View allAll Photos Tagged Devotion
ca. 1914 - ca. 1918
Soldier smoking a pipe and reading a letter. Inset of woman u.r. Verse printed beneath image: Darling, my heart beats fast for you ...
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Little India, Singapore
Thaipusam (Tamil: தைப்பூசம், Taippūcam ?) is a Hindu festival celebrated mostly by the Tamil community on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai (January/February). It is celebrated not only in countries where the Tamil community constitutes a majority, but also in countries where Tamil communities are smaller, such as Singapore and Malaysia.The festival is also referred to as Thaipooyam or Thaippooyam (Malayalam: തൈപ്പൂയം, Taippūyaṁ ?). The word Thaipusam is derived from the month name Thai and Pusam, which refers to a star that is at its highest point during the festival. The festival commemorates the occasion when Parvati gave Murugan a vel "spear" so he could vanquish the evil demon Soorapadam.
Devotees prepare for the celebration by cleansing themselves through prayer and fasting approx-48 days before Thaipusam. Kavadi-bearers have to perform elaborate ceremonies at the time of assuming the kavadi and at the time of offering it to Murugan. The kavadi-bearer observes celibacy and take only pure, Satvik food, once a day, while continuously thinking of God.
On the day of the festival, devotees will shave their heads and undertake a pilgrimage along a set route while engaging in various acts of devotion, notably carrying various types of kavadi (burdens). At its simplest this may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common.
The simplest kavadi is a semicircular decorated canopy supported by a wooden rod that is carried on the shoulders, to the temple. In addition, some have a small spear through their tongue, or a spear through the cheeks. The spear pierced through his tongue or cheeks reminds him constantly of Lord Murugan. It also prevents him from speaking and gives great power of endurance. Other types of kavadi involve hooks stuck into the back and either pulled by another walking behind or being hung from a decorated bullock cart or more recently a tractor, with the point of incisions of the hooks varying the level of pain. The greater the pain the more god-earned merit.
The 2020 Holi Adventure with Paramahamsa Vishwananda was infused with devotion as it took place in Vrindavan, India, and the ashram of the Shree Giridhar Dham. Fortunately, it was held just before the onset of big changes in the world due to the Coronavirus, so a large number of devotees from all over the world were able to experience the joyous festival of colours known as ‘Holi’ and visit many of the sacred sites where Lord Krishna’s lilas took place.
During this time, new deities were installed at the ashram, too: Panduranga, Rukmini, and a unique Hanuman/Garuda.
A truly memorable trip for everyone in so many ways!
paramahamsavishwananda.com
bhaktimarga.org
I loved these luminescent red candles against the background of celestial blue. And the gathering of saints, who are present to us through the icons.
If to pray, then better - in Holy Land! In Jerusalem the prayers most rapidly reach our Lord...
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Russian Orthodox Easter will come tomorrow!
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P.S.
BTW, according Russian Orthodox tradition, the head must be always covered with scarf, when You are entering the church!
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I.
"To frame our mind for even resurrection..."
-Aleksandr Blok
II.
"....................................
And all earthly at once will be thrown
In the bottomless gulf of the dark,
And above it will slowly grow
Silence - seven bright hues in the arc.
And the tune, so youthful and sole,
In the silence will gently wake up –
Lulled by life, strings of beautiful soul,
That is strained like a beautiful harp."
-Aleksandr Blok
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PHOTO:
taken in Russian Church of Holy Trinity, Jerusalem, Israel.
Just a repost (and remake) of this Photo
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Created with fd's Flickr Toys.
This is Tucker. He was my Grampas dog. He is 11 years old and was completely devoted to my Grampa. Followed him room to room, on the scooter, and eventually at his bed side. All for the occasional pat or "good boy." Dogs are Amazing.
@ Mahamuni temple, Mandalay - Myanmar - XT10 - 35mm F1.4 - raw processed with Darktable - DSCF0215dm
St Matthew, Portman Road, Ipswich
In the 1960s, Ipswich went mad. Town planners devised a scheme whereby the population would rise towards half a million, and the existing town centre would be encircled and crossed by urban motorways. They didn't get very far before the men in white coats came and took them away, releasing them into the wild somewhere like Croydon or Wolverhampton; but the towering Civic Centre, the brutalist police station and courts buildings were evidence of their ambitions (the Civic Centre has since been demolished), and the four lane Civic Drive cuts across what was the Mount residential area, the little terraces all demolished to make way for the 20th century.
Now, the new Ipswich plan designates this whole area for residential use, and the civil servants have all moved down to the river. This new plan, if it emerges, can only serve St Matthew well, sitting beside Civic Drive as it does, and cut off from the town centre by it.
St Matthew is, perhaps, less well-known than the other working town centre churches. Partly, this is because it is the only one of them which is kept locked, but also because it is such an effort to get to if you are a visitor. Because of this, many people don't realise that it contains a treasure of national importance. It is the early 16th Century font, which is quite unlike any other in Suffolk, and perhaps is unique in England.
Before we come to it, the church building itself is worth examining. This must once have been quite a small church, but is now a big one. Its core is 15th century, including the lower part of the tower. Nothing else is. Its 19th century expansion can be explained by the proximity of the Ipswich Barracks, for this became the Garrison church. This resulted in the huge aisles, as wide as the nave. The chancel was also rebuilt, but retaining its medieval roof.
Until 1970, the church was hemmed in to the east, but the construction of Civic Drive opened up this view, which isn't a particularly good one, particularly from the north east. It comes as a surprise to find the west end on Portman Road quite so pastoral, but the hidden graveyard surrounding the tower is quite beautiful, and would once have been the familiar view. Ancestor hunters will be horrified to learn that the greater part of the graveyard was built over in the 1960s, with the construction of a church school to the south. All those graves are under the playground now. The part of the graveyard to the east fell foul of the road, and those immediately beyond the chancel were turned into a garden, now the preserve of homeless drinkers. A footpath runs along the north side, which will take you through to the main entrance, the west door, under the tower. You step into a broadly Victorian interior, and find the font in the north aisle.
East Anglia is famous for its Seven Sacrament fonts, 13 of which are in Suffolk. These show the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, and are rare survivals; so much Catholic iconography was destroyed by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and the Puritans of the 17th century.
Here at St Matthew, we find an even rarer survival of England's Catholic past; a series of images of events associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Before describing it, I have to make the point that this really is one of the dozen most important and significant medieval art survivals in Suffolk, and one of the finest late medieval fonts in England. There is nothing as good as this in the Victorian and Albert Museum, or in the British Museum. I make this point simply because on every occasion that I have visited, the person accompanying me (they don't let you vist the church on your own) did not seem to realise quite how important the font was, and gave the impression that the parish, though they care for it lovingly, also did not realise what a treasure, what a jewel, they had on the premises. "It's quite pretty," said the lady when I visited in September 2016.
Of the eight panels, two bear Tudor roses, but five of them depict events in the story of Mary, mother of Jesus. These five reliefs, and a sixth of the Baptism of Christ, are amazing art objects. They show the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin, The Adoration of the Magi, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven, and the Mother of God Enthroned. The guide books all describe these as the five Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. In fact, this is technically not the case, although certainly the font was intended for use in rosary meditations. After extensive research, the late John Blatchly showed convincingly that this font was paid for by the Rector John Bailey to celebrate the Miracle of the Maid of Ipswich, which occured in the parish in 1516 and was held in renown all over England in the few short years left before the Reformation intervened.
We know that the rosary was a hugely popular devotion in medieval England, and that a persons 'bedes' were their most valued possession. They played a major part in personal devotion, but were also important as a way of participating in the liturgy, and an expression of communal piety. Most pre-Reformation memorials show people holding their rosary beads. However, what we now think of as the Rosary sequence only dates from the 14th century or so, and was only one among many - the so-called Dominican Rosary, which is now the predominant meditation. The rosary was greatly popularised in England by St Thomas of Canterbury in the 12th century, who devised a series of seven joyful mysteries, including the Adoration of the Magi and the Assumption. Most sequences were of five meditations, and we must presume that this is what we find here. In time, the Joyful Mysteries would come to be Mary's earthly experiences, and the Glorious Mysteries her heavenly ones.
Because personal devotion was considered a diversion from congregational worship, and Marian devotion was thought superstitious, the rosary was completely anathematised by the 16th century Protestant reformers, and attempts were made to write it out of history, by destroying images of it. Within forty years of this font being produced, possession of rosary beads was punishable by death in England.
The survival of an image of the Assumption is particularly interesting. We still have much surviving evidence of religious life in England before the Church of England came along, but it does not really reveal to us the relative significance of different devotions, simply because some of the major cults and their images - St Thomas of Canterbury, for instance - were ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed. The Assumption is another case in point. 15th and early 16th century wills and bequests reveal a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin, particularly to the feast of the Assumption, which is celebrated on August 15th.
This is at the height of the harvest, of course, and it is not difficult to see the connection between this feast and the culmination of the farming year, or the importance to farmworkers of a festival at this time. More than 200 Suffolk parish churches were dedicated to the Assumption. When the dedications of Anglican churches were restored in the 19th century, after several centuries of disuse, these generally became 'St Mary', although some have been restored correctly since, notably Ufford. The Church of England, of course, does not recognise the doctrine of the Assumption.
Of equal significance are the other images, of course; extraordinary survivals. And why the Baptism of Christ? In fact, this is the most common 'odd panel out' on the Seven Sacrament fonts, and shows us the significance of 'anointing to serve' in the medieval church. The medieval church didn't see Baptism as a mere naming ceremony, or welcoming ceremony, as so many people seem to do today. It was the sacrament by which people received their commission as Christians.
The north aisle also retains panels from the rood screen, built into a 19th century screen.You might miss these, because chairs are stacked against them. Three of the panels show bishops, and the other two show cheering crowds of seven and nine people respectively. I do not think that these can be in their original configuration. Roy Tricker thought that the crowds were portraits of parishioners, but I have seen elsewhere a suggestion that this may have been the screen to the chantry altar of the guild of Erasmus, which was established here.
There is clear evidence of the location of at least one nave altar, since a squint kicks in from the north aisle. There are two good 17th century wall memorials in the chancel, the best being to Anthony Penning and his wife, depicting their children weeping, some holding skulls to show that they pre-deceased their parents.
Much of the 19th century woodwork is from the workshops of two major 19th century Ipswich carpenters, Henry Ringham and John Corder. Ringham's work can be found in several Suffolk churches, most notably St Mary le Tower and Great Bealings, while Corder was an architect responsible for several restorations, including Swilland. Both have Ipswich roads named after them.
The church has an extensive collection of late 19th and early 20th Century glass, not all of it good, but happily by a wide variety of workshops. The great curiosity is the window in the east end of the south aisle, which depicts Jane Trimmer Gaye, wife of a 19th Century Rector, flanked by female members of her husband's flock with images of birth and death. It was designed by her brother Frank Howard, and made by George Hedgeland. Another oddity is Percy Bacon's Christ flanked by St Edmund and St Felix - for the last hundred years the Saints have stood there with their names transposed.
There is a frankly functional modern screen, with a curious Anglo-catholic style rood, which looks most out of place, for St Matthew today is very much in the evangelical tradition. But the lady who allowed me entry thought it 'nice', so I expect nobody minds.
Tour de Suisse par l'Extérieur
Maison d'Ampère
André-Marie Ampère
André-Marie Ampère (/ˈæmpɪər/;[1] French: [ɑ̃pɛʁ]; 20 January 1775 – 10 June 1836)[2] was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him.
Biography[edit]
Andre-Marie Ampère was born on 20 January 1775 to Jean-Jacques Ampère, a prosperous businessman, and Jeanne Antoinette Desutières-Sarcey Ampère during the height of the French Enlightenment. He spent his childhood and adolescence at the family property at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or near Lyon.[3] Jean-Jacques Ampère, a successful merchant, was an admirer of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theories of education (as outlined in his treatise Émile) were the basis of Ampère’s education. Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling and pursue instead an “education direct from nature.” Ampère’s father actualized this ideal by allowing his son to educate himself within the walls of his well-stocked library. French Enlightenment masterpieces such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749) and Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie (volumes added between 1751 and 1772) thus became Ampère’s schoolmasters. The young Ampère, however, soon resumed his Latin lessons, which enabled him to master the works of Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli.
Work in electromagnetism[edit]
In September 1820, Ampère’s friend and eventual eulogist François Arago showed the members of the French Academy of Sciences the surprising discovery of Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted that a magnetic needle is deflected by an adjacent electric current. Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Furthering Ørsted’s experimental work, Ampère showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite directions, respectively - this laid the foundation of electrodynamics. He also applied mathematics in generalizing physical laws from these experimental results. The most important of these was the principle that came to be called Ampère’s law, which states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and to the intensities of their currents. Ampère also applied this same principle to magnetism, showing the harmony between his law and French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb’s law of magnetic action. Ampère’s devotion to, and skill with, experimental techniques anchored his science within the emerging fields of experimental physics.
Ampère also provided a physical understanding of the electromagnetic relationship, theorizing the existence of an “electrodynamic molecule” (the forerunner of the idea of the electron) that served as the component element of both electricity and magnetism. Using this physical explanation of electromagnetic motion, Ampère developed a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena that was both empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive. In 1827 Ampère published his magnum opus, Mémoire sur la théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques uniquement déduite de l’experience (Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience), the work that coined the name of his new science, electrodynamics, and became known ever after as its founding treatise.
In 1827 Ampère was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and in 1828, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.[5] In recognition of his contribution to the creation of modern electrical science, an international convention signed in 1881 established the ampere as a standard unit of electrical measurement, along with the coulomb, volt, ohm, and watt, which are named, respectively, after Ampère’s contemporaries Charles-Augustin de Coulomb of France, Alessandro Volta of Italy, Georg Ohm of Germany, and James Watt of Scotland. His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
Semana Santa en La Antigua Guatemala
Galería Fundación Ancalmo
San Salvador, El Salvador
13 marzo - 10 abril, 2015