In Psalm 19:9 the psalmist writes that “the judgments of the Lord are true [some translations say ‘truth’] and righteous altogether. ”  Truth is equated with God’s judgment.  Human civilizations have used gold both as a medium of exchange and as a way of representing their highest values.  The psalmist says in verse 10 that God’s judgments are “more to be desired . . . than gold, yea, than much fine gold.”  The price of gold reflects the value our civilization places on it.  Truth is priceless.  It cannot be bought or sold, but it can be savored, for the psalmist says further in verse 10 that it is “sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.”  Let us enjoy the sweet savor of God’s judgments.

A friend once told me about a journey she made on foot through western Africa.  In one place she met a man who performed a “spiritual x-ray”  to help her find a path to healing whatever needed to be healed in her life.  Spiritual truth seems to consist in being able to find these pathways to healing both oneself and others.  The psalmist expresses this in Psalm 139 below.

Text of Psalm 139 illuminated by James S. Freemantle (1982)

Meditate on the 23rd Psalm. 

Text of Psalm 23 illuminated by James S. Freemantle (1982)

My son’s Webkinz had been banished to a plastic trash bag in the basement.  Not wanting them to become moldy, Mom came to the rescue.  They now have a better home in the guest room.  They celebrated with a cup of tea.

Bruno Latour begins his work Iconoclash with a description of Italian firemen risking their lives to break the glass protecting the Shroud of Turin so that they could rescue it from the flames as the cathedral burned.  The image on this cloth has fascinated people for millenia.  It has been an object of devotion, declared an object of veneration by the Pope, and an object studied intensely by scientists in an attempt to determine its age and its origins.  To enhance our understanding of the possible meaning of this image for humankind, I invite you to read the Wikipedia article on the Shroud of Turin:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin.

Why does Roland Barthes’s “Rhetorique de l’Image” read so much better in French than in English?  “Ecremer” sounds better than “skim off”, “italianite” sounds better than “Italianicity.”  The emphasis of “comme si”  in the discussion of the image in the Panzani advertisement conveying the idea of a complete meal, has an especially gallic ring to it that cannot quite be translated adequately by “as if.”   An interesting note:  in the original French version Barthes translates “still life” as “still living.”