Fading Memories

It's Easter! I've completely lost my voice through a horrible cold that couldn't have come at a more inopportune time -- but I managed to serve the Easter service. We had a good Lent, I managed to lay off the wine, oil and animal products except for one piece of cheese a day (after I noticed I started getting rather dizzy), lost about one-ninth of my weight -- and although I didn't manage to read the entire gospel according to St. Mark in Greek, I did get back into coding -- weirdly enough. And now I've got three weeks of holidays for coding, visiting museums and Wroclaw, for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

Anyway: Christos Anesti! Christos Voskrese! Christus is opgestaan! Christ has Risen!

At least for me. The very first Sunday of Lent we first took a look at the 16th century house over our Church. (The Church bought the house to get the cellar so we could convert it into a place to drink coffee after services, so we could convert our current coffeeroom into an extension to the "nave" of the church.) We liked what we saw, so we decided to try to buy it.

Problem was, we had only until the very last day of Lent, that is, six weeks, to buy it because of some tax-related issue that would have bumped up the price with about 17.000 euros. Speed was, accordingly, of the essence. And house buying is already quite nerve-wracking. It became impossible to fast properly, so I've missed the Big Red Spiritual Reset Button time this year, which makes it hard to have a proper Easter, John Chrysostom's Easter Homily notwithstanding. A pity, because various circumstances outside my control made a good, thorough Lent a bit of a necessity for me, this year. And we're not muslims: once it's Easter, you cannot decide to somehow do the skipped fasting anyway at a later date. Easter is Easter, for everyone. Again, see John Chrysostomom.

We succeeded, despite complications like Irina losing her job in a very stressful way right after the mortgage application was signed, the seller's representative going on holiday in the middle of it all and more. Friday 30 March we signed the papers -- one hour before the absolute deadline, and we became the proud owners of a big, sixteenth century house. At least, parts of it are C16, and there are parts of all the following centuries.

During Holy Week we started renovating, ripping out the ca. 1930 partitions in the attic, the C18 maid's room in the attic and more. We discovered rotten beams in the roof, a sewer gas outlet right inside the house, the kitchen ventilator ends in what used to be the previous owner's study. All the fun things. Builders, painters, gas & electricity people all offered to the do work for us for ridiculously inflated prices. Except the painters, who wanted more money than we have, but were quite reasonable in their estimate. There's a lot of wood in that house, all of it bare. Apparently the previous owner, who was a shaman of sorts, believed that bare wood was spiritually important.

But most of the scaffolding for the new walls for the kids' rooms in the attic are up, friends of ours are helping with building, my dad is over to help with the work. Progress is being made!

Anyway: here are a couple of piccies of the "before" state:

Facade (the church under our new house is being altered, too, hence the wooden shed):

Cellars (not our property, more's the pity):

Stairs:

Kitchen:

Front room:

Study and front room:

Stairs to first floor:

There's also a big bed room, a bathroom, a guest room, a laundry room and we're making three bedrooms and another bathroom in the attic.

Oh, and: Christus is opgestaan! Christ is risen! Christos voskrese! Christos anesti! (Father Theodore also added Rumanian and Finnish to this years string of translations, but I can't spell those languages.)

This year is one of those rare years where western Christianity and eastern Christianity celebreate Easter at the same date (excluding those people who keep the Julian calendar, of course, there's always something). When that happens the children in our parish take part in the great procession of all children from all parishes and communities in Deventer, no matter the denomination that goes along all churches. There's a donkey, too, usually a young one. The procession passes our own church and Father Theodore blesses all the sweets-on-a-stick we call "palmpasens" that the children carry.

That's me and Father Theodore waiting for the children to arrive:

A blessing with a vengeance:

Next week is Holy Week. I'll be in Church pretty much permanently from Wednesday evening to Sunday afternoon. Accordingly, I won't be able to exercise my gift of the gab to make sure KOffice gets as many Google Summer of Code slots as possible within the KDE project, but no doubt others will fight the good fight. It's amazing -- there hasn't been a single bad GSOC proposal for KOffice this year. They were all really great, all nine or ten of them!

(Pictures by Menna)

1pi and 1pe are linguistic abbreviations for first person plural inclusive and first person plural exclusive respectively. Some languages, like Limbu, make this disctinction pretty thoroughly. Pronouns and verbs differ in form according to whether they "we, including you" is meant or "we, excluding you" is meant.

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I've been watching from the corner of my eye the life videocast from the Church of St. George today. The Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope celebrated the Holy Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I was hoping for a miraculous restoration of full communion -- for the Patriarch to beckon the pope with the chalice, or something like that.

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Our family prays every night -- a very, very, very short and abbreviated version of vespers -- and we like to light a karbounakia, or small bit of charcoal, and add a grain of incense. There are all kinds of good, theological and pious reasons to do so, but it's fun, too, and it helps if the living room smells like Church, when you want to pray.

Our stock, bought last year in Greece, is now sadly depleted, so I was rather interested when a bit of outre research(1) led me to the Hermitage of the Holy Cross. Here they sell incense... But it's almost as if they're selling pipe tobacco!(Note: I do not recommend smoking, not even a pipe, although it is surely something every wise wife should allow her husband, the old English proverb says "allow your man his pipe and his hobby and you've got him chained for good", but smoking etc. A hobby like KDE, though, cannot be but good for ones health.)i

In any case, Casper Boemann has just fixed the rotating-big-images bug in Krita. Hurray!

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¹Roey Katz on #koffice reminded me (without knowing himself) that I should check Ship of Fools, from whence I went to Monachos, where a discussion on head scarves attended me to the question of long hair and beards for men, where I learned that angels are trespassing on the 96th canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

I bet I earned that penny for my thoughts now!

Christ has risen! (all over the world)For those who've been wondering where I was last week, well, I was in Church pretty much solid from Wednesday evening until Sunday morning, 3:30 (CET). And afterwards we had a feast, so I wasn't home until six o'clock this morning.

Holy week is the one week in the year during which I feel most completely alive; when every day seems to be an eternity in itself. During Holy Week I never can believe that there exists a world outside the church services -- everything else is so thin and unreal. That goes for work, but it also goes for KOffice and everything else. Christos anesti!

Which is good, of course. Church is the place where one goes to experience the Eternal and to praise the living God, who his risen from the dead and thereby conquered death itself. And Easter is not commemoration, or re-enactment, but actualisation -- making the eternal truth present for us. Christ is resurrected in reality every time when the priest first sings "Christus is opgestaan!

And this morning, I'm going about the house, singing the Easter troparion in Greek, Dutch and Church Slavonic. Eating chocolate eggs, kissing my wife and hugging the kids. We've got a growing parish full of people (we really don't fit in our Church anymore) I love, and I've given almost all of them the Easter kiss this morning. We had the Gospel in Dutch, Russian, Greek, French, English, Frisian, Macedonian, Georgian and Geez. And I'm blogging incoherently -- but full of joy. Христос Воскресе! Χριστος Aνεστη!

I'm forced to lay off the hacking until December 14, when my new laptop will hopefully arrive. Which means I've got some time to pick up other things that don't need a fast computer. Like continuing an old project of mine: learning to read the bible in Greek. My parents gave me a nice copy of Rahlfs edition of the Septuaginta for my birthday in 1993, and I've been working up the courage to get started on it ever since. (My attempts at Hebrew have been even more laughable, at least I can read modern Greek a little.)

Fortunately, there is a very nice KDE application that's a lot of help, namely Bibletime. Bibletime can use various resources, such as bible texts, lexicons and commentaries and uses the sword library to load them. There is plenty of material -- translations in all kind of languages.

And there is also a free electronic edition of the Septuaginta. (LXX, so called because the tradition will have it that seventy-two Alexandrinian Jewish scholars translated all of the Law in seventy-two days -- the text is the oldest text of the Law we have, even older than the Hebrew texts that have come down to us, and is used as the authoritative text in the Orthodox Church).

There's also a word list, the so-called Strong's Numbers that is a reasonable fit for this text. Only recently, even after I got my Rahlfs edition, a real lexicon to the Septuagint has been published -- and then another one got published, for good measure. The riches! The Septuagint is a difficult book full of obscure koine Greek, neologisms and hebraisms so a good lexicon is important here. Pity I blew my book budget already...

Strong's glosses really aren't quite good enough: for instance, I wish that in "εν αρχη εποιησεν ο θεος τον ουρανον και την γην", "γην" wasn't glossed as "a primary particle of emphasis or qualification (often used with other particles prefixed):--and besides, doubtless, at least, yet." I am fairly sure that "γην" means "earth", here... But that's not bibletime's fault. And the Strong's numbers are still useful, especially when having a KJV or Statenvertaling parallel to the LXX.

But all the pieces are basically complete: text, translation, glosses. If the app doesn't suck, I can get started.

Bibletime's usage of Strong's numbers has improved a lot, too. Previously, the numbers were shown inline in the text itself, breaking up the flow. Clicking on a number would show the gloss. Now there's a nice little box that shows the gloss if your mouse cursor is over a Greek word. Bibletime is very usable, very polished, very helpful and very stable. One of the better KDE applications that are developed outside KDE svn.

Last Saturday it was 25 years ago that our parish priest with other Dutch orthodox believers founded the 'Vereniging van Orthodoxen "H. Nikolaas van Myra"'. This society has as its primary aim to bring believers, clergy and laypeople, from all jurisdictions (Russian, Greek, Rue Daru Russian, Serbian, Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Georgian, Finnish -- and there are more) together. Whether or not we succeed in that aim, the vereniging still exists 25 years later and that we celebrated.

Saturday morning we had an pontifical liturgy (with our own vladyka Gabriel and episcopos Athenagoras) in the 11th century Greater or Lebuinus Church in Deventer. This church belongs to the Protestant Church, but they gave us the freedom of the place. We could even use the old high altar for our altar -- for the first time since the reformation, the Holy Liturgy was celebrated on those steps.

The most touching moment was when our bishop, Vladyka Gabriel, took the little dish with the antidoron after the communion of the priests from me and brought it to the Jansenist (old-Catholic) primate and the Roman Catholic bishop who had been seated in our altar and bade them eat and drink of it in the hope that one they he and they could celebrate together in full communion and as token of esteem and friendship.

(Next day our priest asked me to do the same for the visiting father Antoine from the Roman Catholic monastery of Chevetogne.)

Anyway, we even made it to the website of our town:

I'm the right-most acolyte, the one carrying the dikyrie -- didn't know my beard had reached these proportions yet...

A thoroughly up-to-date saint, is Saint Basil the Great. Here is his opinion on Usenet (του Αγιου Βασιλειου περι του Πνευματοσ βιβλιον):

There is no lack in these days of captious listeners and questioners; but to find a character desirous of information, and seeking the truth as a remedy for ignorance, is very difficult.  Just as in the hunter's snare, or in the soldier's ambush, the trick is generally ingeniously concealed, so it is with the inquiries of the majority of the questioners who advance arguments, not so much with the view of getting any good out of them, as in order that, in the event of their failing to elicit answers which chime in with their own desires, they may seem to have fair ground for controversy.

(KPdf, by the way, is incredible nowadays. Not only does KPdf handle bookmarks, table of contents really well, it also handles Greek letters, can even copy the Greek in the pdf I'm reading now to the clipboard and finally renders the text just beautifully.)