Episodes

  • Old Testament Tour: Poetry, Continued

    Old Testament Tour: Poetry, Continued
    Apr 20 2026
    My darlings, I’m so enjoying our whirlwind tour through the Bible. As a reminder, we’re currently talking about the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which we divide into three chunks: the law, the prophets, and the writings. We started our tour in the very middle, with three of the writing books that are written in poetry, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. And this week, you all read Job chapters 1, 2, and 42 in preparation for diving into the characters a little bit.We’re not doing a quiz or anything, but you should all remember by now that Job, Psalms, and Proverbs are smack in the middle of the sixty-six books of the Bible that most Christians consider canon. Psalms is filled with psalms, Proverbs is filled with proverbs, but Job is not filled with jobs, instead it’s filled with the character Job, along with other characters who fill very different roles. From your pre-reading, you’ll all recall that Satan is one of the main characters, and due to some conversations between Satan and the Lord, Job is rather badly smitten at the outset of our story.By the very end of chapter two, the five main characters are introduced: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, of course Job, and the Lord. What follows is a back-and-forth between these five characters, and you already know how it ends, because you read chapter 42, but let’s dig in to some of the meaty bits of the poetry.After the introduction in the first two chapters, Job opens the poetry with a lament. It’s the saddest of sad poems, and it’s beautifully constructed. Job’s lament ends with these lines:What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.”When I was in college, I took a class called Job and the Joban Tradition, it was taught by Peter Machinist, and one of the things we learned in that class is that Job is a theodicy. It grapples with the question of why do bad things happen to good people?This term, theodicy, incidentally, was coined by Gottfried von Leibniz, the inventor of calculus, who in addition to being interested in infinitesimals, was also interested in the problem of evil. How can there be evil if God is all powerful.The first response to Job is by Eliphaz the Temanite, whom I will remind you, sat on the ground without eating or speaking for a week, just to be with his friend Job. None of these characters are slouches as friends. The overall structure of Job is that Eliphaz speaks and then Job responds, then Bildad the Shuhite, then Job, then Zophar the Naamathite, then Job. This repeats three times, and for the most part the friends are pretty supportive, although Eliphaz does get a bit grumpy toward the end. Even though the whole plot is that Job never sins, Eliphaz feels the need to judge. Here’s a snippet of it:“Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way prosperity will come to you.Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored: If you remove wickedness far from your tentWe don’t have time to read all of the back and forth, but what we find is that everyone who starts out consoling Job eventually does the same thing as Eliphaz. Bildad and Zophar both get a bit accusatory, and then Job is forced to respond.“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made my life bitter,as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils,my lips will not say anything wicked, and my tongue will not utter lies.I will never admit you are in the right; till I die, I will not deny my integrity.I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.You get the point here. Job is like, nah bro, it’s not like that. There’s a somewhat strange interlude in chapter 28, which almost feels like a standalone song or poem, but that is also beautiful. It’s not attributed to any of the characters, and it’s asking a question:Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell?It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds in the sky.Following this is another long poem by Job, and then we get a surprise! A character who wasn’t introduced in the beginning steps out of the crowd, and he gives a rousing speech that begins like this:“I am young in years, and you are old;that is why I was fearful, not daring to tell you what I know.I thought, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right.He makes a good point, but he also brings it home in a way that’s like ten times more judgmental than the three friends, which is looking pretty grim for Job. But don’t worry, the Lord arrives on stage now, and I’m going to switch to ...
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    10 mins
  • Tour of the Old Testament: Poetry Books

    Tour of the Old Testament: Poetry Books
    Apr 13 2026
    After some discussion with everyone during Lent, we’re going to start a tour of the Old Testament in Meeting today. There seemed to be some general agreement among all the Bruntons-east that having an overall sense of it could be fun and interesting. Today we’re going to do a quick orientation, and then we’re going to start exactly in the middle with the poetic books, mostly because I like them and I think they’re a fun starting place.So first it’s worth noting that when Jesus talked about scripture, and when he quoted from scripture, what he was quoting was what we call the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that it was all written in Hebrew, whereas the New Testament was written mostly in Greek.Remember that Jesus grew up in Second Temple Judaism, which we’ll come back to later, but one way you can think of the Christian religion is that it’s an offshoot of Second Temple Judaism, and the reason we say “Old Testament” and “New Testament” is that we inherited the Old Testament from our Jewish roots, and the New Testament was all written after the time of Jesus.There are some theological implications about calling the two parts of the Bible the Old Testament and New Testament, but it’s still a convenient way to group the books, and it’s been a grouping for a long time. In Judaism, the grouping is called the Miqra, or the Tanakh. The Tanakh is a convenient name because it’s actually an initialism of three words, Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. The Torah is the first five books, the Nevi’im are the prophets, and the Ketuvim are the writings. We’re going to come back to the writings in a minute.But get that in your head for a minute. There are five books at the beginning that we group together called the Torah or the Pentateuch, or the Law. The story of the creation of the world is there, and the flood, and the story of Moses leading the Hebrew children out of Egypt. The story of Moses receiving the ten commandments on stone tablets is in there, and a lot of additional rules that weren’t on the tablets, but cropped up along the way.You might remember that Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets” - when he says “the law” there, he’s talking at least in part about the Torah, and when he says “the prophets” he’s talking about the next broad division of books. When you think about prophets, you might think about Jonah who got swallowed by a whale and barfed out in Ninevah, or Isaiah who unknowingly wrote most of Handel’s Messiah a few thousand years before Handel was born, or you might think about Elijah who fasted for forty days and who at the end of his life ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire.We’re going to talk about the prophets later, but that’s another broad division of the Old Testament, you’ve got the law and the prophets. When we talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk mostly about characters, because that’s how I think of them, but we’ll also talk a bit about what prophecy means.The third and final broad category is called the writings, or the Ketuvim, and this is eleven books that are all wonderful. The eleven books include many of my favorite parts of the Bible, in part because we sing them and recite them more than other parts. In particular, there are three books in the middle of the writings that are books of poetry and that’s where we’re going to look today.But first, one more quick recap. Law, that’s the first five books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The Torah and the Pentateuch are two other names for it. Prophets, that’s a big chunk of the Old Testament, and when we come back to talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk about a lot of individual characters like Jonah and Elijah. And the writings.In the Christian Bible, the poetry is exactly in the middle, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, those three books, and because of that they’re also easy to find. My recollection is that if you calculate the exact center of the Christian Bible that Protestants use, it’s in Psalm number 117.There are 150 psalms, and every single one is a beautiful poem or series of poems. In many Christian denominations, it’s traditional to have a psalm sung or spoken in every single service. You might remember that the very first book published in North America was the Bay Psalm Book, which you can think of as kind of a hymnal. Psalms have been set to music many thousands of times throughout the past several millenia, and many of my own favorite hymns are Psalms translated into English and set to music.Some Psalms are long, some are short, and they’re surprisingly varied as poetry, and they’re the part of the Hebrew scriptures that has most made me want to learn more Hebrew.Proverbs is the book right after Psalms. Since Psalms is full of psalms, you won’t be surprised to hear that Proverbs is full of proverbs. Aphorisms for living, and you have ...
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    9 mins
  • Palm Sunday

    Palm Sunday
    Mar 30 2026
    We’re going to keep reading about the final days of Jesus from the Gospel of John today. One of the reasons I like reading the Gospels is that they each have a different take on what happened that week, but the accounts of Palm Sunday and the events of that week are all reasonably well synched up - unlike the dinner we were reading about last week where three accounts are about the wine and the bread but the account in John is about dirty feet.The rough sketch of the story is that Jesus and his friends are in Bethany, which is a couple miles outside of Jerusalem. A side note, the Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany is still a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims. There are at least two churches and a mosque there, and it’s the place where Jesus went from hometown hero to seriously famous miracle worker just before his crucifixion.We’ve talked about the story of Lazarus a few times. The story in the book of John assumes we know about it - “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” The premise of John’s story that this is what catapulted Jesus to fame, and to the attention of the authorities.If you’ve ever looked closely at a depiction of Jesus on the cross, there will sometimes be a sign above it that says I-N-R-I, which is an initialism for “Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum” - Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. This is a reference from the Gospel of John:Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek.There’s a whole argument depicted there in the Gospel of John, where Pilate seemingly would rather not crucify Jesus, but the religious authorities insist on the crucifixion because Jesus claimed to be both the King and the Son of God. They tell him, “We have no king but Caesar.” Pilate didn’t have jurisdiction over their religious objections, but they kind of paint him into a corner over the political point.An interesting little side note that relates to a conversation Dan’l and I had earlier in the week - this is actually the only mention of Latin in the whole Bible. Lots of Aramaic, lots of Greek, but Latin occurs only in this notice.Okay, so back to the story of Palm SundayThe next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,“Hosanna!”“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”“Blessed is the king of Israel!”Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:“Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.It’s worth noting at this point that Jesus doesn’t claim to be a king during his discussion with Pontius Pilate. The crowd had called him king of the Jews, and of course we have the much earlier record in the Gospel of Matthew where the Magi ask where they can find the King of the Jews, but during the discussion with Pilate Jesus doesn’t actually cop to it. When Pilate asks him about it, his response is ““Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”As depicted in the Gospel of John, it’s a bad week for Jesus, and it includes a lot of people wanting him dead for either claiming to be the Son of God or claiming to be the rightful king.But I like to think that the message Jesus preached was actually quite a bit more radical than the things they accused him of. And this way of reading it makes a lot of sense in the story.Saying “I’m the Son of God” or “I’m the rightful king” is one thing, but saying “Every one of you is the child of God and there is no such thing as a rightful King” is a whole nother thing.We have lots and lots of records of Jesus preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, in fact the word kingdom occurs fifty-four times in Matthew alone, and not once does he say, “it’s mine.” Instead, he says over and over and over, “it’s for the poor” or “it’s for the persecuted.”He doesn’t usually answer when they ask him if he’s God, but when they ask him about the kingdom of heaven, oh, then he has words and words and words for them. Usually it’s parable beginning with “the kingdom of heaven is like…”But getting back to the story of Palm Sunday again, we’ve been skipping around a little bit, and I want to end with something that Jesus tells the disciples at the outset of this story of the bad week that we now call Holy Week:Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces ...
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    7 mins
  • Remembrance of Me

    Remembrance of Me
    Mar 23 2026
    It was so much fun hiking with you all yesterday! The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for it, which I suppose is why we couldn’t get a parking space at Patapsco. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who noticed the sun shining.The first daffodils are blooming, right next to the house by the fig tree. It’s a sheltered spot there, and they’re always the first of all the narcissus to bloom here, closely followed by the forsythia that are right across from them, and soon after, it’s everything all at once. Only two more weeks of Lent, next week is Palm Sunday, and the week after that’s Easter.This week we’re going to read an account of the Last Supper from the Gospel of John. It’s substantially different from the other three accounts in the New Testament. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus eats bread and wine with the disciples and delivers a handful of prophecies over dinner. In the Gospel of Luke in particular, he says the words that we Christians all over the world now hear when we celebrate communion in church: “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’”Celebrating communion in church is a way to remember what’s happening there through a ritual, but the ritual itself isn’t so much the point it is to remember Jesus. I like to take the instruction both a bit more literally and to interpret it a bit more broadly. I know those two approaches are in tension with one another, but bear with me. I like to think that every time we eat or drink, we should pause to remember, not just when we’re in church. When we sing our song before dinner, that’s what we’re doing, in remembrance.It’s also a part of why Christians fast. Withholding it from ourselves helps us to remember why we eat and drink. The obvious response to that is “because we’re hungry or thirsty.” But fasting reminds us that it’s not actually quite that straightforward. It helps us remember that we also eat and drink because we decide to. And that others, in the worst of circumstances, lack food or drink because they are denied it.Moving ahead to the story of the Last Supper from the Gospel of John, there is what first appears to be a completely different lesson for us here.Here’s the pertinent part of the story:Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.Notably, just before this scene, John wrote, “the evening meal was in progress” and that’s the whole tale of the meal for John. There’s nothing about the cup and the bread, no new covenant in the blood, just this thing about the dirty feet.There may be some esoteric meaning buried in it. “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me” sounds like it might be an oblique reference to ancient washing rituals from the book of Numbers, “To purify them, do this: Sprinkle the water of cleansing on them”, but there’s also the meaning that Jesus explains directly: if you can’t let me serve you, you’re not getting it.In one sense, this telling of the Last Supper is different than the other three Gospels, because instead of eating and drinking together, Jesus is serving the apostles, and commanding them to serve others in the way he served them.But in another sense, as we refer back to the accounts in the other three Gospels, Jesus is serving food to the disciples. I don’t know if that would have been the role of a host or of a servant in Jesus’ day, but that also brings up a good point: hosting and serving aren’t necessarily so different as I imagine them to be.One more little tidbit to focus on about...
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    7 mins
  • Children of God

    Children of God
    Mar 16 2026
    I promise our Meetings aren’t going to permanently turn into vocabulary lessons where we only talk about the new words I’ve picked up like Syzygy and selenelieon. But I did learn another new word from an article from the New York Times that was making the rounds on Friday and I can’t help reading the headline:“Bad News for Friggatriskaidekaphobes: 2026 Has Three Fridays the 13th”Friggatriskaidekaphobes. That’s a good mouthful. Apparently in common years, that is to say, years that are not leap years, when the year begins on a Thursday, we have three Friday the thirteenths, and this happens to be one such year. And apparently there is always at least one Friday the thirteenth every year.What had especially gotten me started thinking about Friday the thirteenth was remembering Friday, March 13 six years ago, which was the first day I didn’t go into the office during the pandemic. I looked up our Notes for Meeting from that day, and my notes inspired me to revisit some of the same topics. We opened with a reflection that our family was especially lucky, because our school and church and farm weren’t being too interrupted:Since it was already our practice to do these things at home, we’re just kind of continuing on as we were, except with less driving, right?Remember that we didn’t have any idea at the time it was going to last as long as it did, or that so many people would die. It’s strange to look back on it. At the time, my artful transition from “hey we’re in a global pandemic” to “let’s talk about Lent” was this:One of the things that I really love about Lent is that it’s a practice that anyone can do completely on their own.As you kids have all gotten older, I’ve been delighted how intrigued you seem to be by organized everything. Organized school, organized clubs, organized religion, organized sports. I sometimes wondered when we started homeschooling if there would be lingering disdain for such things, but there doesn’t seem to be so far. But it is also nice to remember that you don’t need a school to learn things, you don’t need a church to worship as you please, you don’t need a team to go for a run, and you don’t need to go to an office to get work done.Fasting during Lent is a practice that’s mostly done at home, or really wherever you are, and I like it for that. But it’s also like many of those other things on the list we might do on our own; I’m not the only one doing it, and I feel a sense of community and purpose with everyone else who is doing it with me. When I run, I do think about other runners and then sometimes I even get together and run with them! When I learn, I learn from someone else who once learned the same thing. When I fast, I fast together with everyone else who is fasting, this season it’s even more together than usual, with Lent and Ramadan coinciding. Close to two billion people around the world who might keep some level of a fast.Last Sunday, Katie and I went down to Annapolis and met Tomi in the morning, and we all went to St. Anne’s together. The service was different from our family’s usual Sunday night routine, but it shared all the same themes we talk about at home. Importantly, it reminded me of another thing that Christians all over the world do as we celebrate our Lenten fasts, reflecting on the life of Jesus.With that in mind, right where each of us are, on our own, but also together, here are a few verses from the Gospel of John to get us started:My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.John is probably my favorite of the four Gospels. I wonder if I’m supposed to have a favorite Gospel? The author dives right into our controversial topic.In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asks, “Who do people say that I am?” but here in John, it’s just “I and the Father are one.” John records that Jesus narrowly escapes being stoned for blasphemy by the religious authorities who say this:“We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”I want to reflect for a moment on the truth that Jesus was a known blasphemer, and it made people mad, mad, mad. It’s not the first time such a thing happened, and it won’t be the last. Socrates was famously killed for the same reason. And in the Gospel of John, Jesus extricates himself from the situation by quoting scripture, but it doesn’t work, so he runs away.It’s a foreshadowing of what happens later, when he doesn’t run away, and we should think about that during Lent, as well. Jesus dies. But we haven’t come to that part yet, we’re still in John where Blasphemer Jesus quotes the Psalms to a group of men who are getting ready to stone him...
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    8 mins
  • Spring Has Sprung

    Spring Has Sprung
    Mar 8 2026
    Dan’l and Lina and I finished reading Slaughterhouse Five a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking a lot about one specific aspect of the book, which is that it consistently juxtaposes the ordinary and the absurd and the horrific, sometimes all within the same character on the same day. Aliens, and a bird tweeting, and bombs dropping. The firebombing of Dresden.Against that backdrop, I was downstairs playing Hollow Knight, maybe that’s the aliens in my story, when Lina came down and got us all to come outside.At first I thought there was something wrong, but about halfway up the stairs I started to hear the cacophony of frog-song from outside. I think she opened the front door just as I was coming up into the kitchen, and wow, just wow, wow, wow. It’s really funny to me how suddenly it seems to happen every spring. Just one evening the sun sets, and it’s crazy loud, and there are a hundred frogs in our little pond. Some combination of temperature and time of year and we still haven’t done anything to interrupt their annual cycle.Back before we had dug the frog pond, I’m sure you all remember this, but just indulge me telling the story again, back then we had a pretty substantial mud puddle on that side of the driveway, and one season a frog or maybe it was a toad, but your mama figured out that somebody had laid eggs in it, and she pulled a hose across the driveway and kept that mud puddle filled with water for the six weeks or so it took those tadpoles to find their way out of the mud puddle.Being the very romantic partner that I am, I special-ordered a copy of The Book of Frogs by Tim Halliday. The cover calls it “The life-size guide to six hundred species from around the world.” I haven’t compared a picture of our spring peepers to the Pseudacris crucifer picture in the book, but from the description this is unmistakably our species:“The Spring Peeper provides one of the first sounds of spring, the male’s distinctive ‘peep’ being heard by day and night as long as the temperature is above freezing.”And“Within a chorus, adjacent males often form duets and trios, alternating their calls with one another. If a rival mail gets too close, they switch to an aggressive call, which is a stuttering trill.”They’re on page 318 if anyone wants to read more about them. I know that Meeting is supposed to be mostly about the Bible, but I this is arguable the Bible of Frogs. One of the cool things in the book is actual size photos of all the frogs, and page 318 also includes a drawing of one puffing up its neck pouch for a peep.There are a thousand other little signs of spring and of normalcy. Katie took a picture of the crocuses peeking up yesterday. Crocuses? Croci? Crocuses sounds right to me. Lina noticed snowdrops blooming in front of the porch where I hadn’t exactly planted them but also hadn’t exactly not-planted them. I made a snowdrop Kokedama two seasons ago, but it didn’t work very well, so I just abandoned it by the front porch. Lo, and behold, they took root and are now blooming where they were not-quite-planted.One of my favorite signs of spring, besides the peepers, is how the buds of the trees just swell up until they look like they’re about to burst, which I suppose they are. All of those sycamore trees we planted last season look like they made it through the winter. I saw swelling buds on all five of them yesterday.Part of the reason I always talk about what’s happening right now when we have Meeting is that I think it’s an important practice, to notice the world around us. The seasons moving, the frogs coming back, the buds swelling and bursting into flower. not just what we saw on the news. That too, but not only that. Noticing the turning of the seasons is my act of rebellion.Before the peepers came back, which seems like it’s obviously the most important story for Lent, I was all set to talk about Elijah.I’ve been reading about him a lot this spring. Part of the reason is this wild story in the New Testament that we call The Transfiguration, where Elijah and Moses appear and Jesus becomes radiant with them. I sort of imagine his face glowing like Moses’s did when he brought the tablets down off the mountain, but because of that story I’ve been sort of thinking about Jesus and Elijah and Moses, and this story about Elijah stuck in my head.Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.The angel of the Lord came ...
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    8 mins
  • Syzygy and Selenelion

    Syzygy and Selenelion
    Mar 2 2026
    I learned a new word when I was reading the news this morning. Selenelion. Apparently, on Tuesday morning we may be able to see the fully-eclipsed moon and the sun at the same time, which is called a selenelion. The eclipsed moon is also called a blood moon, because when it ducks behind the shadow of the earth, it takes on a reddish color.Actually I also learned a second new word, which is one I’d heard before but wouldn’t have been able to explain what it meant. Syzygy, which is spelled s-y-z-y-g-y, which feels like an extremely unlikely spelling to me, but the meaning is just when the sun, moon, and earth are in a straight line with each other.I got curious about how long we’ve been able to predict astronomical events like these ones and wound up learning about Edmund Halley correctly predicting a solar eclipse in 1715 and then again, even more accurately, in 1724 using lunar tables. But way before that happened, there’s a story that Thales of Miletus predicted a total solar eclipse in 585 BCE, an event that has been called the birth of science. If you want to celebrate it as the birth of science, the exact date you’d celebrate would be May 28th, and this year would be the two-thousand-six-hundred-eleventh birthday, but I’m a little skeptical of the story. It feels to me more like “hey I knew that was going to happen.” I understand that the ancients had a very different model of solar eclipses than Edmund Halley did, although we’re often underestimating them.One thing we do know is that eclipses were often recorded, and that it’s possible now to pinpoint the exact date, like that May 28th date in 585 BCE, which can tell us the exact day and time that the omen occurred, which by the same account that puts Thales of Miletus there, tells us there was a battle going on, and that the eclipse was treated as an omen.Recall that solar eclipses and lunar eclipses are both at syzygys, do you like how I used that word that I just learned the meaning of? In a solar eclipse, the order of the syzygy is sun then moon then earth, so the moon is between the earth and the sun, and the moon casts a smallish shadow on the earth, so it only blocks out the sun in a specific place, which as the relative positions of all three of them change, looks like a shadow traveling in a line across the surface of the earth.In a lunar eclipse like we’re having on Tuesday, the earth is in the middle, and it casts a large-ish shadow on the moon, and everyone on earth who can see the moon sees the same thing. It’s another kind of omen. In the Revelation of John of Patmos in the New Testament, it’s part of the weird prophecy/dream sequence:When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like bloodNow, in this prophecy the next thing that happens is the stars fall out of the sky and the figs fall off the fig tree, and then someone rolls up the sky like a scroll. So, grain of salt.But it does seem to be a reasonable enough description of a solar and lunar eclipse that we can pretty easily imagine John of Patmos would have at least had some cultural knowledge of what was going on. And that rings true in ancient sources. In the Old Testament prophet Joel, we hear an echo of the same thing:And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.Even though we know the cause of an eclipse is a syzygy, that’s the fourth time today I’ve used the word syzygy, even though we know it, it still seems pretty remarkable. And we still learn something from it. I’m planning to get up on Tuesday and see what I can see, although it might be a little hard to see from Right Field Farm, but the rest of you should get somewhere above the treeline or skyline and make sure you have an unobstructed view to the west, or to the east and the west if you want to see the full selenelion, the sun and the lunar eclipse at the same time.Apparently the atmosphere acts as a prism, which is why even though it’s a syzygy, that’s five, you can still see both the sun and the moon, and the earth for that matter.Before we light our candles and think about all this, I want to read one more eclipse quote from the Old Testament, this one from the prophet Amos, we’re actually going to read two parts of his prophecy. First,He who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night,who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land— the Lord is his name.Such poetry. It’s not the only time Amos mentions an eclipse, and we know that a total solar eclipse happened where he lived in 763 BCE. We know because we can calculated it, but also because we have contemporary Assyrian sources that mention it.The meaning, again, was different from what we ...
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    8 mins
  • New Every Morning

    New Every Morning
    Feb 23 2026
    It’s hard to know exactly who to blame for what’s going on with the weather, but I blame the groundhog. I can hardly believe we’re getting another big winter storm and the snow isn’t even completely melted from the previous one. Capital Weather Gang is calling for three to six inches of accumulation for us, which would be fun and cozy if we weren’t just getting over weeks of snowcrete.There are signs of spring as well, though. I was delighted on Thursday and Friday when the snow cover melted enough that I could see the snowdrops starting their glory run. Every year after they bloom I’ve been carefully transplanting a few, well maybe more than a few, and we’re starting to have a little glade between us and Will and Kelsey that feels magical in the very early spring.The hellebores are starting to peek their blooms up as well, they’re not open yet, but they sort of shoulder out of the ground, and when I was out taking pictures of the snowdrops and noticed a few purple shoulders peeking out from last season’s raggedy foliage. Snowdrops are always the start of spring for me, followed closely by hellebores and then daffodils.This morning I was listening to Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, and I learned that the word Lent comes from the Old English word for spring, lencten. And even though it sounds like the Modern English word lengthen, it’s not exactly the same, although it is a reference to longer days. Which is perhaps the most visible sign of spring to me.I really love how mixed up everything gets when any religion meets culture. Lent is the English word for today, but in other languages, but especially in Latin, the period is named for the forty days, and in fact today is known as Quadragesima Sunday, or Fortieth Sunday. We can get a sense of how Lent has evolved since the ancient times - since we count forty days differently now, skipping Sundays and going all the way to Easter.Today would have been the start of the fasting season in some places, and if you’re not already set on your practice for this year, it’s not too late.Actually on the topic of it not being too late, I’ve messed up my fast every single day so far. I’ve been keeping a fast with no food and water from sunrise to sundown. Part of what inspired me this year is that Ramadan and Lent started on the same day, which doesn’t happen very often. It’s not impossible this will be the last time in my life, or at least the last time that I’m young and healthy enough for this kind of fast.It’s a form of fasting that’s got ancient roots, and was for the first few centuries of the Christian church the normal way to do it, actually I don’t know if they did sunrise, they might have only eaten after sundown, but abstaining from food and water during the day for forty days does have a history.In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, it’s how Moses communes with God when he gets the ten commandments:Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.We’re going to come back to Moses in a minute, but I want to finish a different thought first, which is that during my four-days-so-far of fasting, I’ve found myself mindlessly sticking something in my mouth to eat it at least once every day. On Thursday I went to a cut flower meeting where one of my friends had made lemon poppy seed sourdough, and I remembered my fast just as I was swallowing my second bite. Or on Saturday when I was cooking dinner, I grabbed a bit of fried potato and popped it in my mouth to eat, just out of habit.Part of the reason I’m sharing this is just to say that there’s no such thing as breaking a streak during Lent, we just start anew with each breath. If you had a hard time with setting your intent or keeping your intent, Quadrasegesima Sunday is a great time to reconnect to it, but so is every following day.I’m reminded of the verse in Lamentations that says, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” I try to remember that whenever I’m starting over, which your mama reminds me is every time I take in a breath.We’ve talked about this before, but there are actually forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, which means there are also six feast days, canonically each of the Sundays starting with today. I’m celebrating my fast a little differently, still keeping with the forty days, but I’m being flexible about if the feast day happens on Sunday or on a different day, for instance if Zoe and I decide to brave the thundersnow tomorrow and meet for lunch, that will be my feast day instead of today. Although the weather is not looking ...
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    8 mins