caught by something larger and meaner than he was, or just simply hike over the next hill, hissing and snapping on his way?

I read James Lilek's Bleat with the morning coffee. He is always worth a minute of my time, but today's piece is exceptional. He takes on the case of the radio "shock jocks" who encouraged a (embarrassingly enough) couple from Virginia to have sex during mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Or more to the point, he takes on those who think the swift response of the radio station was a bad thing. He goes on to confront the entire modern genre of "transgressive" art:

It’s the work of people so jaded they think that intellectual bravery is defined not by the traditions you honor, but the ones you debase.

My father-in-law keeps a floating population of peafowl on the farm. I haven't done a head count recently, so I can't give an accurate figure. At one time there were over a dozen peacocks and peahens strutting around the place, shrieking and stealing cat food off of the in-law's kitchen porch. Their numbers are somewhat reduced, but they are still a visible and audible presence. Our house is about forty acres north of theirs and we have been spared the peafowl infestation, until now. First, the five geese that are the remainder of my father-in-law's more traditional poultry flock moved down to our barnyard. (They sneak in and eat the spilled grain from the sheep troughs when they are not honking and squawking like old church ladies mad at the minister.) Now one of the peacocks, apparently unhappy with his standing in this year's mating competition, has joined them on our side of the farm. We first realized he was over here when we began finding shed tail-feathers around the place. He has tried to move into the yard, much to Charlie, the house dog's disgust. Sheep he is used to. Llamas, he has adapted to. Peacocks are just too much. At the moment they are in a kind of stalemate, the peacock coming in under the fence rails when Charlie is inside, retreating down the hill to the barn when he is out.

Peacocks are remarkable creatures, hardy, but weirdly impractical. They grow those giant tails every year for mating displays, only to shed them at the end of the summer and start the whole process over. My boys have grown up gathering two and three foot long radiant rainbow-touched tail feathers off the ground every August. We have bundles of them stashed around, like summer sunlight stored in quills. It almost makes up for the trial of living with them. One would think, after seeing a male in full display, that these birds must have the most beautiful of all calls. Wrong. Imagine, if you will, the sound of someone crushing a cat under a giant rusty hinge, echoing off the hillside. Multiply that by the total number of nesting peafowl and you have our night time music when they are disturbed. Makes a great alarm system though.

Our friend is an India Blue Peacock, the kind usually raised domestically, but still found in the wilds of Southeast Asia. Susan commented today that, since he seems determined to stay, he should have a name. Being fresh out of ideas, I am taking suggestions. Drop me a line or leave your pick in the comments section!

We just returned from the Page County Fair where we finally succeeded in our quest to buy a steer. The auction in Page is in a covered building, the heat kept just on the near side of bearable by strategically placed fans. Good people though, and the kids did a great job with the livestock. The auctioneer was the same fellow who worked our Warren County sale. He has the classic high speed sing-song patter, broken by the staccato cries of the guys taking the bids ( A dollar ten, dollar twenty, dollar twenty?, Yep!, A dollar thirty? . . .) At Page he cautioned the crowd that all animals were sold by the pound, recalling the case of the suburbanite in Warren County this year who thought she had bought a sheep for three dollars, fifty cents. Multiply that by 110 pounds and you get the shock she had when time came to settle up. And they say us country folk are ignorant . . .

We ended up buying a nice Hereford steer raised by a little girl who came up to about my elbow. She had a little trouble in the ring persuading her 1235 pound charge to stand still, but you had to admire her pluck. She didn't name the animal, which is just as well. It disturbs some of our dinner guests when we can tell them who they are eating. The steer now goes to Gore's Custom Slaughter & Processing, where he joins the hog from the Warren County sale. (Yes, I know, a meatpacker named Gore is right up there with a Dentist named Gum, or an Osteopath named Bones. They do a great job nonetheless.)

If you have the time and inclination, go find yourself a rural County Fair and stop on in. Nothing fancy, just real folks doing things most Americans have forgotten. And if you are in the area, give us a call. We'll throw a steak on the grill.

On Friday night Susan and I went to the Clarke County Fair, where we know a few folks, in an attempt to buy a steer at the 4-H Auction. My father-in-law picked up a hog at the Warren County auction the previous week. He was a stout fellow (the hog, that is) and is now on his way to becoming pork loin and sausage. The 4-H kids got good prices for their animals, good enough that we were priced out of the steer market. The irony is is that we have a few cattle here on the place and sell feeder calves. We don't have the facilities or the temperament to raise them up to the 1,000 pound plus size for slaughter, so we buy our beef from the local 4-H sales. The quality of the meat is better than anything you will find in the grocery store and the money goes straight to the kid who raised the steer. I often say that the purpose of 4-H auctions is to give young people the illusion that there is money in farming, in the hopes that some will be foolish enough to give it a try. Clark County's prices were lower than Warren's, but still higher than our budget allowed. We had a good time nonetheless. A few Warren County Deputies moonlight as security there for the week. We ran into one, an investigator whom Susan had spoken to many times, but had never met. (The phone is on her side of the bed - the Sheriff's Department wakes her first, then she wakes me.) He took a good look at her (a former Miss Warren County), looked closely at me, noted the contrast, then asked her, "Did you used to drink a lot?"

This week we try again at the Page County Fair.

Here is a link I misplaced when I switched computers last year; Inner Light Productions, Michael McClellan's web site and online gallery devoted to the Desert Fathers and his own remarkable photographs of Eastern Orthodox and Coptic monks and monasteries.

One of the more pleasant surprises in writing this blog has been my introduction to some of the many articulate and creative Calvinist bloggers out there. My guess is that I owe my Reformed links to Wayne Olsen, who left Calvinism for Orthodoxy, but seems to have kept all his friends along the way.

I attended (ironically enough) an Orthodox Presbyterian Church during my college years, and still have copies of Calvin's Institutes and Berkhof's Systematic Theology in the bookcase. My friend David Yeago (now a systematic theologian at the Lutheran Seminary in Columbia South Carolina) and I used to delve into the arcana of Reformed theology until the early morning hours during our undergraduate years. Eventually we began to notice a certain procrustean quality in Calvinist scholasticism and turned to the Catholic and Patristic traditions of the Church for balance. In my case after many years the process led me to Orthodoxy. I still remember the moment when I realized that I could not be a classic TULIP Calvinist. I was up late one night listening to Patti Smith singing on (the original) Saturday Night Live, deconstructing the Van Morrison tune, "Gloria." She opened her version by chanting "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine ." The doctrine of the Limited Atonement, (in the admittedly simplistic way I was introduced to it) would have required me to respond, "Well, probably so." This struck me as just wrong at a gut level. The intellectual dissatisfaction followed closely thereafter.

Nonetheless, I still retain an affection and respect for the Reformed Tradition and enjoy listening in on the conversations going in the Calvinist blogging world. Joel Garver's reflections on the atonement and the discussions they have provoked have been particularly interesting.

For those who have never heard of Patti Smith, go here for a piece at Blogcritics.com that tries to explain why she seemed so important to those of us around at the time.

Huw at Doxos.com has some good thoughts on the rhythms of feasting and fasting today in his post on the Feast of the Dormition.

NPR presents this fictional tale of the anonymous soul who began the practice of shouting out requests for "Freebird" at concerts. Actually, in this town when people call out for Freebird, they mean it, without a shred of irony. Making fun of Lynyrd Skynyrd around here is a good way to have yourself an educational experience out in the parking lot. Give it a listen anyhow, just for the free jazz version of the song at the end. (RealPlayer needed)

We added a new stud ram to our flock this week. We are breeding for genetic resistance to scrapie, a neurological disease which can afflict black-faced sheep. The new acquisition has the genetics we want, as well as being a showy young sheep. Susan made the mistake of asking her former English major husband for a name for him. Being that our current stud ram is named Pride, the new arrival now goes by Prejudice. Expect a crop of Jane Austen-themed lamb names this winter.

Like any other job, farming has its good moments and bad. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which. It is all a matter of perspective. Night before last I went down to the barn to feed and found that one of the lambs had wedged his head through a wire panel separating the feed sacks from the rest of the barn. Since his head was larger than the opening in the panel, this was an accomplishment. One of the feed sacks was barely within reach, but reached it he had, torn it open with his teeth and chowed down on a small river of spilled grain. This was a bad thing for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that overeating can actually kill a sheep. Their system is designed for grass and foliage; bulky food and not too rich. Too much grain will actually cause ruptures as it works through their very intricate (and surprisingly delicate) digestive tract. I moved the sack out of the way, much to his displeasure. Since he had eaten more than enough, I left him wedged while I fed the other, less creative, lambs. After everyone else was cared for, I turned back to our greedy friend and started working him free, a process not unlike getting a ship out of the bottle. While I was pushing him back, he was pressing forward, still fixated on the remaining spilled grain with the kind of dumbstruck intensity seen only in crack-heads, rare book collectors, porn addicts and boy band fans. Needless to say, we were not experiencing a high point in human-ovine relations. After much effort, and a total loss of composure on both our parts, he came loose, but not before I had speculated on his chances of eternal salvation and commented, at length, on his personal hygiene, the character of his mother, and his reproductive preferences. This was one of those bad moments, unless of course you were anyone but me, in which case it would have been both amusing and instructive. As I said, it's all a matter of perspective.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Dormition, or "Falling Asleep" of the Virgin Mary. David Melling's Anastasis site is displaying the icon for the feast and has links to Patristic texts and sermons. Archimandrite Ephrem's translation of the Vespers and Matins services for the Feast can be found here.

In giving birth you preserved your virginity,
In falling asleep you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos.
You were translated to life, O Mother of Life,
And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death.

I have been linked by another talented Calvinist blogger; Gideon Strauss. His interests range from poetry to architecture to African monastic chant. He blogs from the intersection of faith with culture, always an interesting place.

James Ferrenberg hosts a wonderful meditation on fairy-tales, childhood, and the gospel at his Paradosis blog today. Well worth a read.

I cited a passage from the Japanese poet Basho last week. His great work "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is available in a useful hypertext edition at Basho's World. Not only are there photographs and illustrations of the places Basho visited, but you can read each entry in Basho's travelogue in up to five different translations. The Japanese text is also linked for those more linguistically gifted than I am.

Many of the hits I get on this site are referrals from a search request on Google. It is always interesting to see what people are looking for when they come by. I'm not sure I want to know what page this surfer was expecting to find with the following search: watch me i am a beautiful farm girl. The really odd part is that the referring Google search page was in Finnish. Backtracking though the search, I discovered that it had linked to the post where I told the story of meeting my own beautiful farm girl.

The Warren County Fair wraps up tonight. The 4-H Auction last night went well, and both my sons were pleased with the sale prices for their lambs. Susan, who made sure that sheep got fed, boys got to shows on time, and that difficulties both usual and unusual were dealt with quickly and (relatively) calmly, is recovering with a long afternoon nap. By tomorrow afternoon, everything should be cleared out and the space returned to empty fields with a few permanent display and show buildings near the roadway. The lights from the midway, the music from the ampitheatre and the sounds of animals from the show barn have brought a little life to a part of the County that is increasingly industrial. Across the street from the Fairgrounds is the Family Dollar Store Distibution Center, a single building the size of downtown Front Royal. The jobs it provides are welcome, but I miss the open fields that were there before.

Father Nectarios at Orthopraxis and Gerard Serafin at A Catholic Blog For Lovers have both posted recently on Orthodox-Catholic relations, though from very different perspectives. Father Nectarios links to some interesting and irenic remarks about Eastern Rite Catholics from Metropolitan Nicholas, the hierarch of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese which he had posted earlier. The status of the Eastern Rite, or "Uniates" is a sore point in current Orthodox-Catholic dialogues. Most of today's Eastern Rite Catholics are former Orthodox, brought back into communion with Rome through means which have been the source of centuries-long controversy. The ongoing existence and post-cold war expansion of the Eastern Rite Catholic churches has disrupted dialogue between Rome and several local Orthodox Churches. Most Catholics seem baffled by the vehemence of otherwise ecumenically oriented Orthodox on this point. This situation is, to say the least, complicated, and I would recommend Metropolitan Nicholas' remarks for a fresh perspective.

I once tried to explain the problem to a sympathetic Catholic by suggesting an analogy to the world of business and corporate mergers and acquisitions. For nearly a thousand years Rome approached the East as a kind of corporate raider, attempting to pick up the Orthodox Churches cheap in a series of forced buy outs and hostile takeovers. Since the sixties, Rome has shifted goals, and seems sincerely interested in a negotiated merger with the East. From the Roman standpoint, the Catholic Eastern Rite is a situation that will take care of itself once full communion is restored, much the way overlapping departments are gradually combined and reorganized in any merger. The Patriarch of Constantinople is the prime mover in dialogue with Rome from the Orthodox side. The Patriarchate sees Orthodoxy as living in a hostile environment, troubled by rising secularism on the one hand, and resurgent Islam on the other. While not adverse to merger, that is, to restoration of full communion on proper terms, the Patriarch is more interested in finding support for the survival of Orthodox Christianity in an increasingly hostile world. To follow through with the business metaphor, he is not seeking a merger but rather is trying to negotiate a strategic alliance to reduce competition and preserve market share. From this perspective, the Eastern Rite Catholics are not a problem to be dealt with later, but a chief item on the agenda. If Rome really accepts the Orthodox as "Sister Churches," why are they marketing a competing product in traditionally Orthodox territories? If they continue to do so, does this suggest that talk of merger is really just a cover for yet another takeover attempt?

Needless to say, this explanation of the situation is my own eccentric perspective and should in no way be taken as the "Orthodox" view!

Wayne Olsen, whose weblog is linked over at the left, has started a new blog; The Fathers of the Christian Church: A Weblog . He is inviting contributors to post their favorite excerpts from the Fathers.

Today is the feast of the Transfiguration. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story in their Gospels. The Gospel writers felt great freedom to arrange the particulars of Jesus' teachings and actions to suit the purposes of their own particular Gospel. Here, though, they all follow the same sequence of events. You have Peter's confession, that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and Jesus' revelation that he will be killed in Jerusalem and be raised on the third day. And after this (and after rebuking Peter), in all three Gospels, he tell the disciples that "there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God." What comes next is the Transfiguration on the mountain. Moses and Elijah stand with Jesus. Peter, James and John stand looking on, and God's glory comes overshadowing all. The law, in the person of Moses, the prophets, in the person of Elijah, the apostles, present, but bewildered, all witnessing the Reign of God revealed in the Uncreated Light shining forth from Jesus. This image, which hearkens back to Moses on Sinai and looks forward to the radiance of the New Jerusalem, is key to understanding Orthodox spirituality.

Here is a hymn from Ephraim the Syrian on the feast, from Anastasis, the web page of Archimandrite Ephraim of the Monastery of Saint Andrew:

He led them up the mountain to show them the glory of the godhead and to make known to them that he is the redeemer of Israel, as he had shown through the Prophets, and that they should not be scandalised in him when they saw his voluntary sufferings, that as man he was about to suffer for us. For they knew him as a man, but did not know that he was God. They knew him as son of Mary, going about with them in the world, and he made known to them on the mountain that he was Son of God and God.

The troparian and kontakian (special hymns) for the feast follow:

Thou wast transfigured on the mount, O Christ God,/ revealing Thy glory to Thy disciples as far as they could bear it./ Let Thine everlasting light shine upon us sinners/ through the prayers of the Theotokos, O Giver of Light, glory to Thee.

Thou wast transfigured on the mountain, O Christ our God,/ and Thy disciples beheld Thy glory as far as they were capable,/ that when they should see Thee crucified,/ they might know that Thy suffering was voluntary/ and might proclaim to the world/ that Thou art indeed the reflection of the Father.