The People of the Ark

As a dark curtain of rain drew near, my tour group made its descent down the hill, leaving the Ethiopian town of Lalibela behind us. In the distance, rows of lush green plateaus stretched out under the thunderclouds before plummeting down to the valley.

Only one thing could cause us to look away from this tropical Grand Canyon: a giant cross jutting out from the mud-red hillside.

Our group—myself, two couples from Chicago, and our tour guide—soon found itself on the edge of a gaping hole in the hillside. Inside was a full-sized church, hewn out of volcanic rock. A zigzag of stairs and trenches led to the Church of St. George—or, Bet Giyorgis in Amharic (the main Ethiopian language). From the base, the 17-story church towered above us, its finely carved four columns forming a Greek cross from base to roof. With volcanic red walls scarred by yellow splotches and green stains, the church conveyed a sense of time as well as timelessness.

We entered the church, after first removing our shoes—one of many ubiquitous holdovers from Jewish tradition that I would witness on my trip. The interior was bathed in a cave-like darkness, pierced only by shafts of light from spade-shaped windows high above us. As in other Orthodox churches in Ethiopia, there were no pews or chairs, just a mish-mash of plush carpets. What appeared to the untrained eye to be one room was actually two: the qene mahlet around the entrance, where the congregation sings hymns, and then the qeddest, where the faithful receive communion. A third room was hidden from view in the front: the maqdas, the Ethiopian equivalent of the Jewish Holy of Holies.

It is not for nothing that St. George has been dubbed the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World.’ Were it the only rock-hewn church there, the small northern Ethiopian town would still be worth the visit. But in fact, Lalibela has not one, two, or even three such churches, but a dozen.

How these churches of Lalibela came to be is the stuff of legend…

Read on here

… What is it that has allowed Ethiopia to persevere as a Christian nation? Ultimately, as with any such question, one must acknowledge the grace of God.

 

Oldest Dinosaur Nests Discovered in South Africa

A nesting site for dinosaur eggs found in South Africa is 100 million years older than the previous oldest site.

Some local news via the BBC:

Palaeontologists found 10 separate nests, each containing clutches of up to 34 eggs measuring 6-7cm.

The fossils are of the prosauropod Massospondylus, a relative of the long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus.

They suggest that Massospondylus returned to the site repeatedly, laying their eggs in groups in the earliest-known case of “colonial nesting”.

The 190-million-year-old finds also included embryonic dinosaur skeletons, and are described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They were found in a 25m stretch of rock in South Africa’s Golden Gate Highlands National Park.

The researchers suggest that many more sites remain embedded in the rock, which will be exposed as natural weathering processes continue.

But the current find already vastly extends what is known about dinosaurs in their earliest days on Earth.

“Even though the fossil record of dinosaurs is extensive, we actually have very little fossil information about their reproductive biology, particularly for early dinosaurs,” said David Evans, associate curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum.

“This amazing series of 190-million-year-old nests gives us the first detailed look at dinosaur reproduction early in their evolutionary history, and documents the antiquity of nesting strategies that are only known much later in the dinosaur record.”

 

See Others Through the Eyes of Christ

And your view of them will change.

Please watch this video.

HT:   Patrick Madrid

 

Disability: A Thread for Weaving Joy

A Public Discourse by Archbishop Charles J Chaput who, if I may add, is one of the best Archbishops I have ever listened to.

The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac once wrote, “Suffering is the thread from which the stuff of joy is woven. Never will the optimist know joy.” Those seem like strange words, especially for Americans. We Americans take progress as an article of faith. And faith in progress demands a spirit of optimism.

But Father de Lubac knew that optimism and hope are very different creatures. In real life, bad things happen. Progress is not assured, and things that claim to be “progress” can sometimes be wicked and murderous instead. We can slip backward as a nation just as easily as we can advance. This is why optimism—and all the political slogans that go with it—are so often a cheat. Real hope and real joy are precious. They have a price. They emerge from the experience of suffering, which is made noble and given meaning by faith in a loving God…

The American Jesuit scholar Father John Courtney Murray once said that “Anyone who really believes in God must set God, and the truth of God, above all other considerations.”

Here’s what that means…

Find out here.

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Okay, this is off the above topic but just to clarify my opening statement (about the Archbishop being so good), give this short snippet a view.

 

 

Fr Robert Barron on ‘Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus’

The Egyptian Background to the Ark

… the Ark against its ancient Near Eastern (especially Egyptian) background.

Give it a read here.