Krishti u ngjall! Vërtetë u ngjall! (From the archives: April 12, 2009)

The title of this post is in old-style Albanian, the language my wife’s parents spoke.

Every year, on a certain day, when Mom and Pop were still alive, we would call them in Florida or they would call us in Nebraska or New York or Florida or Georgia (we moved a lot) and whichever party said “Hello?” heard the words, “Krishti u ngjall!”

The response was always immediate from the other person: “Vërtetë u ngjall!”

Phonetically, it sounded something like this:

KRISH-tee oong-ee-AHL! vair-TET oong-ee-AHL!

What a strange thing to do, you might be thinking.

Not at all. If you’re curious what those strange phrases might mean, here is an English translation:

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

The day, of course, was Easter Sunday -- Resurrection Day -- and we were simply doing what Christians have been doing in various places and in various languages for two thousand years.

After Pop died in 1983 and Mom died in 1986, we continued the traditional Albanian Easter greeting with Mrs RWP’s aunt in North Carolina. Now she is gone, too. There is nobody left in the family to speak Albanian to.

So, very early this morning, as the day was beginning to dawn, I said to Mrs. RWP, “Krishti u ngjall!” and she replied, “Vërtetë u ngjall!” Some traditions are worth preserving.

This was not only an Easter greeting, it was something like the communion of the saints, I think. Some of them on earth, and some of them in Heaven. But all in agreement.

In many places around the world, in many languages, many people said these words today. We said them at our own church (Pentecostal, not Albanian Orthodox) this morning. The pastor said, “Christ is risen!” and the entire congregation replied, “He is risen indeed!” The pastor said it three times, and after the third response, spontaneous applause broke out in the choir and among the congregation.

As I said, the communion of the saints.

This afternoon I found on the Internet a photograph of the interior of Saints Peter and Paul Albanian Orthodox Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the church Mrs. RWP attended as a child with her mother, father, and brother. It was the first time my wife had seen this church since 1946. The church is decorated in the photograph, not for Easter, but for another Christian holiday.

Christmas. You may have heard of it.



[Editor’s note. And now it is 2013, Easter Sunday, and the same thing happened this morning, with a couple of slight differences. Our greeting was the same, but this time Mrs. RWP spoke the words first, and I was the one who replied. Also, we now attend a Methodist church, yet the exchange between the speaker and the congregation was the same at this morning’s sunrise service. The communion of the saints. I rest my case.--RWP]

The world is made up of two kinds of people...

Those who get it:


(click to enlarge)

...and those who don’t:


(click to enlarge)

A Good Friday meditation

[Editor’s note. My atheist readers may want to skip this post altogether, as I ain’t gonna change your minds and you ain’t gonna change mine. Still, I welcome everyone, one and all. --RWP]

I thought they’d be gone by now, but I’m in my fifth week of having shingles and they're still very much here.

Having the shingles on Good Friday can be very instructive.

In western Christendom, today is the annual commemoration of the day Jesus Christ (Hebrew, Yeshua Ha’mashiach, Jesus the Messiah) was crucified around 29 or 30 A.D. (Latin, anno domini, in the year of the Lord), or as the politically correct now say, C.E. (in the common era). In eastern Christendom (the Orthodox churches), this commemoration will not occur until May 3rd.

I told you in an earlier post that shingles were excruciating, and I told you that I pondered the word excruciating and realized it means “out of the cross” or “from the cross.”

I don’t mean to imply in any way that shingles are the worst pain a human can experience. My dad died of pancreatic cancer. My mother-in-law died of bone cancer. My mother died after an eight-year battle with cancer. Each of them experienced excruciating pain.

And then there’s Jesus. He was crucified. He was nailed to a cross.

Shingles are as nothing compared to that.

Historians will tell you that a lot of human beings were crucified by the Roman Empire over the years. So what was so different about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?

I’m glad you asked.

He had done nothing wrong. He was the Son of God. He was the Lamb who came to take away the sin of the world. And we killed Him.

So now I am in pain and Jesus suffered for me. We have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). Praise the Lord! But our attention on this Good Friday should not be on the pain Jesus experienced or on his method of execution but instead on what his death accomplished.

That He died for my sins makes me free from the penalty of sin, which is death (Romans 6:23). That He rose from the dead three days later gives me everlasting life (John 11:25-26). Yes, my body may die, but He will raise me up on the last day (First Corinthians 15:52-57). He is the firstborn of many brethren (Romans 8:29-30).

These things I believe.

I do not follow Him perfectly or as faithfully as I ought to. Nevertheless, I follow Him.

God help me. I’m a Christian.

Random thoughts, or It must be the medicine talking

You have no idea how bummed out (for British readers, the expression has absolutely nothing to do with one’s bum being out; it means depressed) I become when a post of mine receives no comments.

On some days, trying to blog is very much like whistling in the dark, spitting into the wind, casting one’s bread upon the waters (a reference to Ecclesiastes 11:1), shouting into the abyss (pick metaphor -- or rather, simile -- of choice).

Our grandparents said, “between Scylla and Charybdis,” our parents said, “between the Devil and the deep blue sea” and we say, “between a rock and a hard place.”

Our grandparents said, “the Sabbath,” our parents said, “Sunday” and we say, “the weekend."

The decline and fall of Western civilization is almost complete.

In this post I have decided to stick with American punctuation and forego the British. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, join the club.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.

When you're down at the sea and an eel bites your knee, that’s a moray.


(Photo used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

The moon is full tonight.

I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

“The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

“Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

If anyone knows about naked shingles, it’s me.

According to Wikipedia, William Butler Yeats responds directly to Arnold’s pessimism in his four-line poem, “The Nineteenth Century and After” (1929):

“Though the great song return no more
There’s keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.”

I think Yeats has described exactly how I feel when a post of mine receives no comments.

I doubt that I shall be blogging much in the next few days, as I have a funeral to play for this afternoon, and a rehearsal tonight with the women’s ensemble, and a Good Friday service tomorrow, and an Easter Sunrise service, and the regular Sunday morning service to boot. Well, not to boot, but you know what I mean.

So I’ll see ya when I see ya.

If anyone cares.

My five-day absence explained, plus a reading

Five days have elapsed since my last post, a rather long time for me as I normally post every other day, give or take. Here’s why:

My modem gave up the ghost and I didn’t have access to the internet.

It’s that simple. I reported it Sunday morning to my provider’s technical support group and after remotely running a few tests of their own they agreed with me that my modem was indeed frozen, freaked out, dead, kaput.

They said they would order a new one on Monday and that I would receive it via FedEx on Tuesday.

Tuesday dawned bright and early and I arose expectantly.
I do that every morning, but never mind.

Slowly the hours ticked by. There was no FedEx guy at my door at 9:00 a.m., no FedEx guy at my door at 12:00 noon, and no FedEx guy at my door at 3:00 p.m. [Editor’s note. Note the inclusion of the Oxford comma. --RWP]

Just as I was about to give up all hope and begin composing a nasty letter to my internet service provider giving them a piece of my mind, the FedEx guy showed up around 6:00 p.m., rang the doorbell, and was back in his truck before I could get to the door. I found the precious long-awaited package on my doorsill.

So now I am back in Blogland with all you wonderful people sitting out there in the dark nice folks. Just telling you about my ordeal has made me too tired to post anything else.

Except I did tell Snowbrush in a reply to his comment on the previous post that my next post would contain more about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” so:

Here it is, read aloud and everything (3:59).

P.S. -- Now in the fifth week of my shingles, I am still taking the pain medication Neurontin three times a day. Can you tell?

P.P.S. -- My hiatus caused my number of page views per day to drop from 502 to 208, so I am including the name “Pope Francis I” here to get my blog traffic back up to speed. If that doesn’t work, there’s always Susan Boyle.


(Screenshot from DVD copy of the film Sunset Boulevard showing Gloria Swanson.)

The New ABCs

Away with the horribly old-fashioned A is for apple, B is for ball, C is for cat. They’re too boring.

It makes more sense in today’s complex world to introduce our intellectually gifted, computer-literate, upwardly mobile children to the New ABCs, which have been specifically designed to prepare young sophisticates for the world of tomorrow:

A -- Avidly admiring Adelaide’s antiquated architecture, aspiring actor Alfie Armstrong, amused, ate an apple. Amanda Axelrod, Alfie’s aunt and an amateur architect, absentmindedly ate an apricot. Afterward, assorted apes and antelopes attacked Alfie, an absolutely awful alligator ate Aunt Amanda, and ants, always aggravating, ate apple-and-apricot appetizers.

B -- “Besides baking biscuits,” boasted blueblood billionaire bricklayer Benjy Bickerson breezily, “busy baby brother Bernard, bashful bachelor, broke broccoli, boiled bananas, blended batter, brewed beer, bought buttonhooks, bagged birdseed, befriended barking beagles, blew bubbles between Brooklyn’s bigger buildings, but borough’s better brokers blacklisted Bernard because baby brother belched before breakfast.”

C -- Clever Claudia Cornwall, collegiate carousel cleaner, coolly climbed Colorado’s classic crevices, clowning crazily, crying “Corral crustaceans! Collect cucumbers! Close Carlsbad Caverns!” continuously.

D -- Dizzy debutante Daphne Dingleberry, Denver’s dimpled darling, deftly drove dapper Daniel Doppelganger’s distinguished Dusenberg downtown during December Dental Days despite daily demonstrations denouncing defective dentifrice distribution.

E -- England’s elegant Evelyn Epworth, ermined, enrages eternally exquisite Elizabeth every Easter; even Elizabeth’s emotions explode eventually. Enraptured, Egyptologist Edward Emerson excavated emerald eucalyptus, evoking Evelyn’s ennui.

F -- Fresh from February’s fig festival, fertile French farmer Francois Français, feeling fine, flamboyantly fathered four following fun-filled fortnight frantically fighting Finnish flotilla fleeing Frankfurt’s fish-feeding frenzy fiasco.

G -- Gowned gorgeously, Gilda Gottlieb, Glendale's golden girl, greeted Gabriella Gildersleeve grandly. “Greetings!” giggled Gilda, gleefully giving Gabriella gangrenous glowworms. “Gracious! Gross! Ghastly! Gosh! Go!” gasped Gabriella, groaning. Gargling, Gabriella's goofy grandmother, Gloria Grambling, growled “Gesundheit!” girlishly.

and so on.

Want to give it a try?

P.S. -- Just for klahanie (Gary), who likes to start with the end and work backwards, here’s my offering for Zed, er, Zee:

Z -- “Zay!” zcreeched Zanzibar's zaniest zookeeper, Zelda Zymase, zending zebras zcurrying, “Zinfandel zertainly zounds zilly!”

If it’s Thursday, this must be The Religious Corner

Here, from the Jesus Creed blog, is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time.

You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.

But I hope you will.