Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Destination: Newpie News Off to the reunion in about twenty minutes. It's baking hot outside, so the trip should be a morass of sweat and stickiness - we don't have a/c in the car we're taking. Just finished giving a tour to a bunch of ladies who were very interested and asked a bunch of questions. Those are always so much fun - better than trying to interest a bunch of bored teenagers who could give a crap about furniture...no matter how beautiful. Going to get ready to leave work. Yay, a half-holiday. Here's something from the book I'm reading for you all to chew over. "In general, the image of the motherhood of Christ expressed three aspects of Christian belief about Christ's role in the economy of salvation. First, Christ's sacrifical death on the cross, which generated redemption, was described as a mother giving birth; second, Christ's love for the soul was seen as the unquestioning pity and tenderness of a mother for her child; third, Christ's feeding of the soul with himself (his body and blood) in the eucharist was described as a mother nursing her baby. In general also we can say that, between the twelfth and the fourteenth century, the use of these images became "darker"; suffering was increasingly stressed. ... To male writers (such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, the monk of Farne, Francis of Assisi and Henry Suso), mothering meant not only nurturing but also an affectivity that was needed to complement authority. Aelred of Rievaulx, describing the crucifix (a new devotional object in twelfth-century monasteries), emphasized motherhood as union, tenderness, nurture and nourishment: 'On your alter let it be enough for you to have a representation of our Savior hanging on the cross; that will bring before your mind his Passion for you to imitate, his outspread arms will invite you to embrace him, his naked breasts will feed you with the milk of sweetness to console you. Two hundred years later, the anonymous monk of Farne wrote in a similar vein, although the food was now blood rather than milk: 'Little ones...run and throw themselves in their mother's arms...Christ our Lord does the same with men. He stretches out his hands to embrace us, bows down his head to kiss us, and opens his side to give us suck; and though it is blood he offers us to suck we believe that it is health-giving and sweeter than honey and the honey comb." 12:38 p.m. - 2002-08-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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