LAWYER OPERATION RECOVERY

A lawyer awakened after a serious operation, only to find herself in a dark room with all the blinds drawn.

"Why are all the blinds closed?" she asked her doctor.

"Well," the surgeon responded, "they're fighting this huge multi-alarm fire just across the street from the hospital, and we didn't want you to wake up and think the operation had failed."


Cheers,

Paul (A.)

Kudos to Paul (A.) for sharing lawyer jokes, since lawyering is his profession, though I note the lawyer in the joke is a woman, which may give him a degree of deniability. 

OCCUPY WALL STREET TRIAL

#OWS #D17 Trial photo by Jefferson Siegel

 The defendants were some of the dozens arrested last Dec. 17, a month after O.W.S.’s eviction from Zuccotti Park. Half of the 20 defendants in this particular group had already had their cases adjourned or charges dropped entirely.

 Eight stood ready to go to trial on Monday morning. Charges for most of those who entered the lot included trespassing and criminal mischief.
....

t the end of the second day of testimony, retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard — who was the first to climb a ladder and enter LentSpace on Dec. 17 — stood outside the court building with his fellow defendants.

“I just felt like Occupy Wall Street needed a new home and we should place our bodies in a location of justice,” Packard said of his motivation for entering the fenced-off square.
Defense lawyer Gideon Oliver said Trinity has had chances to drop the case against his client Packard, but refused to do so.

“Packard had a good-faith belief, based on Trinity’s past practices and his relationship with Rector James Cooper, that Trinity would exercise forbearance. Trinity had multiple opportunities to back off these prosecutions,” Oliver said.

Defense lawyer Stolar offered a more faith-based outlook.

“The Bible and prayer say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ That’s what Trinity should be doing.”

The trial resumes tomorrow. 

O God of justice and mercy: We ask you to bless this court of justice, the defendants, their defense attorneys, the leaders of Trinity Church, Trinity's attorneys, and the judge, and give to all who participate the spirit of wisdom and understanding, that they may discern the truth, and impartially administer the law; We ask that the hearts of the leaders of Trinity be open to the spirit of forgiveness; through your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.

Photo and link from Bp George Packard's Facebook page.

UPDATE:

Eight Occupy Wall Street members were convicted on Monday of criminal trespass for breaking into a fenced-in private lot last December during a protest.

The protesters scaled an eight-foot fence, ignoring signs that warned against trespassing, and entered a plaza known as Duarte Square that is owned by historic Trinity Church, one of lower Manhattan's largest land-owners.

The one-week trial in Manhattan Criminal Court pitted the church, once a strong ally of the movement, against Occupy supporters, who pressured church leaders not to cooperate with the prosecution.

....

In the trial before Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino, one defendant, Mark Adams, was also convicted of trying to slice through the fence's locks with bolt-cutters

Sciarrino sentenced him (Mark Adams) to 45 days, more than the 30 days that prosecutors had been seeking; he did not offer an explanation.

The other seven defendants received four days of community service.

Trinity could have dropped the charges.  What about forgiveness?

H/T to Jim Naughton at The Lead.

GILES FRASER'S NEOLOGISM EXPLAINED

Click on the picture for the larger view.

Giles Fraser's definition of his new word in a visual by Susan Russell as seen on Facebook.

WHAT IS THIS CHURCH OF ENGLAND...?

Canterbury Cathedral

In The Times in London, which you cannot read without a subscription, Diarmaid MacCullough writes about the latest statement from the Church of England on the proposal to allow same-sex civil marriage in England.  Of course, I cannot copy the entire article for a number of reasons, but I'll take the risk of giving you a few snippets:

So “the Church of England cannot support the proposal to enable all couples, regardless of their gender, to have a civil marriage ceremony”. That’s odd, I thought that I was part of the Church of England and I can and do support the proposal. And I know quite a few other people who thought that they were part of the Church of England and they support it too.

So what is this Church of England that doesn’t? It doesn’t actually sign its name to the 13-page public submission it has just made to the Government’s consultation on marriage equality, but it is not difficult to ferret out what it is.

It is a curious theme park called Bishop World. This is a collection of middle-aged to elderly males, some gay (though they don’t like to say so in public), some heterosexual (and they remind us of that all the time in public). They have a penchant for wearing mitres, sitting on committees and talking to each other. They are ably assisted by a small group of lawyers and civil servants, again for the most part remarkably male. A high fence protects the environs of Bishop World, so none of the inmates are troubled by opinions from the distressing wilderness beyond its bounds. Within their defences, nevertheless, they are anxious, insecure creatures, who worry incessantly about the breakdown of society.

I hesitate to post the link where I found the entire article, but if you Google the first words of the piece and the author's given name, you should find it.  I would not want to vacation at Bishop World Theme Park.

Geaux, Diarmaid - er - Sir Diarmaid!

LYME REGIS - PART THREE

For so very long, I'd wanted to visit the little town of Lyme Regis on the coast of England in West Dorset because of its association with Jane Austen and her novel Persuasion, in which Louisa falls when jumping off the steps of the Cobb and suffers a serious injury, because of the setting of the movie "The French Lieutenant's Woman", and the book of the same title, and more recently because I read a novel about Mary Anning, the young fossil hunter. For the full story of why I wanted to go to Lyme Regis, see my earlier post on the town.

The entire visit to the little town had an air of unreality about it, as I could not quite believe I was finally there. The emotions that I thought would emerge when I arrived in the place I had so wanted to visit didn't come, and I felt a detachment, as though I was watching a film of someone else in Lyme Regis. I said nothing to Cathy, my fellow traveler, about my feelings, because she might have taken them to be disappointment, but that was not the case at all. What happened was that the emotions were too great, so a kind of numbness took over, which is the reason why I've taken so long to actually write about the place. As I write these words, I sound a little crazy, even to myself.

We drove through the town and parked as close to the beach as we could, which was pretty close considering our visit was during the tourist season. We walked straight to the beach, and I had my first view of the Cobb, which featured so prominently in two of the books and the movie.

Cathy and I walked out on the Cobb, and she insisted that I do the Meryl Streep imitation.  Since I couldn't quite believe I was actually walking and standing on the Cobb, the joking around with the scarf and me as Meryl Streep early in the visit was probably a good thing.


After the walk on the Cobb, Cathy and I headed for the beach.  Although smaller fossils (curies, as the local people call them), can still be found at Lyme Regis, during the tourist season the beach is pretty much swept clean.   As we walked along, Cathy spotted the small fossil pictured at the left and gave it to me as a memento of our trip.  I was quite surprised by the find and even more moved by Cathy's generous gift.

We walked back to town and looked for a restaurant to eat lunch, but all were either too crowded or unsatisfactory for one reason or another. We headed back to the beach, walked up and down, and settled on By The Bay, where we intended to have lunch at one of the outdoor tables, protected by umbrellas, with a full view of the beach. However, as we walked toward the restaurant, a light rain began to fall, and by the time we reached the restaurant, the rain came down harder, so we took a table inside. Of course, we had to order fish and chips, and Cathy recommended ginger beer, as she said, "Fentimans, a good old Newcastle firm, the logo is the owner's dog, which is one of the reasons I like it."  What could I do?  I ordered Fentimans Ginger Beer, along with a glass of wine.

I'll let Cathy speak again, "We had a good time :) The restaurant served damn good fish and chips."  Indeed!  We had a lovely lunch, with delicious fish and chips and tasty ginger beer. 

After lunch, we walked along the row of colorful beachfront changing cabins, where folks had their chairs, iceboxes, and food and drink - their supplies for a day on the beach.  I imagine the ladies of the late 18th and early 19th century changing into their bathing costumes with hardly an inch of skin exposed beyond the face and hands and being rolled out to sea in bathing machines.

As we headed back to town past the shops and made our way to the car, I particularly noted the beautiful lampposts with shell motifs.  The photo to the left with the birdie perched on one of the beauties is very likely not mine, but where it comes from, I can't say.

My sense of inhabiting a dream had lifted a little toward the end of the visit, but the entire time in the town has an air of unreality about it until this day.  Did I really visit Lyme Regis, or are my memories  a figment of my imagination?  The pictures prove I was there, but still... 

Image at the head of the post and of the Cobb from Wikipedia.

Note: The picture of the streetlamps is also from Wikipedia.

...INTO THE VERY HEART OF GOD

Bro John Anthony

11:44am Jun 15

When we talk of Jesus making intercession for us to the Father, it’s not Jesus ‘talking’ to God about us or for us, it is Jesus being intimately close to His Father and carrying us whom He loves on His heart, and into the very heart of God.

-Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Bro John Anthony posted in St. Cuthbert's Cottage

"PATIENT TRUST" - PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient with everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient with being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability -
and that it may take a very long time,
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
as though you could be today what time,
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that His hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Thanks to David@Montreal for sending me the wise and beautiful poem.

LEONARD COHEN - 'THE STRANGER SONG'

I listened to the song the other day.  It is so beautiful, so here it is.

FURTHER COMMENTARY ON CHURCH OF ENGLAND STATEMENT ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

Here in PDF format is the Church of England's statement in response to the Home Office Consultation on Equal Civil Marriage, if you'd like to read it all.  The very first paragraph of The Church's understanding of marriage made me smile.

1. In common with almost all other Churches, the Church of England holds, as a matter of doctrine and derived from the teaching of Christ himself, that marriage in general – and not just the marriage of Christians – is, in its nature, a lifelong union of one man with one woman. 

 Well, there's sticky matter of divorce and remarriage, which is permitted by the church despite its understanding of marriage as a "lifelong union of one man with one woman," which seems to me to undermine their case against same-sex civil marriage from the very beginning.

Moving on...

Tim Ellis, Suffragan Bishop of Grantham:

‘...in what way can the statements of the prelates be taken to be the mind of the Church of England in this and other related matters?’ For, in truth, the bishops in the media have not spoken for me or the way in which I understand this thorny matter and, I suspect, they do not speak for a sizeable minority or even majority with the life of the Church. However, it is possible that I will soon be approached by the local media to defend the position taken up by my colleagues and the pressure will be on to ‘toe the line’.

Tobias Haller at In a Godward Direction:

The authors hammer away on the alleged "complementarity" of the sexes as a necessary component of marriage without apparently recognizing either the circular nature of that argument or the dangerous tendency towards Christological heresy inherent in its anthropology. The circular nature of the argument is: “Marriage can only take place between a man and a woman because only a man and a woman are of different sexes.” This is, of course, merely restating the premise. The more dangerous, and heretical, trend of this argument lies in the suggestion that the sex difference implies a different order of being for men and women. This is known as sexism, and it undercuts the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation. One would think the church might be more sensitive to that issue, though one wonders how many English bishops actually believe the doctrine.

Alan Wilson, Suffragan Bishop of Buckingham:

The mightiest act of God is his commandment to love him as we love our crooked neighbour with all our crooked heart. It’s shockingly unconditional. Someone wrote to me last month to say it beggared his belief that a bishop should think that “Love thy neighbour as thyself” applied to homosexuals. It beggars this bishop’s belief that anyone should think that it doesn’t.

Themethatisme at conscientisation:

There is the biological usage of complementarity, (not definition) and 'tis this, that is liberally sprinkled through the document as the Bishops seek a good legalistic euphemism for saying men's bits are designed to fit ladies bits and you shouldn't be doing anything else with that arrangement. Which owes more to the traditional definition of the word in which 'This port complements the stilton' or 'that handbag really complements those shoes'.  The two becoming one and being something else, a new ensemble, a new flavour, a fresh expression.

I've suggested a rather long reading assignment for two reasons: The first is that I believe all four posts are worth reading whole and entire.  The second is that three out of the four bloggers are Church of England, all but Tobias, and the statement claims to speak for the church.  Since the statement was released unsigned, the posts quoted and linked above make it clear that whoever put together the statement does not speak for ALL members of the Church of England.

JESUS AND MO - SONG

Click on the cartoon for the larger view.

From Jesus and Mo.