A Blog: Being an Assortment of Random Things That Get My Attention

  Tomorrow is what's known as Trinity Sunday, probably the most confusing festival of the church year. We celebrate a God who is one Person and at the same time three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It's an idea that became codified pretty early on in the history of Christianity, but theologians have struggled down the years to explain it to lay people. For an exhaustive (and exhausting) exploration of the subject, you can check out the Creed of Athanasius, which includes such riveting prose as: "...we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost." He goes on in that vein for several pages. The concept even appears in my work-in-...

Tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit infused the Apostles and, by Luke's description, lit up their heads with "tongues" of fire. Above is one Eastern Orthodox artist's idea what this might have looked like. Just before the flames, there was a sound of a strong wind. Strange weather, all in all. I love this story. I get to read it tomorrow when St. Andrew's Episcopal Church meets for the first time in person on church grounds (still staying outside) since the Covid thing drove us from the premises and onto Zoom. We'll still be masked in the parking lot, but we're allowed to sing with our masks on, which is a new privilege since last Fall's outdoor service at two parishioners' house.  In past years, I've had the fun of reading it in Italian at St. Paul's in Concord. While St. Andrew's doesn't do the multiple languages thing, I'm still looking forward to it. You see, something like it actually happened to me onc...

  It might have been almost poetic if it weren't so horrifying. An attack on the seat of our government took place on the Feast of the Epiphany, the day we remember sages from a distant land journeying to see a little kid who would one day be known as the Prince of Peace. When the Magi told King Herod about it all, though, the paranoid ruler saw the child as a prince of a very different sort, as a threat to himself. The notion that Jesus intended to overthrow the Roman Empire and with it Herod's tetrarchy was fake news that led to violence. The tyrant imagined a danger, believed his own imagination, and sent his men on a rampage that ended in deaths. Herod was not in danger, and his hangers-on were not being oppressed (at least not by the child and his family). They feared losing power, and that fear is also what motivated the rioters of January 6, 2021. They were largely folks who felt that letting other folks have more rights would diminish their own hegemony, though they wou...

On Facebook today, Jess Rudolph of the Commedia dell'Arte troupe I Verdi Confusi observed that the female servant Mask, Colombina, is grateful that Thanksgiving is an American holiday and outside her historical period. Of course, Colombina still lives, and it was only because he was posting to the Society for Creative Anachronism that he would assert she has a "period." But someone on the thread observed that there was a pre-Advent feast before our Thanksgiving on St. Martin's Day. Similar to Carnevale before Lent, the Festa di San Martino was a chance to indulge oneself before the relative austerity of a waiting and fasting season. (Lent is waiting for Easter; Advent is waiting for Christmas.) Here is what Wikipedia says about St. Martin: " Saint Martin of Tours was a  Roman soldier  who was baptised as an adult and became a bishop in a French town. The most notable of his saintly acts was he had cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, t...

  I have found myself becoming a fan of this scary-looking guy. The Plague Doctor wore a complete hazmat suit that just also happens to look really creepy, and he's what I want to be for Halloween this year. Because, you know, plague. When I picked up my mask at the popup Halloween shop, I asked the cashier whether it was a popular mask this year, and he just laughed. So maybe I'm being unoriginal. Or maybe a lot of people just like the mask and don't know what it's about. Hanging near mine on the rack was a steampunk version with random pipes and eyes like an old-fashioned diving bell.  I know people often misunderstand it. I was shocked to find an ad for this mask that identified it as Pantalone, the rich old man of the Commedia dell'Arte. This is not Pantalone. Not remotely. If it resembles anything from the Commedia, it's maybe a bit like the Capitano or braggart soldier. But not much. For one thing, actors' masks leave the mouth free and don't have ...

Hi. Welcome to my first blog post. I'm not sure what to write about, but I've been told I need a blog because I am a writer in the 21st century. Back when my characters would have been alive, all one needed was to be literate and know someone with a printing press, but now most everyone can read and write, and the competition for readers' eyes is much more fierce. The book I've written, Zani: Feathers of a Lion Book 1 , is about a guy who's a professional jester in Venice (1518), who can't kiss the girl he's falling in love with because his mother is a Fata and his kisses can be deadly to mortals. It's also about a girl who befriends the jester while trying to get to know her estranged father, a silk merchant. They're part of a group of mostly amateur actors (the jester is the professional) who put on plays for other wealthy Venetians to watch. It's an eccentric kind of story, historical fiction with a sprinkling of faerie dust.  This being an in...