25 January 2024: Epiphany III in the Christian calendar & the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

I never imagined that I would ever end up writing these words, on the day when ‘Christians’ celebrate the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle:

For weeks before Christmas last year, we have been witnessing the dying embers of Christendom,

Extinguished on floods of innocent Palestinian blood – a few Christians among them, but mostly Muslims,

At the hands of a brutal and deranged racist Jewish Zionist regime.

Meanwhile, the majority of our religious, political and civic leaders, in the West, are busy in their virtual and fantasy world, playing at being expert landscape architects and artists,

as they re-arrange the destruction and debris of Gaza, still dotted with corpses, into a new and even more horrific edifice.

I am reminded of the German saying, ‘Man kann sich auch zu Tode siegen’, more popularly translated as ‘You can drive yourself victoriously into your own grave.

Christendom, alas, will soon be joining Zionism in the grave they are building from the ruins and rubble of Gaza.

In the words of St Paul, ‘Let us make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification’. Romans 14:19.

‘Search for nothing any more, nothing except truth.

Be very still, and try and get at the truth.

And the first question to ask yourself is:

How great a liar am I ?

(D H Lawrence)

Rishi Rishi Premier Liar 25 January 2024

“Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?”

What infernal serpent
Has lent you his forked tongue?
From what pit of foul deceit
Are all these whoppers sprung?

(Anonymous in the spirit of William Blake)

“Those who chant ‘from the river to the sea’ are either useful idiots” “Those people who rip down posters of hostages reveal them even to have no humanity. Those who chant ‘from the river to the sea’ are either useful idiots, who do not understand what they are saying, or worse people who wish to wipe the Jewish state from the map,” UK’s premier liar said.

Our very own ‘useful idiots’ – your words Rishi.

TALK RADIO is bad enough but with TALK TV you can See the Talk!

KEEP IT UP by D H Lawrence ...

People go on singing when they have no song in them.

People go on talking when they have nothing to say.

People go on walking when they have nowhere to go.

People keep it up, because they daren’t stop.

So here we go round the mulberry bush,

Mulberry bush, mulberry bush!

Here we go round the mulberry bush –

Never having seen a mulberry bush in our lives.

D H Lawrence

Is this too big!!!!!!

NEMESIS (D H Lawrence c 1929)

The Nemesis that awaits our civilization

Is social insanity

Which in the end is always homicidal.

Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.

And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.

If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness

And freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed

The sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven

Will be bright red with blood.

AT LAST (D H Lawrence c 1929)

When things get very bad, they pass beyond tragedy,

And then the only thing we can do is to keep quite still

And guard the last treasure of the soul, our sanity.

Since poor individuals that we are,

If we lose our sanity

we lose that which keeps us individual

distinct from chaos.  

But if we lose our sanity …

We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots,

The howl of the utterly lost …

The beauty of bare branches, blue sky and that blazing star at Oak Tree House today.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that (she) who began it all
can feel you when (she) reaches for you.

Rilke from his ‘Onto a Vast Plain’.