#Epistle I

[poetictouch]

'Tis education forms the common mind: Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.

~ Alexander Pope

#Alexander Pope #Moral Essays #Epistle I #To Lord Cobham #education #forms #common #mind #twig #bent #tree #inclined #quote #quotes #poem #poetry #Saleh Badrah #Poetictouch

[boxbrained]

my dear friend lane told me to draw gman in the morticia addams fit so OF COURSE I HAD TO!!!!!

#hellooooooo ma'am #the reason she's called mrs. x in epistle 3 is cause we're married fun fact #(borat voice) my wife #SHE'S SOOOOO #i was giggling and kicking my feet while drawing her #half life #half life 2 #gman #pent (f)art

[peachieflame]

Fav zukka fic of all time?

Ahhhh this is really hard. I haven't really read that many but I have like 4 or 5 that I constantly reread...

If I had to name an absolute favorite it's Will We Last the Night by CSHfic, VSfic !! Literally every zukka fan needs to read this fic. It's incredibly well written and paced. Personally I also think the characterization is so spot on like yeah this is all stuff Sokka would say. I also in general love long fics that flesh out how Sokka and Zuko come from enemies to friends and then bfs

My favorite scene has to be this one btw:

Azula scowled and moved to take a bending stance, but before she could the ground lurched violently. The force nearly threw Sokka to his knees. Zuko grabbed his arm to steady him as the conning tower plummeted several feet downward, the lift losing pressure as the steam escaped. 

“Jump,” Sokka said, and Zuko was thick-headed, impulsive, and absolutely perfect, so he didn’t even hesitate, shoving Sokka backwards before Azula could even register the word.

They hit the deck hard, and it shuddered terrifyingly under their weight. He nearly lost his footing again, and somehow managed to keep it between Zuko’s vice-like grip on his arm and the adrenaline-fueled thundering of his heart.

I really want to draw out a lot of scenes from this fic but I have so little time realistically ! </3 Hopefully I get to it soon.

#answered ask #anon ask #this one and epistles by Lady of the flowers on AO3 are really tied idk... #I love long fics that let the slow burn and relationship really develop know

[hollers-and-holmes]

ROMANS SIX

Unsure of your identity in Christ?

ROMANS SIX!

At war with a besetting sin?

ROMANS SIX!

In an argument with an antinomian relative?!

ROMANS SIX!!!

#read the epistles with me #Romans 6 #a chapter a day #caloo callay #except when I don’t #*Meri please insert a funny rhyme here for me please my brain is tired*

[isfjmel-phleg]

🫥

*it cut off my last tags which were: I don't know what I can do about this but in the meantime it's a struggle

#random personal stuff #back on my soapbox feel free to ignore #okay so I have been struggling a bit in the Sunday school class that I am being taken to #which is not surprising because I have been struggling socially in this church for the past year #it's a women's class taught by the pastor's wife but not all the women in the church are in it #most of them are middle-aged/elderly #what we're learning is perfectly fine #I appreciate that they're going through an epistle and not lecturing us on How To Be Good Wives and Mothers #but the other women will chime in with their thoughts in between discussions of doctrine #and it will be things like empty little slogans #(such as 'Choose joy!' or 'GodisgoodallthetimeandallthetimeGodisgood') #(not that there isn't any truth in those but they're used tritely) #or What The Lord Did For Me (or: My Life Is Perfectly Peachy) #or things that suggest their faith is all about never being upset by anything ever because you Have Peace #and I kind of wonder if this is a generational thing #because sometimes I'll call my mom with something that's troubling me #and she'll tell me things to the effect of 'just don't feel that way' #or 'ask the Lord to take it away' #which is kindly meant but ultimately ineffective in my experience #but anyway I'm sure these women mean what they say yet at the same time it just...feels insincere to me #as if as Christians we're just supposed to paste smiles on our faces and never have negative feelings #I'm not saying we should all come to class and dispense our personal dramas #but it feels like we're showing up and performing Niceness #and not allowing room for anything that isn't Easy Answers Positivity #and I sit there feeling like there's a huge invisible brick wall around me #and I'm sure that's a me problem #but...I don't know what I'm trying to articulate here sorry #I guess I don't know how to interact with these people because nothing seems real #and we can progress no further than the smallest of small talk because heaven forbid we let our real honest selves slosh over in public #and it's draining!

[thedrawingjay]

“love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies”

them,, just them

#myart #alexander the great #hephaestion #ancient greece #the quote is from aristotle #i will now proceed to ramble in the tags #there's this quote about alexander from the cynic epistles implying he yielded to 'hephaestion's thighs' #i felt the need to put this out there #happy pride month lmao #this is my contribution #close friends my ass

[ao3screenshotss]

#title: #i cannoli have eyes for you #author: #epistle #ao3 #ao3 funny #jujutsu kaisen #gojou satoru #getou suguru

[siena-sevenwits]

Gushing about what I've learned on my deep dive on the Letter to the Romans to my brother as though it were fandom, and he's okay with it.

#I don't know if I'm pleased with myself or not - I set a goal to reread all the Pauline epistles this year and I was getting along fine but #then Romans came along and demanded I spend more time on it and I've chewed on it with commentaries and cross referencing and #prayer for months now and not moving on to the rest because I just want to keep understanding Romans better #(although it's got me reading lots of the literary and prophetic literature as well as the Pentateuch as references to them keep on arising #I highly doubt I will hit my original goal but hopefully this is good #less of a Goodreads challenge approach to it and more of letting it move in and live in my house for a good half year? #recovering reader #faith #sacred #coreander's old books

[thedreadvampy]

another day another 2 hour despair sesh on the phone with my mum about Palestine

#red said #apparently the British Society of Friends won't allow an epistle that mentions 'the war in Gaza' in case it upsets 'the Jewish community' #literally MENTIONING THAT THERE IS A WAR #bc mum and the rest of the meeting agreed to remove reference to it starting on October 7th WHICH IT OBVIOUSLY DID NOT there are concerns #about Appearing Antisemitic. by MENTIONING THAT IT'S HAPPENING WITHOUT BLAMING KHAMAS #the justification. apparently. is that we're already on thin ice with The Jewish Community because of Quaker activities in Palestine #which have been largely to do with challenging apartheid and trying to help broker peace processes #so me and mum are both like. ok so are we pro Palestine or pro genocide as an organisation? #because if we think Genocide Is Bad then we should not be afraid to say We Think Genocide Is Bad #and we can also say We Think Antisemitism Is Bad because SHOCK FUCKING HORROR not all Jews represent the State of Israel #in fact basically none of them do #anyway whatever the fuck happened to plain speaking i wanna know #when in history have the faction of Quakers who wanted to never upset anyone been the drivers of change? #wasn't the Quakers going 'obviously we are anti slavery but we shouldn't SAY that in case we upset White People' who we remember positively #they're also changing dates on a lecture Corbyn was due to give in order to avoid accusations of antisemitism #to which i have GOT to ask. 5 months into a genocide and we're STILL giving credence to the idea that criticising Israel is antisemitism? #i will scream until my lungs pop

[honey-gaze]

love letter to letters!

#i will be ur penpal bb! #shout-out to @greenwhistler for being one of my sweet letter friends btw #I've got almost every letter I've ever gotten in this sweet lil box i dug out of my grandmas art shed #when she died i found a big bag of all the letters i sent her throughout my childhood and it is! a treasure #anyway slow correspondence 5eva #epistles #penpalin' around #mary ruefle's madness rack & honey #samgaze

[christinedepizza]

Chanting “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be done” like a ward.

Anyway, look at my son, I made him out of string.

Reference: Walters Art Museum W.37, fol. 187v, a Book of Hours from Flanders, 1300-1310

#epistles #embroidery #for the love of me I could not make those white lines look good I kept pulling them out to try new stitches #until it started to mess with the thread underneath and make that look super messy #so here we are

[backup-shoe]

Lilith, my sweet half-demon child. I would love to see somebody more well-versed in Catholicism take a stab at picking apart the symbolism suffusing her character arc. There are just enough things that my little osmosed-christianity-as-a-child brain recognises, but can't quite assemble into a coherent picture. Some thought fragments that have been kicking around in my head under the cut:

1. Death, resurrection, and a holy wound

Minus the holy wound part, the first two are simply a statement of what happens in Lilith's storyline in season 1. Lilith sacrifices herself to save Ava from the Tarask in episode 5, and returns in episode 7, seemingly resurrected from the dead. So far, fairly run of the mill death/resurrection plot common to a lot of sci-fi/fantasy.

However, when Lilith comes back, she (and we) discover the following remnant of her encounter with the Tarask:

A side wound on the the right hand side resulting from being pierced through by a pointy lance Tarask spine. Hm, this screamed stigmata to me during my first watch through, and with each rewatch, I am become more convinced that this is a deliberate reference to Christ being pierced by the Lance of Longinus during the crucifixion.

However! Lilith can't possibly be the Christ-figure of this show, can she? That is more straightforwardly Ava, who is 1. the protagonist of the show, 2. also rose from the dead, and 3. has a more innocent Lamb sacrificed to save the world narrative come season 2. Indeed, come season 2, Lilith very quickly becomes a full-time antagonist, and really ends up being more of Book of Revelation-esque monstrous figure than a Christ-like figure.

So, how do we reconcile Lilith's face-heel turn with the Christ imagery from season 1? Well, I venture that it is pretty uncontroversial that Lilith, from the very beginning was set up to be Ava's narrative foil, and so it makes a lot of sense for her to share in Ava's Christ imagery. However, in the end, she is not the true Christ-figure but a pretender. At this point, I am sorely tempted to make the leap to calling her an Antichrist, but this is also the point where I run up against the very limits of my knowledge of Christian eschatology.

(An aside: I also tried to figure out if Lilith came back on the third day after she died, but fell down a rabbit hole trying to figure out Ava and Mary's route between episodes 5 and 7. I have come to no conclusion on this matter, because none of the routes they take really make sense from a routing/availability of transit standpoint.)

I will conclude this section with a parallel between Lilith and Ava from season 1 and season 2, respectively, that I thought was neat:

2. Scales, wings, and the Book of Revelation

By the time season 2 rolls around though, Lilith quickly becomes a full-time antagonist, developing scales and leathery wings as she descends further into villainy. At this point, I think the most salient Biblical touchstone for her is the dragon from Revelation 13. Whereas Adriel is the beast, Lilith is his dragon. Given the physical traits she develops, I think this reference was fairly obvious, and not terribly interesting on its own.

The one wrinkle to this that I will note though, is that I think her role as the dragon was already alluded to in season 1. She is the last person who is not Kristian that Jillian Salvius and Michael Salvius interacts with. I think her brief interaction with Jillian and Michael in episode 9 (before she teleports off to the Vatican) is to establish her as the dragon that stood ready to devour the child of the Woman of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12:4). Here, Jillian is the Woman of the Apocalypse, whose child (Michael) was taken away to God (Reya) upon birth (Rev. 12:1-6). Not sure what the significance (if any) of this is in context of the Warrior Nun narrative, but I thought it was pretty neat.

Anyway, tl;dr, scales + wings = dragon!Lilith.

3. A parallel to the conversion of St. Paul

All right, here's the one that drives be absolutely insane, because buried in the midst of all these obvious, in-your-face dragon references, there is a reference to St. Paul of the Pauline epistles! And i can't, for the life of me, figure out what it means for Lilith.

I first noticed this parallel to St. Paul during the scene in season 2, episode 5 where Adriel burnt Lilith's eyes:

This immediately dredged up from the depths of my memory the following image:

(Source: Wikimedia)

This is the lower half of Caravaggio's The Conversion of Saint Paul. Look at how he is on the ground. Look at the way he is covering his face. Is the show deliberately trying to get us to connect Lilith with St. Paul, or was the framing of LIlith's blinding subconsciously conjured from the brain of someone steeped in Catholic iconography?

In any case, this was the scene that got me thinking about Lilith and our boy Paul. Much like our boy Paul, Lilith was blinded but had her vision restored. Unlike our boy Paul whose restoration of vision was accompanies by scales falling from his eyes (Acts 9:18), Lilith gains some lovely scales under her eyes that totally do not make her look like a raccoon:

In addition, unlike Saint Paul, who simply regains his regular vision, Lilith also gains the ability to see "reality," whatever that means. (To the audience's knowledge, it means she sees wraiths, but I have my suspicions that maybe there's more to it than that.)

The interesting thing to me about this reference to Paul, is that it was so strong, but confined to this one specific episode. Lilith never does anything that calls back to this moment for the rest of the season. Nor do her actions at all jive wit what Paul decided to do with this life after he regains his sight (spread the word of Jesus Christ far and wide), unless we count her feeble attempt at converting Ava to Adriel's side during their episode 7 fight.

So, where does this leave us? Why the random reference to Paul in the middle of the season when we already have the dragon of Revelation pretty much right in our faces? Is this a hint at the next step of her journey? Something clearly changed for Lilith during Ava's final confrontation against Adriel—she goes from actively helping him to becoming a bystander, content to watch him get ripped apart by Tarasks. Not to mention her sudden change of attitude in helping Ava, and telling Beatrice that she hopes that they will be on the same side during the upcoming Holy War. Maybe she's meant to play a Paul-like role if the show had managed to get a third season.

tl;dr: Lilith makes my Bible trivia brain go brrrrrrrr. I need someone more knowledgeable in these things to come tell me how I'm getting this all completely wrong.

#i can't believe i have so many thoughts on a supporting character in this silly show #i can't believe i read the book of revelation for this #i also read all of the epistles in a day (for a separate endeavour) #i know i'm probably overthinking a this and that the doylist explanation is probably something mundane like #“we chucked in whatever christian imagery we thought was cool” #but this does not mean i cannot attempt and fail at using it as an excuse to do a deep dive into christian eschatology #warrior nun #hb has thoughts #hb watches: warrior nun

[soldier-poet-king]

also like. have always and forever been obsessed with the term beloved, even before the tumblr girlies, because it was the one thing in my whole fucked up religious life i could always vibe with and love and i love the word and the term and call everyone beloved bc its true and also im a huge ass language nerd and love me some greek and have wanted to integrate beloved in the original greek into a larger plant half sleeve tattoo but unfortunately in greek the word is gendered and it makes. the brain scream

#this is SO stupid bc it should be a big deal but if i have to live with it on my skin forever it IS a big deal #bc they dont use the feminine in the NT in the epistles and also im just. we hate the feminine. i also dont love the masculine. i just #i have Hang Ups about ideas of the divine and gender and im not even making an argument here i just rlly like the idea of that tatoo #and then i think out the practicalities and it's/ ah. ok #im not trying to be edgy or woke or whatever i am just. Thinking About It and also The Agonies #tbh maybe the angels have it right #the second reading at mass tonight started with BELOVED and so. i am thinking

[sourcetwo]

the last three paragraphs of epistle 3

#i choose to ignore epistle 3 i refuse to not give these guys a happy ending. come on . they deserve it!!! #im jsut. epistle 3 destroys me #opposite of fix-it fic tbh. bad ending. sad ending. to me #hl

[twosides--samecoin]

“Mother, I keep having the same dream. I dream that I’m growing tall as a poplar. I pierce through the roof of the balcony and through that of the floor above, the fifteenth floor, the sixteenth floor, shooting up through concrete and reinforcing rods until I break through the roof at the very top. Flowers like white larvae wriggle in to blossom at my tallest extremities. My trachea sucks up clear water, so taut it seems it will burst, my chest thrusts up to the sky and I strain to stretch out each branching limb. This is how I escape from this flat. Every night, mother, every night the same dream.”

Han Kang, The Fruit of My Woman

#by the end of writing most fic chapters I find a quote I like to go at the beginning ahead of my own text #mark laidlaw's epistle 3. lyrics from funny girl. latin by way of phormio. sometimes has fic meaning sometimes it's just for me. often both #but this one has taken on some irony because I just escaped trap house hell apt building :') #han kang #the fruit of my woman #long time running

[orlaite]

interesting indeed

#on the whole thus far the wilson biography is the better and more thorough book #but mack has cited alot of really interesting epistles (and diary entries ((by persons other than lawrence)) that werent in the wilson bio #TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION if i skimmed over this in the wilson book im killing myself in repentance