Good day and peace and love to you all.
So I went out with the camera today and took shots of whatever caught my eye.
Here I am in Luton town centre standing next to a pipe, with mouth & man.
This is popes meadow. Its just down the road from my flat (apartment) and I loved the curve of the trees and sky. Especially as this is how it was seen and not a camera effect!
This is the progression of the latest painting.
Influenced by the red of flowers seen today.
This wonderful lady in Luton is pointing at me.
Look, now the three of us are smiling. What about you? Come on, smile. That it, you are wonderful.
ST BASIL THE BLESSED 1469-1552
A native of Moscow, he was a iurodivyi, a `fool for Christ` or `holy fool`. Such `fools` were familiar figures in sixteenth-century Russia, as the Elizabethan traveller Giles Fletcher testifies: `They go about stark naked save a clout about their middle, with their hair hanging long and wildly about their shoulders, and many of them with an iron collar or a chain about their necks or middle, even in the very extremity of winter. These the people take as prophets and men of great holiness, giving them a liberty to speak what what they list without any controlment, though it be of the very highest Himself.` Basil conformed closely to this picture. Destitute and homeless, he wandered naked through the streets; folly gave him freedom, and though his words and symbolic actions - seemingly eccentric but with a sharp, hidden point - he acted as the living conscience of society.
`If any man thinketh that he is wise among you in this world, let him become a fool, that he may become wise` (1 Cor. 3.18); `We are fools for Christ`s sake` (1 Cor/ 4.10). What Paul means, in the first place, is the paradox of faith in the crucified Messiah. Foolish, in the eyes of the world, is our faith. Yet were the Orthodox Holy Fools really fools to accept literally the invitation of Paul, `Let him become a fool`? We are so accustomed to the paradox of Christianity that we hardly see in the tremendous words of Paul anything but a rhetorical exaggeration. But Paul insists here upon the radical irreconcilability of two orders - that of the world and that of God. In the Kingdom of God reigns a complete inversion of our earthly values. As the Bible says, `The first shall be last and the last shall be first!`. Folly for Christ`s sake expresses essentially the need to lay bare the radical contradiction between the Christian truth and both the common sense and the moral sense of the world.
What am I. Artist, or Fool for Christ? Holy man. Son, father, or brother?
Or, perhaps all of above and more!
Think less and pray more.
Know that you are loved my beloved brothers and sisters. Blessings be upon you and your loved ones. Your brother, Peter the fool (among so many other things) for Christ.
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