Tree of Forgiveness
by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones
Last week, Gerry and I were lucky enough to view this painting
at The Lady Lever Art Gallery
in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England
Burne - Jones' treatment of forgiveness made me think of a series of passages I have saved over the years, all with the common theme that forgiveness requires searching your own soul and using your thinking cap:
"In short, I began to think, and to think indeed is one real advance from hell to heaven. All that hardened state and temper of soul, which I said so much of before, is but a deprivation of thought; he that is restored to his thinking, is restored to himself."
"To Forgive: Reprove, Restore, Reclaim"
on the
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony
Additional thoughts on the topic of forgiveness can be found
<~ <~ <~ by scrolling down in the column to your left
Hawwah*
She was Goddess of the Faeryland
Until she lost the God's new toy --
A red ball of clay --
Lost it accidentally one day
Playing in the orchard.
The God would never forgive her.
He forbade her walking in the garden with him.
He called her serpent
And, divine though she was,
She crawled on her belly
For thousands of years
Unable to forgive herself.
L'N
*The Hebrew word for Eve.
Autobiography of Eve
ReplyDeleteWearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
~ by Ansel Elkins