Podcast
REFLECTING LIGHT
Hosted by Mandy Green · EN
Reflecting Light is a podcast hosted by Mandy Green that explores myth, ancient texts, scripture, great works of world literature and the works of artists, past and present, for the threads of light and truth they left behind for us to learn from.
16episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Beautiful Easter Mayhem
Apr 5, 202400:16:42Tap to summarizeBetter late than never! Mandy returns with Easter Greetings and a look at the beauty of the mayhem the first Easter, as recorded in the Book of Mark. Wishing you all some beautiful Easter mayhem. xoxo art by He Qi: Women Arriving at the Tomb He Qi Copyright 2021. Limited use. To Purchase Kate Bowlers book: https://amzn.to/4anG81J
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Master the Tempest is Raging!
Mar 22, 202400:13:20Tap to summarizeAre we willing to ride out our storms knowing the Lord is in the boat with us? Matt 8, Luke 5. Image Credit: Yongsong Kim, "The Hand of God.' https://yongsungkimart.com/products/the-hand-of-god-by-yongsung-kim?variant=40700331393189
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"Wonderfully and Fearfully Made"
Mar 2, 202400:10:45Tap to summarizeWith all of the focus on love the past month, it's important to remember to love ourselves. Join Mandy as she discusses how we are each "wonderfully and fearfully made," (Ps. 139:13-18). Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
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The Fourth Great Commandment
Feb 17, 202400:20:42Tap to summarizeWhen was the last time your rested? TRULY rested? When was the last time you ceased from doing anything--totally stopped and just emjoyed existence? If you're like me, it's been too long. And that's why I recorded this podcast. Exodus 20: 8-11Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. All other quotes taken from Chapter 5 of Soul Feast by Marjorie Thompson. https://amzn.to/3SZrUhp TRY IT! SET A GOAL TO CEASE FROM EVERYTHING A FEW TIMES THIS WEEK AND BUILD UP FROM THERE. It's harder than you imagine! (Which means the Elohim probably had an idea of how important it would become to us as humans!) xoxo. Mandy
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Kindness
Feb 3, 202400:14:11Tap to summarizeSmall Kindnesses Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.” From Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press, 2019). Posted by kind permission of the poet. Small Kindnesses grateful.org "Am I then really all that which other men tell of, or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Who Am I." Welcome to RandomActsofKindness.org randomactsofkindness.org 2024_RAK_kindness_calendar PDF Document · 8.5 MB
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Word of the Year: Affection
Jan 27, 202400:19:58Tap to summarize"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rilke Word of the Year: "Affection" noun af·fec·tion ə-ˈfek-shən Synonyms of affection 1: a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something : tender attachment : FONDNESS She had a deep affection for her parents. Middle English affeccioun "capacity for feeling, emotion, desire, love," borrowed from Anglo-French, "desire, love, inclination, partiality," borrowed from Latin affectiōn-, affectiō "frame of mind, feeling, feeling of attachment," from affec-(variant stem of afficere "to produce an effect on, exert an influence on") + -tiōn-, -tiō, suffix of action nouns Referench: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affection philostorgos: tenderly loving Original Word:φιλόστοργος, ον Phonetic Spelling:(fil-os'-tor-gos) Definition:tenderly loving Usage:tenderly loving, kindly affectionate to Reference: https://biblehub.com/greek/5387.htm For the full text of the Jefferson Lecture 2012, by Wendell Barry, please visit: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography Photo by Guy Mendes Quoted excerpts from the lecture: “Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910) p. "The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned. I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy." "But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to borrow again from Allen Tate). The faculties of the mind—reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited. The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don’t learn much from big numbers. We don’t understand them very well, and we aren’t much affected by them." ((Who Owns America? edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 1999, pages 109–114. (First published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1936.) [Nature] "As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.” (The Faerie Queene, VII, vii, stanza XIV.) "To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that “Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.” (Opus Posthumous, edited, with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957, page 176.) "But we need not wait, as we are doing, to be taught the absolute value of land and of land health by hunger and disease. Affection can teach us, and soon enough, if we grant appropriate standing to affection. For this we must look to the stickers, who “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” "E. M. Forster’s novel, Howards End, published in 1910. By then, Forster was aware of the implications of “rural decay,” and in this novel he spoke, with some reason, of his fear that “the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. . . . and those w...
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