Today's word is architecture

Great Buildings ~ by DK, 2017, architecture, 256 pages, 8/10

This book gives you an overview of the history of architecture from the ancient world to the present day, a guided tour of more than 50 masterpieces of every architectural style, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to Chartres Cathedral, Sydney Opera House, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.  Each building is analysed visually.  CGI cutaway artworks peel away walls to reveal the bones of the building, and close-up photographs home in on details of style.

It takes a global look at both historical and contemporary architecture.  What is the difference between a Doric and an Ionic column?  How does a flying buttress work?  Why do concrete balconies appear to float in thin air?  You will find the answers here, along with a wealth of intriguing stories about the patrons, builders, and architects who made each architectural masterpiece possible.  

It's like being taken on a personal tour by a guide who shows you exactly what to look at.  I especially enjoyed Chartres Cathedral (pp. 72-77) because I've enjoyed walking labyrinths, and this may be the most famous one ever.  "The huge labyrinth, or maze, inlaid in the floor at the west end of the church, symbolizes the pilgrim's journey to Jerusalem and the path of the soul to heaven" (p. 76).  Click HERE to see some of the times I've written about labyrinths on this blog.

Sunday Salon ~ books, labyrinths, family, purricane

BOOKS

Two weeks ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote these words for a book about his theology by Stephen D. Morrison:

I have endeavored to follow up scholarly theological books with shorter, generally accessible works.  I have kept myself accountable to the injunction:  “That which cannot be said simply is perhaps not worth saying at all.”  As such, I followed up Theology of Hope (1967) with the popular-level work, In the End — The Beginning (2004); my Christology, The Way of Jesus Christ (1990), with Jesus Christ for Today’s World (1994); and The Spirit of Life (1992) with The Source of Life (1997).

I have five of these six books, but somehow I missed In the End — The Beginning.  I'll have to remedy that oversight!  I hadn't realized these (smaller) books were more accessible versions of his theological tomes, but the "easier" ones are definitely shorter:

(342 pages) Theology of Hope

In the End — The Beginning (192 pages)

(388 pages) The Way of Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ for Today’s World (152 pages)

(358 pages) The Spirit of Life

The Source of Life (148 pages)

Now I guess I'd better read (or re-read) all six books as I compare their contents.  I've had these since the 1990s, except Theology of Hope, which I bought in 1987.  That one is so old, the pages are falling out, so I got a later edition in 2012.  I can't throw away the old one yet, though, because of all my marginalia and underlining in it.

LABYRINTHS

Donna and I walked the labyrinth at the Mercy Center with Kevin on Thursday.  Click to enlarge the photo to see both of them meditating near the tree in the center.

Wanting to share labyrinth photos with a couple of friends, I went looking through my blog posts ... and couldn't find what I wanted.  Ha!  It's because I posted it on another of my blogs:  Book Buddies.  Here's the photo I was thinking about, one of Mary and Donna in the center of a smaller labyrinth at a church in Ooltewah.

Here's a labyrinth that Donna and I walked in Hixson, six years ago, when she took this photo of me.  There's a similarity among these outdoor labyrinths, but they are also different:  one is outlined with stones, one with bricks, and one with grass between wood-chip paths.

FAMILY

My youngest granddaughter has been pictured with her best friends in CityScope Magazine after their graduation from high school.  She is now a college freshman.

PURRICANE

Let's end with a gentle "cat-egory 3 purricane," hoping to bring a smile in a week of devastating weather in our world.

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Sunday Salon ~ friends, bookshops, and books

Old Friends

My friend Ginny sent me a card for my recent birthday that says, "We're much too young to be this old."  I think Snoopy would like it ... I mean, Joe Cool would like it.  Just for the record, Ginny is older than I am, by a few months, anyway.  We've been good friends since the summer before I started high school in 1955.  Marching band practice started in August, with Ginny on clarinet and me on glockenspiel.  Wow!  That's 63 years!

New Friends

Sheila, Donna (behind), and Bonnie walking the Labyrinth

Yesterday was World Labyrinth Day, and four of us walked the nearby labyrinth together at First Presbyterian Church on Delmar:  Sheila, Donna, Bonnie, and Juleta.  These three are "newer" friends than Ginny, though Donna's been my best friend for two decades.

Donna and Juleta continued on after Sheila elected to walk over the inlaid bricks delineating the "paths" of the labyrinth to sit down for awhile.  We spent an hour at the labyrinth, walking and talking while my friends got to know each other.  It was a very good day.

On my Kindle ~ favorite quote

The Bookshop Book ~ by Jen Campbell, 2014, travel, 8/10

"One day at the bookshop I got a call from a lady who had spied a collection of nature tales on our online inventory.  She used to have the book when she was younger, she said, but her mother had sold her copy at a jumble sale forty years ago without her permission, and recently she'd been hoping to track down a copy to read to her grandchildren.  She'd never forgotten the beautiful colour plates ... She was thrilled to find we had a copy.  I packaged the book up and posted it to her.  The next day she called me back.  I quickly realised she was in tears, and I worried that the book might have got damaged in the mail. ... But it turned out that the book I had posted to her was her book:  the actual copy, with the inscription in the front from her great aunt, and one of the corners bumped from where she'd dropped it down the stairs when she was seven.  Forty years ago, some 200 miles away, her mother had sold the book, and somehow we'd come across it and somehow she'd come across us, and there she was, reunited with her very own book.  It's moments like this that make bookselling one of the best jobs in the world" (loc. 1412).

Library Loot

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything ~ by Barbara Ehrenreich, 2014, memoir, 8/10

This book will change the way you see the world.  Barbara Ehrenreich, one of the most important thinkers of our time, was educated as a scientist.  She's an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice.   From childhood, she set out to find "the Truth" about the universe and everything else:  What's really going on?  Why are we here?   In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone.   It was the kind of event that people call a "mystical experience" — and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.

I've been skimming back through this book that I first read in December of 2014.

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World Labyrinth Day ~ this Saturday

Saturday in St. Louis is supposed to be sunny with a temperature in the low 80s.  I know where there's an outdoor labyrinth, if anyone wants to go walk it with me that afternoon.  Call, text, email, or send me a private message on Facebook.  I've written about labyrinths several times on this blog and others.

Overview of labyrinths for Book Buddies
Labyrinth at Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church
Labyrinth at St. Paul Episcopal Church
Labyrinth at Burks United Methodist Church
Labyrinth at St. Francis of Assissi

World Labyrinth Day is the first Saturday in May, and people all over the world will be involved in activities at labyrinths.  To walk the one I know a couple of miles from me, you'll need to be able to walk on grass.  I'm willing to explore a different one, if you can direct me to it.

This fellow found the same labyrinth I did, the one at First Presbyterian Church on Delmar Boulevard, though he started walking it years before I moved to St. Louis.

World Labyrinth Day

Beginning ~ in the center of a labyrinth

Opening lines of Grounded: Finding God in the World ~ A Spiritual Revolution ~ by Diana Butler Bass (2015):

"I am sitting in the center of a labyrinth at Mount Calvary, a monastery in Santa Barbara, California."

Synopsis of the book

Religion is on the decline in America as many people leave behind traditional religious practices.  Bass argues that what appears to be a decline actually signals a major transformation in how people understand and experience God.  The distant God of conventional religion has given way to a more intimate sense of the sacred that is with us in the world.  This shift, from a vertical understanding of God to a God found on the horizons of nature and human community, is at the heart of a spiritual revolution that surrounds us — and that is challenging not only religious institutions but political and social ones as well.  People are finding new spiritual ground by discovering and embracing God everywhere in the world around us — in the soil, the water, the sky, in our homes and neighborhoods, and in the global commons.  Faith is no longer a matter of mountaintop experience or institutional practice; instead, people are connecting with God through the environment in which we live.  There's a radical change in the way many people understand God and how they practice faith.  Bass invites readers to join this emerging spiritual revolution, find a revitalized expression of faith, and change the world.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.

Sunday Salon ~ white-tailed deer

This evening near dusk (yes, I'm posting this late in the day), I glanced out my bedroom window and saw nine white-tailed deer in the field.  They are obviously wary of people and aware that my apartment complex have lots of those animals in them.  When I grabbed my coat and tried to quietly go around the corner of my building, the one "on guard" somehow alerted the others, and all of them stopped grazing to watch what I'd do next.  I took only a step or two between these photos, but that was enough to spook them.

Blurred though they are, you can see their bobbing white tails in the first of these two as they run from me.  In the final shot, they are waiting at a distance to see what I do.  I went inside and watched from my window as they returned to grazing, as in the first two pictures.  Even clicking to enlarge these photos, I'm not able to count all nine deer I saw in motion this evening.  I've lived here nearly a year and a half, and this is the first deer I've seen, though I was told they come occasionally.

BOOKS

Book Buddies

We've been discussing Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Butler Bass (2006) chapter by chapter during October and November.  It isn't too late to join us because we won't start a new book until January, since the holidays are almost upon us.  We've had some thoughtful comments on each of the chapters (though some, like me, are far from finished reading the book yet), plus we've done some extracurricular activities, like visiting labyrinths.  You'll find links to the labyrinth posts — as well as the very fruitful discussion topics — by clicking on the book's title.

We are considering Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012) for our January discussion.  Have you read it?

Author in town

It's been almost two weeks since I went with my friends Donna and Jane to hear Thomas Friedman speak at the Tivoli, here in Chattanooga.   His most recent book is That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (long title with the subtitle included, huh?)  His other books include The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded.  Even though I sat only a few rows from the stage, obviously it was too far for my cellphone camera to capture details during his question-and-answer session.

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Sunday Salon ~ books, my baby brother, and quilts

BOOKS

We book buddies are still discussing Christianity for the Rest of Us.  A labyrinth was mentioned on page 56, and our conversation turned in that direction.  I have written about several labyrinths, and that's me walking the latest one on Wednesday morning.

Overview of labyrinths for Book Buddies
Labyrinth at Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church
Labyrinth at St. Paul Episcopal Church
Labyrinth at Burks United Methodist Church

FAMILY

My brother Jim wants a new camper and figures this one is about right.  He wrote on Facebook,

"We've missed the camper so much that we decided to buy a new one.  It's more suitable for my needs.  What do you think?"

There's one in every family!

QUILTS

When I visited my friend Emily this week, I admired this quilt she had made.  I started thinking about how many of my friends are quilters.

Judith makes quilts for children in need.  She's on Facebook, and every week she rushes off to quilt with her friends.

Susan @ Patchwork Reflections has this quilt from 2008 at the top of her blog right now.

Wendy @ CaribousMom has entered a quilt into a blogger's quilt festival.

Shirley and I met in an online book discussion, and she's been active in my Book Buddies blog from the beginning.  She doesn't blog, but I see her quilts on Facebook.

And this last quilt was made by my son's mother-in-law, Bea, in 1993.  After I did Bea's funeral in September, my daughter-in-law Sharon wanted me to have this quilt made by her mother.  It is now on my bed.  Sewn onto one corner of the reverse side is a tag that says "Quilted with love for you" with her name and date — "Bea W. 93" — added using pink embrodery thread.  Pink was Bea's favorite color.

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Labyrinths

We've been discussing labyrinths on my Book Buddies blog, related to our reading of Diana Butler Bass's book on Christianity for the Rest of Us.  So two of us walked the labyrinth at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in downtown Chattanooga today.

The labyrinth was in a courtyard surrounded by the church's buildings, totally enclosed and yet outside.  We started at the "sunny" door (top photo), and this door was on a shady side.  Because the darker "guide lines" were faded, we each missed turns and had to retrace our steps.

The doors into the courtyard were locked, and the couple arriving when we drove up knew where to find someone to let us in.  While waiting for the key, we learned this labyrinth is based on the one inside Chartres Cathedral in France and the wife had been there.  Her access to that labyrinth was more difficult than our short wait, since chairs had been set up all over that one.  You can see the chairs in the photo are set up, but off the actual labyrinth.  This smaller one Donna and I walked today is patterned after the one at Chartres Cathedral.

As I started into the labyrinth, I noticed a feather.  When I passed Donna in an adjacent lane, I told her it was there.  When I came back around that area, I looked for the feather, but it was gone.  Looking across at Donna, I could see it in her hand.  (That white spot above her clasped hands is the feather's white tip.)  I spoke to her when I missed a turn, when I noticed she missed a turn, and probably several more times.  She said not a word, meditating as I should have been doing, if it weren't for all the opportunities to take these pictures for my blog.

As I approached her here, I noticed she was standing still, looking at the deep purple flowers beside the pink and white blossoms.  Just as I got there, I saw a bee fly away.  When we had lunch afterwards, Donna said the bee had an appetizer at one flower and went to another for his lunch.

As I walked, I was aware of splashing water off to the side.  When I had completed my walk back out of the labyrinth, I went to that wall and found a statue and water flowing over and dripping off all the leaves into the stones in the fountain below.  That's when I noticed names on the wall to the left of the fountain.

This had been the church of my neighbor and friend, so I went to read the names.  I heard the "sunny" door close behind me and realized Donna was probably cold and went inside the church when she completed her walk.  My friend Robin Holt died a year after my mother.

This handout from the labyrinth says in part:

"The labyrinth here at St. Paul's is a modified Classical Chartres design, similar to the one laid in the nave of Chartes Cathedral in France around 1220 AD. ... There is no right or wrong way to walk the labyrinth.  Walk with an open mind and an open heart and receive whatever is there for you. ... May God bless you on your journey."

Donna quietly and persistently went through the labyrinth; I was focused on what I'd write and what photos I'd post this evening.  She was "mindful" while I was "mind-full."  Guess who probably got the most out of it?  On the handout is the feather she carried through the labyrinth and then took home as a gift for her cat Sammy.

An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, 2009

Sub-titled "A Geography of Faith" this book is about becoming aware of where you are by moving and doing. The author is almost saying, "Don't just endlessly think about it; get up and DO something." And she gives us a dozen things to try. One practice she did, after years of excuses, was to walk a labyrinth. It was in a setting of pine trees.

"The first thing I noticed was that I resented following a set path. where was the creativity in that? Why couldn't there be more than one way to go? The second thing I noticed was how much I wanted to step over the stones when they did not take me directly to the center. Who had time for all those switchbacks, with the destination so clearly in sight? The third thing I noticed was that reaching the center was no big deal. The view from there was essentially the same as the view from the start. My only prize was the heightened awareness of my own tiresome predictability.

"I thought about calling it a day and going over to pat the horses, but since I predictably follow the rules even while grousing about them, I turned around to find my way out of the labyrinth again. Since I had already been to the center, I was not focused on getting there anymore. Instead, I breathed in as much of the pine smell as I could, sucking in the smell of sun and warm stones along with it. When I breathed out again, I noticed how soft the pine needles were beneath my feet. I saw the small mementos left by those who had preceded me on the path: a cement frog, a rusted horseshoe, a stone freckled with shiny mica. I noticed how much more I notice when I am not preoccupied with getting somewhere" (pp. 57-58).

Back at the place where she had begun, she realized, Surely the Lord is in this place -- and I did not know it!

The beauty of physical practices like this one is that you do not have to know what you are doing in order to begin. You just begin, and the doing teaches you what you need to know. (p. 58)

The small labyrinth in these photos is at the Episcopal church near my house, so I set out to do what she suggested. It occurred to me later that I should have walked it barefoot, instead of in my sandals, since another of the author's exercises in awareness is to feel grass on bare feet or (in this case) the roughness of sun-warmed bricks.

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith is for people who want to deepen their spiritual life through a heightened awareness of the physical self in this world. Like Jesus, she tells stories so that I was able to see and feel her experiences. Her reverence for a saltmarsh mosquito brought tears to my eyes (click the link to read my short report).

"In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life" (page xvi).

Rated: 8 of 10, a very good book.
__________

NOTE: On Barbara Brown Taylor's home page there's a link to a radio show called Tapestry with Mary Hynes, who interviews Taylor about this book.