Fish on Friday: Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill.

Good day and welcome to this blog, one and all!

                                                    This is a photo I shot yesterday eve. Bird tree sky.

                               Here is the next one. Bear in mind, my blogs are not about how good my
                     ability as a photographer is. They are mostly just to capture and show what holds
                     my attention as one moment passes into another.

                      Here it was as if I was no longer behind the camera, but was the bird flying with grace.

                            Not a lot of difference! See what is this relative too? A stormy sky?
                            A whirlwind, where the tree is uprooted and pictured in the sky.
                                   From my point of view there is not much difference. What I am fascinated
                             with is what your point of view is. If you you look behind you what do you
                     see. Or go outside. Is there a pavement and road. There is here and at 7am there
                     are a lot of parked cars outside peoples houses and none moving. Nor people
                     walking down or up this road!

                     So my brothers and sisters, this our latest painting.   I just cant come up with the
                     title. If you know what it is the please let me know at petgkim@gmail.com. Thank
                     you.

                      I do like this and am thinking, what does it matter anyway, if its incomplete!
                      Who can judge if it is? I cant,  and  didnt want to paint on it anymore incase
                      I messed it up. I may come back in a day or two and go around the edge with a
                      wash. The centre of this work though is as I would wish it if I could have even
                       envisaged it before it was created.
   

                      I am sure you can see the common theme running through this triptych!




                                             Fish on Friday  

  I will further down this blog, share with you a bit of writing on Hunger And Thirst After Justice , by Father Gerald Vann, (a great Dominican) whom it was said;
 "His writing can be read with profit by Anglicans. His books are easy to understand; he never strays far from the devotional needs of his readers."                                                            Church Times

Due though to the current state of the world and the seperation of large parts of the globe from each other in terms of unequal division of resources, I felt it more appropriate to share what he said about the aforementioned subject.

HUNGER AND THIRST 

AFTER JUSTICE

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill.                                                                                                  MATT, v.6.

Some have held that happiness consists in selfishly following the bent of the passion for wealth or pleasure or power: they are wrong, because these instincts thus isolated and so turned to evil are on the contrary an obstacle to happiness. Others have thought that happiness consists in the "active life" as such, in doing rather than being; and again they are wrong, for activity is either a means to happiness, or else is itself beatific only as an overflow of a state of being. Happiness is not, essentially, something we have but some -thing we are, though we become what we are by doing and by the way we suffer when suffering is given us, which way is itself a form of doing. But the active life is a social life; and so this beatitude and the next tell us how we should act towards the rest of the family, first as far as justice is concerned, and secondly in regard to the qualities of soul that go beyond the bare demands of justice: generosity and mercy.

  Being is more important than doing. It is wrong to think that in order to do great things for the human family you must be endlessly occupied with external activity, that you must be able to point to the arresting visible changes in the face of things, the institutions, the buildings, the movements, that owe their origins to you. The saints often have these things to their credit; but they achieve them almost, as it were, in spite of themselves, certainly rather as an inevitable result and expression of what they are than as a studied programme.        

 There are always some indeed in the world who think themselves great because their brief appearance on the stage is accompanied with much sound and fury: they have much external power, and use it to change, for a time, the face of the earth; but in reality it is they who are as the grass that withers: they go, and the upheavals they caused are at length forgotten, or figure as a tale in the textbooks of history. The power that lives on is the real power, the inner power: the power to move mountains, to tame the animals and bring them back, as St. Francis did, to the human family, the power to charm men to holiness not by what is said merely but by the voice that says it, the personality it expresses. You find a hint or likeness of this power in all the really great: in the men of genius, perhaps, in the great lovers of humanity, in those who are filled with the love of a purpose greater than themselves; but you find it in its fullness in the saints, whose power is more than human since it is the life of the Spirit within them. You find it, above all, in the life of Him from whom the saints` power comes: "and Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee"; "and they wondered at the grace that proceeded from his mouth"; "and they were astonished at his doctrine, for his speech was with power He commandeth the unclean spirits, and they go out?" -as we read in one single chapter of the Gospel (Luke iv). So it was, too, that when the woman sought to be cured of the issue of blood He said "Who hath touched my garments?" for He knew that power had gone out from Him. And it is not only a power to heal the body or to give physical strength goes forth: you look Him in the eyes or hear His voice and you are never the same again, your whole former life is a land to which you can never return. A great Dominican, himself a man in whom there was something of this inner power, once finely said: "When our Lord calls a man a sinner he isn`t one-he used to be."

This is the power that lives on earth long after the one who has it has passed from the earth; for the original influence is handed on to others and to others again, and from generation to generation down the ages of the world.

Blessings of love, peace and humility be upon us all.

Your brother Peter