About baptism, holidays and water

... New Year's holidays end. At the end of any holiday, it is necessary to cultivate the instinct of destruction, since the holiday is essentially obligated to spend itself well. It's time to part with garlands, burn the necessary on the necessary day ...

I do not put live Christmas trees.

By the way, it seems that in Georgia a fine was introduced for the sale and purchase of live Christmas trees. I can't say for sure. But I like it.

Let the living Christmas trees remain alive.

Therefore, I never loved all sorts of songs about the "small Christmas tree", etc. It was a pity to the tears of the Christmas tree. It is known what they end.

And it is sad that even Okudzhavsky farewell to deer, in love, rescue, the blood looks superficial. But spins in my head.

This post is exactly for the Orthodox Feast of Baptism, with which all Orthodox and congratulations.

In Georgia, there are no ordan ice-cuts, since there are no such regular and deep snow, except perhaps high, where it is closer to the clouds than to the river bottom ... I was also near the Jordan River, which is flowing calmly, not so violently, transparent so that the fish is visible, and sometimes quite large floats. And on the other side there is a thoughtful heron with a blue beak, reflected in the water in a question mark. Actually, she could have placed these pictures here (if anyone has a desire, then I will let the Jordan with herons here), but now I somehow want to do something else.

In Tbilisi, the queues in churches for holy water are usually built, the temples are filled, of course, throughout Georgia. And the meaning is not in the materialized shrines on the very thing ...

But you are unlikely to say better than the father of Alexander Shmeman. Therefore, right now it is precisely these words of his words, from the book "Diaries. 1973-1983".

“Why did I think it ... - People, as if far from" churchness "and" theology ", often have the best theological intuition? Is it because they have already been constrained by some kind of “order”, should “apologetics” and “spiritual benefits” should make from all? The horror of pseudoscience. It is enough for a person to learn the key of “piety”, and for him it is no longer necessary - though honesty, a sense of surprise and admiration, a criterion of authenticity (anything: beauty, art, good ...) dies in him. Moreover, it begins to pull it on everything mediocre, gray, slave, if only it was pious. The terrible meaning of the emergence of "holy water" in Christianity: whatever you cover it, it becomes sacred and saint. And the funny thing is that no one, even the Germans, knows how this "holy water" arose. For the fact of the matter is that it arose only and exclusively from piety, from the religious (and not Christian) desire not to truth, not to God, but to the "material shrine." And this means from the denial of water (for we are baptized not in the "holy" water, but in the water, which is therefore holy, which is restored as water: life and death, peace and sky, communion and ablution, and it is in this restoration that the meaning of the baptismal and baptismal consecration of water ...). "