55 Maxims

I first read these at Paideia. You can hear Fr Hopko read and comment on them in his podcast at Ancient Faith Radio. Scroll down to the entry for March 13, 2008.

55 Maxims for Christian Living
by Fr. Thomas Hopko

1. Be always with Christ.
2. Pray as you can, not as you want.
3. Have a keepable rule of prayer that you do by discipline.
4. Say the Lord’s Prayer several times a day.
5. Have a short prayer that you constantly repeat when your mind is not occupied with other things.
6. Make some prostrations when you pray.
7. Eat good foods in moderation.
8. Keep the Church’s fasting rules.
9. Spend some time in silence every day.
10. Do acts of mercy in secret.
11. Go to liturgical services regularly
12. Go to confession and communion regularly.
13. Do not engage intrusive thoughts and feelings. Cut them off at the start.
14. Reveal all your thoughts and feelings regularly to a trusted person.
15. Read the scriptures regularly.
16. Read good books a little at a time.
17. Cultivate communion with the saints.
18. Be an ordinary person.
19. Be polite with everyone.
20. Maintain cleanliness and order in your home.
21. Have a healthy, wholesome hobby.
22. Exercise regularly.
23. Live a day, and a part of a day, at a time.
24. Be totally honest, first of all, with yourself.
25. Be faithful in little things.
26. Do your work, and then forget it.
27. Do the most difficult and painful things first.
28. Face reality.
29. Be grateful in all things.
30. Be cheefull.
31. Be simple, hidden, quiet and small.
32. Never bring attention to yourself.
33. Listen when people talk to you.
34. Be awake and be attentive.
35. Think and talk about things no more than necessary.
36. When we speak, speak simply, clearly, firmly and directly.
37. Flee imagination, analysis, figuring things out.
38. Flee carnal, sexual things at their first appearance.
39. Don’t complain, mumble, murmur or whine.
40. Don’t compare yourself with anyone.
41. Don’t seek or expect praise or pity from anyone.
42. We don’t judge anyone for anything.
43. Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.
44. Don’t defend or justify yourself.
45. Be defined and bound by God alone.
46. Accept criticism gratefully but test it critically.
47. Give advice to others only when asked or obligated to do so.
48. Do nothing for anyone that they can and should do for themselves.
49. Have a daily schedule of activities, avoiding whim and caprice.
50. Be merciful with yourself and with others.
51. Have no expectations except to be fiercely tempted to your last breath.
52. Focus exclusively on God and light, not on sin and darkness.
53. Endure the trial of yourself and your own faults and sins peacefully, serenely, because you know that God’s mercy is greater than your wretchedness.
54. When we fall, get up immediately and start over.
55. Get help when you need it, without fear and without shame.

From the Week's Reading

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of the tree remains the same, however many rings are added to it; and a man cannot leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs.

From "The Romance of Rhyme" by G. K. Chesterton

Caught in the act!

The woodpecker I talked about yesterday was back this afternoon. Here he is caught in the act courtesy of a telephoto lens looking down from the deck.

The Evidence

We have a woodpecker who makes a regular breakfast stop on the wooden rail fence around the yard. While in general I would rather a bug be in the bird than in our wood, his cure is doing more damage to the fence than the odd insect. We have tried chasing him away with loud shouts and dramatic waving of arms, but the next day he is still there hammering away with his beak, wood chips flying and the hills echoing with the sound of a bird at work. The picture above is evidence of the crime, with a calling card left by the vandal himself.

Ram on the Shearing Stand

View of Hogback Mountain

Looking Towards Home

Orthodox Agrarian

I periodically get hits on the blog from Google searches that match the title. I am always a little embarrassed because I am not a stellar exemplar for either Orthodoxy or Agrarianism. So, I am always happy to find other Orthodox making the move to a rural lifestyle. It lets me say, see- don't look at me; go look at them. James, the longtime blogger at Paradosis has taken the plunge and now includes regular farm reports in his blog. His wife has gone further and has set up a St. Brigid Farm blog with great pictures of their little plot of ground in the Pacific Northwest. If you stop by before Friday night there is still time to get in on the "Name the Goats" contest.

The View From Home

Yes, we can get our geek on . . .

Authors On-line

An increasing number of authors not only have web sites but also write blogs, giving the devoted reader the ultimate fan experience. At some point I intend to add a few of my favorites to the list of links over on the right. As a start, here is a link to a writer John C. Wright's livejournal. Wright, besides being an alumnus of my law school, is a practitioner of space opera on the grandest scale as well as being a first rate writer of contemporary fantasy. A web page with links to his work is here. He is opinionated, articulate and willing to get into the trenches with fan and foe alike. While the livejournal writing is interesting, it doesn't begin to give an idea of what his fiction is like. For that, pick up one of the books.

Sunday afternoon at the movies

Sunday afternoon Susan, youngest son and I went to the movies. Our hometown theatre is Royal Cinemas, a vintage small town movie house. The balcony has been converted into a second screening room and there is a tiny third screen on the left side of the old building, but the main theatre is still large enough to capture a bit of the old movie palace magic. When I go to the movies I want a screen big enough to lose myself in. Royal Cinemas has still got it.

We saw the new Narnia film, Prince Caspian, which gets a thumbs up from all three of us. There are two interesting reviews on the National Review web site. The first, by Thomas Hibbs, is here. The second, by Frederica Mathewes-Green is here. The contrast between the two would make for some good discussion, particularly Frederica's assertion that "The movie is just plain better than the book."

Shearing

There was a break in the rain Friday night with early morning winds on Saturday to dry out a week's worth of wet wool. Taking advantage, we set up the shearing stand and got to work. The first few sheep went quickly. They were older ewes, used to being handled and gave us no trouble, seemingly relieved to be out from under all that wool. Later in the afternoon the luck of the draw brought us a group of yearlings, sheep born last season who had never been sheared before. Imagine a 150 pound toddler getting his first haircut. Imagine that toddler with muscles, hard hooves, horns in one case, and absolutely no sense of decorum. We finished the talley for the day a little tired but with less drama and bloodletting than I expected. I have to say though, the hair sheep idea is looking better and better.

The guys hanging out

Peacock Moving Quickly

 

Rain Gauge

 

You mean I actually won something?

I am never the guy holding the winning ticket. The lottery has ignored me. The peel-off games at fast food joints have never brought me anything more than a free bag of fries, and a small bag at that. I've come to view a raffle ticket as just a receipt for a charitable contribution. So you can imagine my surprise when Susan told me that we had won a sheep. I had kicked in a buck at the Sheep and Wool festival for a chance on a Katahdin ram and thought nothing more of it until Susan picked up the phone and was told I had the winning ticket. Katahdins sheep are a little different from anything we have on the farm. For one thing their coat is different from normal wool. They are considered "hair" sheep. They shed. No shearing involved, it just drops off in the spring. Our prize sheep is down in Waynesboro, Virginia due south of us on Triple L Farms. Check out their web page if you are interested. For some great pictures of hair sheep go here.

I am not sure when we will go and pick up our prize. We have been too busy shearing for a road trip, which, I suppose, makes the case for the Katahdin all by itself.

Kitchen Companions

Not being naturally gifted in the kitchen and having an inordinate trust in books, I naturally turned to cook books when I first started fending for myself. The first one I ever bought was From A Monastery Kitchen. I know, a copy of The Joy of Cooking would have been a lot more practical, but the simple recipes accompanied by prayers, apt quotations and drawings made preparing meals beyond scrambled eggs seem not only possible but actually enjoyable. The edition I linked to is now out of print, but a revised and expanded version is still available.

Listening to Verse

In our time we have forgotten by and large how poetry sounds. I don't mean that no one reads poetry out loud anymore, just that we have lost the knack of properly reading verse in rhyme and meter. Go to a contemporary poetry reading and you hear the poet take on a grave, nasal tone, ending each line with a little up or down inflection of the voice, trying to inject a little music into what is basically prose with interesting line breaks. Or as Robert Frost put it in his poem "How Hard It Is To Keep From Being King":

Free verse leaves out the metre and makes up
For the deficiency by church intoning.
Free verse so called is really cherished prose,
Prose made much of, given an air by church intoning.
It has its beauty, only I don't write it.


If you would like a daily dose of verse read well, you cannot do better than Classic Poetry Aloud.
The link takes you to a very long web page where you can both read and hear each poem. There is a searchable index here. The most recent 100 readings are available as a podcast from iTunes. I carry a dozen or so with me in the car as an alternative to the radio wasteland.

What is outside the window

Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.