Ecstasy
Two mornings ago, the Torah lection of Mass was Father Abraham's stern banishing Hagar with her infant son to certain death in the wilderness. He provided some bread, and a skin of water, and placed these, with the infant, on its mother's shoulder.
And they set off, neither pleading, nor protesting.
With the skin of water consumed, and, perish as they both must, the mother set the infant in the bushes to die, while she sat down a good distance away - a bowshot, to be exact - but out of sight, for she could not bear to watch the infant's last moments.
The child cried out and wept.
Who can describe, or imagine, the mother's anguish?
The Angel of the Lord heard the infant's cry, and roused its mother from benumbed delirium: wake, see, here is a skin, and there, a well; give the infant to drink.
And now, who can express the ecstasy of this mother..
quæ videns puteum aquæ..
Genesis 21,19
Ecology
Here is a fascinating thought; an integral personal ecology, proposed in HH Pope Francis' Encyclical Laudato sì: a deeply interwoven fabric of environmental, economic, social, cultural, and daily life concerns.
A buoyant sexuality, and its essential sexual health (WHO 1974 Declaration), cannot but have an inspiring part here.
In a cheerful anthology of erotica, I Colori del Sesso (iBooks), perhaps the narratives might have been enriched by an awareness of this integral ecology, which can be an insurance against predictable imagery unable to probe a deeper reality.
Who can say?
Etymology
I enjoyed a rich study of the root κλει.. in the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott:
- a kind of astringent pill, or suppository
- boom of an harbour
- of silence
- rowing bench
- of promontories
- clausula, cadence (poetry)
- door opening in the street
- street-door
- inner-door
- sluice gates
- brothel
- shrine
- that can be shut
- part of a ship
- clitoris
- a gem
- a pearl
- renowned
- famous
- splendid
- slope
- hillside
- celebrate
Ecstasy, Ecology, Etymology bring food for thought with great mystery of seeing, and touching:
palpando.. in fide solidatur
Liturgia Horarum III:1331
as Saint Gregory the Great expresses for today's Feast of the Apostle of India, Saint Thomas.
