Think Draw - Picture - Human Sacrifice

Title: Human Sacrifice
created on 09 Apr 22

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Comments on this picture (77):
1. chelydra wrote: This is a convergence of several streams. (1) Times have changed a lot since I got active here 12+ years ago. Back then pictures like this struck me as maudlin religiosity. Now that the world is coming to an end, well...you know...
2. chelydra wrote: (2) Artdillon reminded me that Easter's upon us, though it took me a while to realize who's in his subtle & tasteful 'Just a Man'. Which is when thoughtstream #1 kicked in.
3. chelydra wrote: The Reborn Flashless TD system has been limiting me to fewer and fewer comments. I just lost Thoughtstream #3. Curses!
4. chelydra wrote: Trying again: (3) An ex-fundamentalist named Bart Ehrman has lots of moderate, reasonable, and scholarly chats available on YouTube. Scraping accretions of BS exposes a kind of truth I can believe in, sort of.
5. chelydra wrote: As I vaguely suspected and as Ehrman argues cogently, any kind of careful analysis of which parts of the New Testament are almost certainly based of Jesus's own beliefs and doctrines actually eliminates the elegant neo-Platonic philosophizing...
6. chelydra wrote: ... about the meaning of Jesus's death... and thus about the meaning of Easter... (Just discovered that the resurrected TD does not like comments to be submitted that won't fit neatly into these little boxes.
7. chelydra wrote: ... Shorter comments work just fine, it seems.) But what remains is a moral/spiritual confrontation with not only one death but also with all deaths.
8. chelydra wrote: (4) What I mean by that is better communicated through music than words. It came to me forcefully while listening to Bach's B-Minor Mass (possibly the greatest music ever) conducted by Robt Shaw (ditto chorusmaster) in Carnegie Hall (ditto venue)...
9. chelydra wrote: Because I flunked Latin (except for brief periods after I created nice Christmas & birthday cards for my teacher's cat) I had no idea what the chorus was going on about. No program. Had to sit separate from folks I came with. So what I heard was...
10. chelydra wrote: like angels singing in tongues — no intelligible words to process in your brain, just amazing sounds to vibrate your spine & heart.
11. chelydra wrote: At one point alone in the dark concert hall, quite suddenly, I found myself thinking about an old schoolmate, our star quarterback, who looked like a Greek god-warrior.
12. chelydra wrote: Our only real conversation took place at our 30th class reunion at a VFW hall. He was way overweight, sunk in alcoholism, and incoherently explaining how much I had meant to him (which I found very hard to believe). He had about a year left to live.
13. chelydra wrote: Because alcohol was a family curse, two days or more passed before his waterlogged body was found by chance, He'd fallen into a swimming pool at night, and I think he got tangled up under a tarpaulin.
14. chelydra wrote: The reunion was in the fall of 1996, the concert was in April 1998. When I heard the sad story of how he'd died, I guess my reaction was typical of casual acquaintances hearing of an undignified death. Sheesh! Or maybe Ouch! But that first and last...
15. chelydra wrote: ...conversation had stayed with me. And through some unconscious alchemy, his death was becoming meaningful, even noble, as in one of those relentless a Greek or Shakespearian tragedies, or the Book of Job. They pull no punches. Nor does real life.
16. chelydra wrote: That transformation in my attitude was not happening at all consciously, not until a particular part of the Mass, when it hit home. The humiliation, the shame, the sickening circumstances, and...the crying out...
17. chelydra wrote: ...through a mouthful of chlorine and wet dead leaves— Why, why why? Who am I, who was I, what did this life mean, if anything? The absurdity hits home, hard. What was the point? Just this ghastly punchline?
18. chelydra wrote: As I sat in the dark with that river of astounding music washing over me, with vivid memories and imaginings of my classmate floating by, I was of course thinking not of King Lear, or Oedipus, or Job, but of another even more famous tragic hero...
19. chelydra wrote: and after the concert was over I was able to figure out from a borrowed program book which part of the Mass had that effect, because I did recognize the Latin bit that opens the next part...
20. chelydra wrote: I wasn't the only one deeply affected by that 5 or 10-minute bit of a long, long concert. I just found the NY Times review:
21. chelydra wrote: "Challenged by Mr. Shaw's slow tempo in the ''Crucifixus,'' the chorus sustained its lines beautifully, and virtually laid Jesus to rest on the words ''passus et sepultus est'' (''suffered and was buried''). ...
22. chelydra wrote: "... The final note was stunningly quiet yet infinitely expressive, the virtual embodiment of entombment. Then, like a flash, came ''Et resurrexit'' (''And He was resurrected''), bursting with life and joy from the first note."
23. chelydra wrote: The reviewer was By James R. Oestreich, it was published on April 6, 1998, and headlined "Affirmation, With Quiet And Sparks"...
24. chelydra wrote: (Please disregard either -er or By)
25. chelydra wrote: Robert Shaw died at 82 the following January; this was probably the last concert of his stellar career, which took off in April 1948 when Toscanini asked him to run the choral part of Beethoven's Ninth...
26. chelydra wrote: Quite a trajectory, quite a life—from an Ode to Joy that convinced Toscanini he'd "at last found the [choral] maestro I have been looking for" to a hallucinogenic Crucifixus et resurrexit in a half-century...
27. chelydra wrote: And Shaw’s chorus was racially integrated from its birth in 1941—"a melting pot that sings" he called it.
28. chelydra wrote: Shaw's parents were an evangelical preacher and a religious singer, and he almost had a church career himself.
29. chelydra wrote: "Shaw's NYT obit, also by Mr Oestreich, says: For Mr. Shaw, music was always more than a luxury or entertainment. As a form of communication, it was spirit itself, a moral force. ..." [from obit]
30. chelydra wrote: ..."You don't join the Collegiate Chorale,'' he wrote. ''You believe it. It's very damn near a religion.'' [obit]
31. chelydra wrote: (There's a misplaced quote-mark in comment #29; it should follow the colon. Sorry.)
32. chelydra wrote: GOOD NEWS!— the punchline I was wondering how to write, to bring all this to a worthy conclusion, I just discovered in the obituary, and it says exactly what I've been try to find words for.
33. chelydra wrote: We hereby quoteth James R Oestreich, who quoteth in turn Robert Lawson Shaw:
34. chelydra wrote: [from obit] But he could turn around and discourse at length on the spiritual and mystical meanings of a text. In preparing a performance of Britten's ''War Requiem'' at the Carnegie Hall workshop in 1994...
35. chelydra wrote: [from obit] ...he said of Wilfred Owen's text and Britten's music, ...
36. chelydra wrote: [PUNCHLINE ALERT! PLEASE PAY ATTENTION NOW! Thank You for your coöperation.]
37. chelydra wrote: [Shaw quoted in obit] ''Whether any one of us 'makes it' in a hereafter I find somehow less important than the presence of humanity such as this.''
38. chelydra wrote: THAT WAS THE PUNCHLINE. Read it again if you need to.
39. chelydra wrote: Here it is again, in case you missed it: ''Whether any one of us 'makes it' in a hereafter I find somehow less important than the presence of humanity such as this.''
40. chelydra wrote: "Humanity such as this" —Shaw was referring to Owen's poetry and Britten's musical score. But he could have been referring to himself, making awesome music by stirring up that "melting pot that sings"
41. chelydra wrote: ... and he could have been referring to my classmate, making that heroic effort to communicate something meaningful and valuable (infinitely more than I realized at the time) to someone he'd barely acknowledged in his youthful heyday...
42. chelydra wrote: ...and of course, there the mysterious messiah whose resurrection some of us will celebrate tomorrow... But even stripped of every supernatural assertion that's in the Bible or in later chronicles of miracles...
43. chelydra wrote: To paraphrase Shaw: Whether He or anyone else 'makes it' into some kind of hereafter is perhaps less important than His or his or her human presence in this undeniably real life.
44. chelydra wrote: After all those centuries of theological debate—Was Jesus fully God, identical with Yahweh/Jehovah, who was also His Father, and thus Creator of Himself, etc etc — what's left if we choose to hang on to our rational minds and common sense, and...
45. chelydra wrote: ...say simply that He was (is and always shall be) just a man? Are we left with nothing? Or with everything?
46. chelydra wrote: I have no idea if what I'm suggesting is even remotely connected with what Artdillon intended to imply, but his title does fit in beautifully with what I've been trying to say (in fewer words too).
47. chelydra wrote: I do think everything is the correct answer. The thing about the crucifixion is that it was as humiliating and disgusting a death as you can imagine.
48. chelydra wrote: It was the unholiest of deaths, and the untimeliest of deaths—not what His followers expected of a Messiah. And what they'd expected him to accomplish was left undone, or barely begun.
49. chelydra wrote: To the average "innocent bystander' in Jerusalem, sitting on the fence, neither follower nor accuser of Jesus or of any of the other purported Messiahs (there were dozens)...
50. chelydra wrote: His arrival in the city a week earlier, His rabble-rousing, His arrest, and His speedy (and ugly) execution must have looked a lot like my first impression of my old classmate's demise—a disgraceful, pathetic
51. chelydra wrote: and dreadfully unfortunate misfiring, after such a promising start.
52. chelydra wrote: Remember, this is how His life and death might have seemed to a casual observer. Is this some kind of typical atheistic nihilistic dismissal of everything holy?
53. chelydra wrote: Perhaps it is. But for me it's a way of understanding the holiness of reality, of real life, of this world, this Creation... Consciousness, life, even existence itself might as well be considered miraculous, cosmic, and profoundly meaningful —
54. chelydra wrote: (substitute earth for world in comment #53 above, if you prefer; it's probably closer to what I meant as well as less offensive.)
55. chelydra wrote: My late classmate had the kind of charisma we associate with Kennedys. Others have said he looked in his youth 'like a Greek god". His decline and fall were a shock...
56. chelydra wrote: ...To Jesus's followers as well as casual observers, it's fair to guess that his arrest and execution were a shocking and extreme disappointment.
57. chelydra wrote: The theologians' verdict circa 250AD was that Jesus was indeed "fully God and fully man"—the latter meaning it was not fake blood or
58. chelydra wrote: ...feigned pain at the end, his emotions were human, and his mind—fully man. His last words say so. He was also fully divine.
59. chelydra wrote: And what are we, chopped liver? (Let's not forget, Christian is an orphaned offspring of Judaism!) (For you non-New Yorkers, that's a Yiddish saying, like Oy Vey.))
60. chelydra wrote: Please add -ity to that Christian. Thanks.
61. chelydra wrote: Well, Jesus Himself tells us we have the Kingdom of God within us. Was He just kidding, just humoring us? You decide.
62. chelydra wrote: Seems logical, to me, that holiness is actually a natural state—behold the lilies of the field, you can be like them, etc.
63. chelydra wrote: And all the holiness and judging power that some Christians believe belongs only to their three God-segments and all the little gods they call angels, and Heaven beyond the Gates...
64. chelydra wrote: ... is our birthright, to have and to hold, to cherish and to use, in sickness and in health. Until death do us part. Keeping body & soul together means what it says. Living is soulfulness.
65. chelydra wrote: Having a god-given Free Will means not having to put up with BS, with groupthink, with the most pathetic political choices imaginable.
66. chelydra wrote: (66) There's a lot to be said for believing in real life. When asked on a Conscientious Objector application in 1968: Do you believe in a Supreme Being? the answer came back All Being is Supreme,
67. chelydra wrote: Four words: All Being is Supreme. If I'd recalled that anecdote about sixty comments ago, it would have saved us both a lot of time.
68. chelydra wrote: Before we go I should mention that one of the streams leading into this picture is the Leonardo(?) painting "Salvator Mundi" which served as a starting point. Tho' you'd never know it.
69. chelydra wrote: PS: In #59, Substitute "estranged" or "wayward" or "emancipated" (depending on you point of view) for "orphaned" —because Judaism is not dead, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest that.
70. chelydra wrote: UPDATE: Not being familiar enough with (a) ...when Easter comes this year, (b) ...what Mr Zelinsky looks like (my news comes on the radio), or (c) Christian languages....
71. chelydra wrote: ...I assumed that Artdillon's "Just a Man" must be the Canary Islanders' image of what Jesus looked like, "just a man" might be one of the many things people say about Jesus at Eastertide.
72. chelydra wrote: ...which set the stage my own rather more verbose ramblings on the general subject of Life, Death, Easter, and suchlike topics.
73. chelydra wrote: But if what I hear over the radio these days is any indication, I'm not the only one who's mixing up Jesus and Zelinsky.
74. chelydra wrote: Anyway... so it goes.... And thanks, Indigo, for that affirmation, which came just as I was think I might put all this into the trash (but save a copy just in case)
75. chelydra wrote: ...(in case of what? you never know...)
76. indigo wrote: Please don't trash.
77. svazquez13 wrote: i love this !