faith

Way off topic, but too funny not to share

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

It took me a while to get around to it, but lately I’ve been catching up on the series, The Chosen. I’ve been hearing quite a bit about the series, but I just don’t tend to watch TV shows. I saw it was available on Prime, though, and decided to give it a go.

I’m into season three now. I’ve been enjoying it a fair bit. I do see where some of the criticisms are coming from, but I also see where the criticisms have been unwarranted. Given how little detail we have in the Bible for a lot of things, it is understandable that they would have fleshed things out quite a bit. I question some of the directions they chose, but found others interesting. Portraying Matthew as being autistic, for example. Then there were continuity issues. For example, in an early episode, it shows people reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but Jesus doesn’t teach that to his apostles until a season or two later.

One of the things I question is their use of modern concepts projected onto the past. Like seeing writing on a stone marker that was translated as “private property, trespassers will be prosecuted”.

Another is the usual trope about how Jesus and the Apostles were all poor, and that Jesus was homeless. Fishermen in Galilee would have been solidly upper middle class. As for Jesus, when Joseph died, as the eldest son, Jesus would have inherited the family home as well as the family business. They may not have been wealthy, but they wouldn’t have been poor, either, and he would have had a home to come back to.

Other things, though, were niggling at me. Little details – and they clearly paid close attention to details in this series.

For a bit of back ground, I have a keen interest in history. Particularly ancient history. However, my approach to history is rather different. I want to know how ordinary people lived and, in my view, to really understand a people, the best way is through learning what they ate and what they wore. It’s amazing just how far reaching those two things are. They are influenced by everything from climate and geography, to proximity to trade routes. What fascinated me about ancient foods, for example, is just how far ranging some of the ingredients were, even for those who were not wealthy, and the remarkably complex and sophisticated their food was. Cooking methods, seasoning, methods of preservation, flavour combinations, etc. When we were actively homeschooling, we regularly recreated historical dishes as best we could. I was particularly amazed by just how much salt, fat and sweeteners were part of ancient meals. Downright staggering, in some cases.

Along with food, their clothing, their homes, their everyday tools, their methods of transportation – everything is so interconnected.

In the series, there’s a lot of worrying about food, but it is very… vague. Which is remarkable, considering just how important food was to the Jewish people and their celebrations. Seeing tables loaded with… bowls of … seeds? There’s fruit. Bread. Talk of cooking lentils. Chopping of cucumbers. Talk of buying vegetables, etc. Talk of cooking. What I wasn’t seeing was pretty much any sort of protein, in a land where they would have been eating massive amounts of fish, at the very least. The eating of fish is often mentioned in the Bible. I’ve recreated meals from 2000 years ago, and it just all seemed… wrong.

Then there was the clothing. Why are there frayed edges all over the place? Why were there so many seams? Why were almost all the seams showing frayed edges? Also, some of the colours. People did try to wear as much colour as they could, but some of those colours required dyes that were exceedingly expensive at the time, while others could only be worn by people of specific class or status.

Other things niggled at me. Like the shelters being built, or how people seemed to just be… doing things with their hands that had nothing to do with the task at hand. There was also a lot of, why is that there? I’m no historical expert, but I know enough that a lot of things just felt… wrong.

Then I got to a scene in season three, episode four. An item on a table that was so incongruous, it distracted me away from everything happening in the scene.

I ended up taking a picture of my monitor to show you.

I wasn’t able to get a shot that included the lid, but that box?

I have one.

These boxes are made in Poland. Granted, they’ve been doing it for about a thousand years, but not two thousand years, and certainly not made with the modern tools, patterns, colours and sealant that were used to make this box.

So I’m just laughing at this, and completely distracted because I HAVE THAT BOX! In the exact pattern and colours. A nesting set of three. The box in the scene is the middle sized one.

I admit, with all these little things niggling at me about the food and clothing and shelter and so on, I did find myself wondering if Metatron has done an episode on the Roman armor and uniforms. 😄

The Re-Farmer

Blessing of the Baskets

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

My younger daughter and I took our basket into town for blessing.  After a bit of shifting things around, this is what our basket looked like.

2018-Easter.basket

The prosciutto roses were added at the very end, because they dry out so quickly – though they did double duty in holding some of the eggs in place!  I ended up fitting 8 of each type of egg into the basket, so there were some of the tea dyed and onion skin dyed eggs left over.

The embroidered table cloth is one of a couple of antique embroidered linens I’ve managed to acquire many, many years ago.  It has 8 little matching napkins.

Normally, I would have ironed it first, but neither of our two irons made it with the movers.

Which reminds me.  I have come to realize something.

We are now completely finished unpacking!

I had unpacked a box of books in the office some time ago.  I still have a number of bins, but aside from one that’s still got stuff in it because I have to find the right spot of them, they don’t need to be unpacked.  The stuff in them belongs in the bins.

On the one hand, Yay!  We’re unpacked!

On the other… there is now no possibility of finding the missing stuff jammed into an unpacked box somewhere.  That stuff is lost.

Including my two irons.

*sigh*

But I digress!

I snagged a quick photo in the church…

2018-Easter.basket.blessing

Another half dozen or so baskets were added after this photo was taken.

I’m taken aback by the lit candles inside people’s baskets.  I’m reading “fire hazard” all over the place!  :-D  My daughter remembers the last time we brought our baskets here for blessing, several Easters ago.  We had come out for a visit and stayed with my father, in the very house we live in now.  We had included a candle in our basket.  Someone lit it for us!

A couple of the baskets that came after this photo was taken were just huge!  You can kind of tell whose baskets are for larger families. :-D There was one that had the most interesting wire holder for the eggs, that kept them well above the rest of the food.  I love all the different styles of baskets and how they are decorated, too.

If you look towards the back of the photo, on the riser above the baskets at the foot of the alter, is a small basket that doesn’t have any food in it.  That’s a donation basket for the priest, for doing the blessing.  I remember helping my mother bring baskets for blessing, and she would set up the little donation basket, and a second one, where she added some food items from our own baskets.  Other people followed her lead and added more, so that by the end of it, the priest also had a basket full of food!

For the blessing ceremony, a prayer and blessing was said, then the priest sprinkled all the baskets with holy water.  Then he went down the aisle and sprinkled us, too.  We finished with a rousing hymn of blessing, with the priest grinning from ear to ear as he sang, his arms waving to the rhythm.  Clearly, this is a ceremony much enjoyed by the priest, as well!

Then, after we retrieved our basket, I saw him standing there with his iPhone out, taking video of us all, getting our baskets, still with that huge, joyful smile on his face.

It was awesome.

The Re-Farmer