REFLECTING LIGHT

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.

Mary the Magdalene 07/21/2024

The Saturdays of our Lives 04/20/2024

The Saturdays of our Lives The Saturdays of our lives are sometimes our darkest hours, as we wait, like disciples of old, for the new life promised in Christ. In this episode, Mandy speaks to this darkness as we wait and hope. artwork: The Grey Havens, by , as seen in the INTO THE WEST, Lyrics by Annie Lennox, Produced by Howard Shore Lay down Your sweet and weary head The night is falling You have come to journey's end Sleep now And dream of the ones who came before They are calling From across the distant shore Why do you weep? What are these tears upon your face? Soon you will see All of your fears will pass away Safe in my arms You're only sleeping What can you see On the horizon? Why do the white gulls call? Across the sea A pale moon rises The ships have come to carry you home And all will turn To silver glass A light on the water All Souls pass Hope fades Into the world of night Through shadows falling Out of memory and time Don't say We have come now to the end White shores are calling You and I will meet again And you'll be here in my arms Just sleeping And all will turn To silver glass A light on the water Grey ships pass Into the West READING: For Holy Saturday: Pg. 174-175 From: Have a Beautiful Terrible Day by Kate Bowler. (SO MANY GEMS IN THIS BOOK! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!) To purchase on Amazon: or on Target: HEBREWS 12:5-12 “My son, do not despise the []chastening of the Lord, Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him; 6 For whom the Lord loves He chastens, And scourges every son whom He receives.” 7 If[] you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? 8 But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. 9 Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they indeed for a few days chastened usas seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. 11 Now no []chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. 12 Therefore strengthen the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed. /episode/index/show/reflectinglight/id/30816828

"The Least of These 04/12/2024

Beautiful Easter Mayhem 04/05/2024

Master the Tempest is Raging! 03/22/2024

"Wonderfully and Fearfully Made" 03/02/2024

The Fourth Great Commandment 02/17/2024

Kindness 02/03/2024

Word of the Year: Affection 01/27/2024

Word of the Year: Affection "And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rilke Word of the Year: "Affection" af·fec·tion Synonyms of affection 1: a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something : tender attachment : 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: philostorgos: tenderly loving Original Word:φιλόστοργος, ον Phonetic Spelling:(fil-os'-tor-gos) Definition:tenderly loving Usage:tenderly loving, kindly affectionate to Reference: For the full text of the Jefferson Lecture 2012, by Wendell Barry, please visit: 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 who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.” (Howards End, page 15, 112). Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book: “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you see?” (Ibid., page 214). To have beautiful buildings, for example, people obviously must want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful, but evidently they also must love the places where the buildings are to be built. For a long time, in city and countryside, architecture has disregarded the nature and influence of places. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (Ibid., page 30)." “The light within,” I think, means affection, affection as motive and guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain everything. Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book: “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you see?” The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk: truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished. But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone. /episode/index/show/reflectinglight/id/29361798

Knowing 01/20/2024

Epiphany 01/06/2024

Epiphany Welcome to 2024~ We start the year by concluding the Christmas liturgial season ending in Epiphany! epiph·a·ny 1 capitalized : January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ 2: an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being 3a(1): a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the nature or meaning of something (2): an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking (3): an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure b: a revealing scene or moment Journey of the Magi By T.S. Elliot A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. "Every hero needs to venture into the Belly of the Beast. It’s essential to be devoured at least once by the monster. The hero never begins as a hero. He becomes a hero, and that entails the annihilation of his own, unheroic, former self. The hero always undergoes a metamorphosis, from ordinary to extraordinary. The hero, like the snake, sheds its old skin and takes on a new form. To change, you must enter a sacred space, a transformational space. Nothing ever changes in the ordinary space. The familiar world keeps you the same. It has no alchemical power. If you are confined in the same old world, you remain the same old person. You must cross the threshold into the New World."--David Sinclair (Taken from the instagram account: @robertedwardgrant on 1-3-2024 /episode/index/show/reflectinglight/id/29361708

Advent IV: "Tomorrow Come I Into the World!" 12/22/2023

Advent IV: "Tomorrow Come I Into the World!" Thank you for joining me for this advent season! Wishing you and yours a truly magical, beautiful holiday season! xoxo Mandy For more information on "Forbidden France: In Search of the Black Madonna" visit: Advent Reading: Helaman 13: 1 And now it came to pass that , the Lamanite, did prophesy a great many more things which cannot be written. 2 And behold, he said unto them: Behold, I give unto you a sign; for years more cometh, and behold, then cometh the Son of God to redeem all those who shall believe on his name. 3 And behold, this will I give unto you for a at the time of his coming; for behold, there shall be great lights in heaven, insomuch that in the night before he cometh there shall be no darkness, insomuch that it shall appear unto man as if it was day. 4 Therefore, there shall be one and a night and a day, as if it were one day and there were no night; and this shall be unto you for a sign; for ye shall know of the rising of the sun and also of its setting; therefore they shall know of a surety that there shall be two days and a night; nevertheless the night shall not be darkened; and it shall be the night before he is . 5 And behold, there shall a new arise, such an one as ye never have beheld; and this also shall be a sign unto you. 6 And behold this is not all, there shall be many and wonders in heaven. 7 And it shall come to pass that ye shall all be amazed, and wonder, insomuch that ye shall to the earth. 8 And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall on the Son of God, the same shall have everlasting life. 3 Nephi 1:4-22 4 And it came to pass that in the commencement of the ninety and second year, behold, the prophecies of the prophets began to be fulfilled more fully; for there began to be signs and greater miracles wrought among the people. 5 But there were some who began to say that the time was past for the words to be fulfilled, which were by Samuel, the Lamanite. 6 And they began to over their brethren, saying: Behold the time is past, and the words of Samuel are not fulfilled; therefore, your joy and your faith concerning this thing hath been vain. 7 And it came to pass that they did make a great uproar throughout the land; and the people who believed began to be very sorrowful, lest by any means those things which had been spoken might not come to pass. 8 But behold, they did watch steadfastly for and that night and that day which should be as one day as if there were no night, that they might know that their faith had not been vain. 9 Now it came to pass that there was a day set apart by the , that all those who believed in those traditions should be except the should come to pass, which had been given by Samuel the prophet. 10 Now it came to pass that when Nephi, the son of Nephi, saw this wickedness of his people, his heart was exceedingly sorrowful. 11 And it came to pass that he went out and bowed himself down upon the earth, and cried mightily to his God in behalf of his people, yea, those who were about to be destroyed because of their faith in the tradition of their fathers. 12 And it came to pass that he cried mightily unto the Lord that day; and behold, the of the Lord came unto him, saying: 13 Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the be given, and on the come I into the world, to show unto the world that I will fulfil all that which I have caused to be by the mouth of my holy prophets. 14 Behold, I unto my own, to all things which I have made known unto the children of men from the of the world, and to do the , the Father and of the Son—of the Father because of me, and of the Son because of my flesh. And behold, the time is at hand, and this night shall the sign be given. 15 And it came to pass that the words which came unto Nephi were fulfilled, according as they had been spoken; for behold, at the going down of the there was darkness; and the people began to be astonished because there was no darkness when the night came. 16 And there were many, who had not believed the words of the prophets, who to the earth and became as if they were dead, for they knew that the great of destruction which they had laid for those who believed in the words of the prophets had been frustrated; for the sign which had been given was already at hand. 17 And they began to know that the Son of God must shortly appear; yea, in fine, all the people upon the face of the whole earth from the to the east, both in the land north and in the land south, were so exceedingly astonished that they fell to the earth. 18 For they knew that the prophets had testified of these things for many years, and that the sign which had been given was already at hand; and they began to fear because of their iniquity and their unbelief. 19 And it came to pass that there was no darkness in all that night, but it was as light as though it was mid-day. And it came to pass that the sun did rise in the morning again, according to its proper order; and they knew that it was the day that the Lord should be , because of the which had been given. 20 And it had come to pass, yea, all things, every whit, according to the words of the prophets. 21 And it came to pass also that a new did appear, according to the word. 22 And it came to pass that from this time forth there began to be sent forth among the people, by Satan, to harden their hearts, to the intent that they might not believe in those and wonders which they had seen; but notwithstanding these lyings and deceivings the part of the people did believe, and were converted unto the Lord. Peace on earth to all people of good will. /episode/index/show/reflectinglight/id/29207128

Advent III: The Power of your Intense Fragility 12/15/2023

ADVENT II: See the Face of God 12/09/2023

Advent Week 1: The Condescension of God 12/01/2023

Recognizing Good 11/25/2023

Come Away 11/18/2023

Lament 11/11/2023

Lament Commentary from, Getting Involved with God, by Ellen Davis Psalms referenced: 102, 42, 22, 88, 126, and 130. LAMENT IS: · A form of prayer that addresses God. · A clear statement that NAMES the truth of the evil, the suffering or the pain. · Affirmation of God’s faithfulness · Affirmation of the hope of deliverance. · Freedom to feel terrible in God’s presence. · Communal—gives us something to do with suffering, has us present with it. · Carries the action to God-4 God to act, in hope. · Calling God out on promises made! IS NOT: · an answer to the problem; it doesn’t solve anything. · Not complaining or griping. · Not a way to avoid suffering to but a way to lean into it. Lament is A REFLECTION OF TRUE RELATIONSHIP! LAMENT SPEAKS OF THE CLOSENESS TO BE REAL AND HONEST! "BECAUSE we have faith, we have the capacity to lament." Mandy Green Psalm 13 1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? 3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, 4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. 5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. 6 I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me. Psalm 42 As the hart longs after the water brooks, So my soul longs for you, Elohim. 2 My soul thirsts for Elohim, for the living God: When shall I come and appear before the Elohim? 3 My tears have been my food day and night, In this, they continually say unto me, Where are your Elohim? 5 Why are you bowed down my soul? And why are you disquieted in me? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him For the help of his countenance. 7 Deep calls to deep at the noise of thy water spouts: All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. 8 Yet Jehovah will command his lovingkindness in the day-time; And in the night his song shall be with me, My prayer to the God of my life. 9 I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? Why am I dark because of the oppression of the enemy? 10 As with a shattering in my bones, mine adversaries torment me, While they say all day to me, Where is your God? 11 Why art thou cast down, my soul? And why do you rage within me? Hope in God; for I shall praise him, Who is the Yeshuah (salvation) of my countenance, and my God. (My Translation) /episode/index/show/reflectinglight/id/28448558