150 years ago today, Confederate General Barnard Bee, seeing reinforcements arrive on a hill north of Manassas, Va., exclaimed:
There is a Jackson, standing like a stone wall!
…We seek God. We strive for the only truly worthy goal.
Every visible thing we see will lift us up to Him, if we let it. Creation as a whole serves as the ultimate parable. God made it all for one reason: to lead us to Him.
But we look and do not see. We hear, but we do not understand. The Lord whispers His declaration of love to us at every instant, but we have iPod buds in our ears, crackling with noise. The Lord smiles on us with delight at every instant, but we have our cool sunglasses on, so we cannot see Him.
The sun shines more brightly than the moon and the stars. But when it rises in the morning, bats go blind. We are spiritual bats: We live in a spiritual night, able to see what we need to survive—and even come up with some pretty good ideas sometimes. But we cannot see the Sun of Truth. The simple, infinite truth shines all the time, moving all things, attracting all things. But we cannot see it.
What do we have in common with the disciples to whom the Lord Jesus first spoke these words?
With the first disciples, we believe this: The One Who spoke the parables also spoke the great parable of creation. Every thing comes from, and leads towards, the crucified teacher. It is Christ that we seek, and—blind and deaf as we are—He has come and found us.
…Earlier this year, they made a tv-movie in Germany about the Hindenburg blimp disaster of 1937. I can’t see why, because the 1975 George C. Scott “Hindenburg” is the best movie ever made. The critics panned it, but they were disastrously wrong.
George C. Scott makes George Clooney look like Pee Wee Herman. “The Hindenburg” has Charles Durning at his petulant best, romance of the most subtle kind, a genuinely evocative insight into the German soul in 1937, and a worthy ending. I think it is the first movie I ever saw. I was spoiled for life. Check it out at your local library.
Father Mark White Blog 
Succinctly put, there is no way I can be succinct. They’re too many subjects.
In the battle that almost wasn’t (a skirmish, really), Jackson was much larger than life.
The Hindenburg was a derigible, not a blimp.
At least in theory, we’re one up on the Israelites of Christ’s day: we have the Light of the World to guide us. The fact that we blind and deafen ourselves with the things of this world is yeat another matter. Bats make us look blind. By our behavior, we resemble lemmings a lot more all the time.
George C. Scott makes most actors look as though they don’t take the business of acting seriously. Branaugh at his best might give him a run for his money. But, there have been others as well, Olivier, just for starters. For some reason, I liked his intensity as the sheep farmer out to avenge his son’s death by an accidental release of poisonous gas at Dugway.
LIH,
joe