{"id":6191,"date":"2012-03-06T23:00:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T23:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=6191"},"modified":"2012-03-06T23:08:22","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T23:08:22","slug":"of-dust-and-breath-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=6191","title":{"rendered":"Of dust and breath"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — i have a major post, possibly two, on Ezekiel and Esther, Israel and Iran<\/em> in prep, and zen <\/strong>just posted a major piece on the era of the creepy-state<\/a> — so don’t mind me, this is just a brief aside on religious devotion, relics, the heart, the skull, the breath ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s an eerie beauty to relics — and when I read a BBC news piece today titled Dublin patron saint’s heart stolen<\/a>, about the theft of a relic of St Laurence<\/strong> from Dublin’s Christ Church cathedral (upper image), while the “contemporary” part of me found it perhaps worth a chuckle and certainly paradoxical — <\/p>\n

The thief would have needed metal cutters to prise open the iron bars protecting the wooden heart-shaped box holding St Laurence O’Toole’s heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

— another part of me was saddened, much as I was saddened some years back by the destruction of the Buddhas <\/strong>of Bamiyan.<\/p>\n

I hope Dublin gets its spiritual heart back.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

And so my mind went back to another relic, and another recent encounter with that eerie beauty — the relic of St Valentine<\/strong>, martyr, which I ran across in a photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew<\/strong> OP<\/a> (lower image), posted on the saint’s day, February 14th, by Shawn Tribe<\/strong> in the New Liturgical Movement<\/a> blog, a regular read of mine.<\/p>\n

St Valentine, memorialized not by silly cupids (silli putti<\/em>?) and plump, winged hearts, but by the fellow’s skull…<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There’s something there about dust — that we are dust, animated by breath until the dust settles…<\/p>\n

There’s an eerie beauty to that thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — i have a major post, possibly two, on Ezekiel and Esther, Israel and Iran in prep, and zen just posted a major piece on the era of the creepy-state — so don’t mind me, this is just a brief aside on religious devotion, relics, the heart, the skull, the breath […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[701,526,497,533,687],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism","category-charles-cameron","category-christianity","category-religion","category-specs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6191"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6228,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions\/6228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}