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.

Tomorrow is the commemoration of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, one of the odder tales in Orthodox hagiography. Recountings of it can be found at this page from St. John's Cathedral of the Russian Church Abroad and on this page from the OCA website. The story of the Seven Sleepers was popular in both Eastern and Western Christendom and a version of it can be found in the Koran. For the skeptic, it is an interesting folktale. For the believer, it is a story of faithfulness in persecution, and a living parable of the Resurrection.

The cave where the Seven slept was later turned into a pilgrimage site. The ruins of the site remain today and pictures of it can be found here.

Monday is the start of the week long Warren County Fair. Both of the boys are showing sheep at the 4H Market Lamb show, so someone from the family where be there every day for the duration. If you want to put in a bid on a sheep, goat, hog or steer at the 4H auction, just stop on by Friday evening at 6:30. I'll be the middle-aged man in the Glenrose Hampshires ball cap. Come on by and say hello.

If you are in the area tomorrow night, come to the fairgrounds before 7:00 p.m. for a special show by Loretta Lynn.

In Court yesterday I was prosecuting a former resident of Floyd County, Virginia, and was reminded that I had been meaning to link to this site: Fragments from Floyd (Virginia). This is one of my favorite rural blogs, and well worth a visit.

For those of you who are not regular NPR listeners, go here for Baxter Black's cautionary tale on the dangers of Sheep Farming.

While doing a little housekeeping on the "comments" feature, I found I had overlooked a response to my post on Billy Collins. The writer takes me to task for missing the intended humor of the poem, consistent with its original French models. She may well be right. Hanging out with cops, crooks and lawyers all day can dull one's sensitivity to the subtler shades of irony. We in criminal law specialize in tragedy and farce. Disagreements about Collins aside, I can heartily recommend her own web site, Laurable dot com. She has a unique collection of links to audio files of poetry and a poetry weblog of her own.

The author of Notes From Pure Land Mountain lives near the western shore of Lake Biwa. Three hundred and twelve years ago the haiku poet (and proto-blogger?) Basho lived in a hut on the southern tip of the lake. Here is his report of life there:

In the daytime an old watchman from the local shrine or some villager from the foot of the hill comes along and chats with me about things I rarely hear of, such as a wild boar's looting the rice paddies or a hare's haunting the bean farms. When the sun sets under the edge of the hill and night falls, I quietly sit and wait for the moon. With the moonrise I begin roaming about, casting my shadow on the ground. When the night deepens I return to the hut and meditate on right and wrong, gazing at the dim margin of a shadow in the lamplight. (Translation Makoto Ueda)

Robert Brady's story of an encounter with the descendants of Basho's boars can be found here.

This is the summer of rabbits. We are overrun with Sylvilagus Floridanu, that is, the Eastern Cottontail. We have always had a few around; our mixture of woods and pasture with tangled brush at the margins is perfect habitat. This year however, I can hardly walk in the early hours or the evening without kicking up one. The morning trip down the dirt and gravel driveway is an exercise in rabbit avoidance as they break across in front of truck. Usually the local alliance of foxes keeps their numbers down. I'm not sure what has caused this break in the food chain. Perhaps the presence of five llamas on this part of the farm has caused our red coated raiders to find other hunting grounds.

Up til now, the largest list of Christian Blogs has been kept at Martin Roth's site. His list has migrated and mutated into a searchable index of 245 (as of this morning) sites at blogs4God. Blogs are broken down into eight categories. I can be found under "Church Polity." I probably should be under "Journals" but the current category has a pleasantly Elizabethan sound, so I won't complain.

By happenstance I ran across another rural "Notes" site, only this one is by an American living in the countryside of Japan; Notes from Pure Land Mountain. I lived in Japan for two years as a small boy at a time when most of the country was still rural outside a few big cities. Here is a quote from the first post in his archives:

I decided not to take the main and faster highway back home, but to meander a bit in search of the kind of moments one can only come upon in mid-meander, and so took the narrow winding road along the Lake. I would thereby also get to see the old thatched-roof cottage again, where the beauty of its old wood and the stone path to the door was discreetly revealed by elegant bamboo fences and the gracefully sloping arms of ancient red pines and I could feel that old spirit, one of those last embers of the old Japan, like sitting close to fading loved one, moving close to a dying fire

The rest of the post goes on to mourn the loss of that "old Japan" which I can only half-remember myself from forty year's distance.

I was sorry to discover that Gerard Serafin has removed the Orthodox section from his blog list. I had grown acustomed to getting a few ecumenical hits a day from his link. He gives the reasoning behind this here on his blog. Orthodox/Catholic relations are a convoluted and controversial subject. I have previously posted on the topic here and may have some further thoughts in the near future.

I have added a list of a few of the Orthodox folk who keep on-line journals on LiveJournal.com to the permanent links section on the left. LiveJournals are typically more personal and less link-oriented than most weblogs. The first one listed, LiveJournal for Orthodox Christianity, shows off one of the useful features of the LiveJournal software, the ability to easily create a jointly authored "community" page. If any of you other Orthodox LiveJournaler's stray into blogger territory and would like your page listed, drop me a line.

We had a lamb die this afternoon. I'm not sure what the cause of death was. Sheep can die for a thousand different reasons, some usual, some so implausible as to defy description. His body was in the barnyard. It was raining when I got down there in the truck to carry him off up the hill to the spot we use as a graveyard. When I picked him up, there was a patch of dry ground underneath, lighter in color than the wet barrnyard, in the shape of a lamb. It looked half like a crime scene outline, half like some ancient petroglyph line drawing saying, here we once had sheep.

Tolle Blogge links to another rural blog, View from an Iowa Homestead, the online journal of John VanDyk, entomologist and Christian back-to-the-lander. I had a great-grandfather who was a doctor in the mining town of Lucas, Iowa, which about exhausts my knowledge of the state. When a friend of mine headed off for grad work in drama at the University of Iowa, I remember telling her, "Debbie, why Iowa? Iowa is just like Kansas, except no one from Iowa ever got to the Emerald City . . ." I'm willing to learn better, and will try reading a while.

Francis Mooney at Xavier+ has some kind words to say about my Bill Mallonee post. His latest post is a link to a site where you can view online Action Comics #1, the original episode of Superman. Watch, as the man of steel takes on domestic violence. If only it were that easy!