Crowns of glory are His right

Crowns of glory, ever bright

Words: Thomas Kelly (1769-1855)
Tune: Harts

Crowns of glory, ever bright,
Rest upon the Victor's head;
Crowns of glory are His right,
His, who liveth and was dead.

Jesus fought and won the day;
Such a fight was never fought;
Well His people now may say,
See what God, our God, has wrought.

He subdued the powers of hell;
In the fight He stood alone;
All His foes before Him fell,
By His single arm o'erthrown.

They have fall'n to rise no more;
Final is the foe's defeat:
Jesus triumphed by His power,
And His triumph is complete.

Selah.

All who see this sacred sign

Press towards heaven's portal

Words: J. Allan Warner, 1899
Tune: Ave Virgo Virginum

Brothers, join hand to hand
in one bond united,
pressing onward to that land
where all wrongs are righted:
let your words and actions be
worthy your vocation;
chosen of the Lord, and free,
heirs of Christ's salvation.

Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
who hath gone before you
through the turmoil and the strife,
holds his banner o'er you:
all who see this sacred sign
press towards heaven's portal,
fired by hope that is divine,
love that is immortal.

They who follow fear no foe,
care not who assail them;
where the Master leads they go,
He will never fail them.
Courage, brothers! we are one,
in the love that sought us;
soon the warfare shall be done,
through the grace He brought us!

Selah.

The life of the warrior

Courteous words or else hard knocks are a warrior’s only language.

The impossibility of the warrior

C.S. Lewis

His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil's hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours…

The voluble self protested, wildly, swiftly, like the propeller of a ship racing when it is out of the water. The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time, Horatious stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the centre of the whole universe. The eldila of all worlds, the sinless organisms of everlasting light, were silent in Deep Heaven to see what Elwin Ransom of Cambridge would do…

Truths like terrible jewels

It was fortunate that something so horrible [as physical combat with the un-man] should be so obviously out of the question. Almost, but not quite, Ransom decreed that whatever the Silence and the Darkness seemed to be saying about this, no such crude, materialistic struggle could possibly be what Maleldil really intended. Any suggestion to the contrary must be only his own morbid fancy. It would degrade the spiritual warfare to the condition of mere mythology. But here he got another check.

Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

The divine plan in little details...

"It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom," said the Voice.

And he knew that this was no fancy of his own. He knew it for a very curious reason – because he had known for many years that his surname was derived not from ransom but from Ranolf's son. It would never have occurred to him thus to associate the two words. To connect the name Ransom with the act of ransoming would have been for him a mere pun. But even his voluble self did not now dare to suggest that the Voice was making a play upon words. All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident.

The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern...

"My name also is Ransom," said the Voice.

The nature of the enemy

[Ransom] had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even the somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child… It showed plenty of subtlety and intelligence when talking to the Lady; but Ransom soon perceived that it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston's body…

A victory in the impossible

"Mercy," he groaned; and then, "Lord, why me?" But there was no answer.

The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something happened to him which had happened to him only twice before in his life. It had happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded. In both cases the thing had seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge “about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible.”

The same thing happened now…

Selah.

Afleet Alex: proud warrior

I know this is a random post, but I've never seen a horse to match the heart of Afleet Alex.

I literally had my breath taken away yesterday...waiting between a wedding and the slow start of its Hyatt reception, I had time to watch the running of the Belmont Stakes. And wow, I don't really have the words to describe this horse! I am still in amazement...

Afleet Alex already had a miracle Preakness, where he was clipped by another horse, fell to his knees...by all rights should have fallen and been destroyed...but he kept his feet in some miracle of destiny...and won by 4 3/4 lengths. Watch the tape of that and tell me how he did it? Simply unbelievable.

So, deep inside I was pulling for Afleet Alex in the Belmont. His warrior heart in the Preakness had won my heart, and when he went to the gate in 9th position for the Belmont, my pulse quickened: Could he do it? Only three in a hundred years had won from that start...

Then they were off, and running! And I got a really sick feeling, for it seemed that Afleet Alex was running so poorly. He fell further and further behind in the pack, running far behind with only the far turn and homestretch left...and when I saw there were too many horses for him to make the rail, I felt the race was lost. My heart sunk...

But suddenly, before the far turn, Afleet Alex surged. And there...before my eyes...a miracle run. Incredible. Simply amazing. Afleet Alex ran the fastest, most brilliant closing quarter mile that I've ever seen.

If you didn't see it, believe this: Afleet Alex went from 7th place, back in the pack, with only far turn and homestretch left...and won by 7 lengths, going away.

He couldn't get by on the rail, but didn't need it. He swung to the middle outside on the far turn, passed leading Giacomo like he was standing still, and sprinted to the finish like a proud warrior without peer.

I couldn't believe my eyes. I felt I had witnessed a miracle run -- something so special: a horse made for a moment in time, soaring up to meet destiny...a warrior, noble creature, a king! Really, words can't describe that run.

I just had to salute such a horse with a post: Well done, Afleet Alex, proud warrior, noble soul!