Category: The Daily Sip

Livid * – a poem of Holy Saturday

In the night after Holy Saturday - an angel. But before?An original icon in the collection of Charles LaFond Livid: A poem of Holy Saturday Livid bruises cover your still body. Plums. Blues. The resulting purple. The garden. The arrest. The savage beatings. And then in that cold, stone tomb...

Mary’s Other Song

Crucifixion Bas Relief #24: "With Rose". Stoneware, Cone 6, Rose Crystalline glaze, unglazed forms. Carved Bas Relief, 16.5 x 6 inches, Charles LaFond, artist. Lent, 2019, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mary’s Other Song If I hold my hand against the wood, flat, like this I can feel your breathing from above....

Tenderness

This is the first Icon I ever had written by an Athonite friend whose icons I have always loved and of which I have requested a dozen originals over these 20 years of priestly ministry. Don’t be impressed.  The purchases represent money I should have invested for retirement.  Also they...

Tiaras, stars and darkness

In Holy Week one is rather more sensitive to darkness but also to its mystical beauty.  We are told that darkness and light are both of God even though we have created a myth that light is of God and darkness is somehow evil or bad.  Might that not simply...

Face-to-face

It is early in Holy Week and though I am no longer going to church, I am very much involved in the Way Jesus is walking this week.  Without tarting up the experience with liturgical window-dressing and other people’s words from other people’s pulpits, I find myself, in the deep...

hospitality and the abdomen

The human abdomen can be so lovely.  The Crucifixion Bas Relief, Clay with wax resist. April 13, 2019. Preparation for Good Friday firing. Charles LaFond, Potter We, each of us, have a human body.  We can all agree to begin there. It may be young or old, sick or well,...

Two friends

Holy Week has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Purple. Thorns. Blood. Sins.  Covered crosses, Presto-chango revealed crosses. Glum faces as if they are hearing the story for the first time and there has been no spoiler alert. (In the end Jesus is just fine and all.)...

On resilience and Peace

Funeral urn with turquoise filial We become what we do.  This is one of the primary learnings of neuroplasticity – how we are able to develop a return to peace after adversity. But if religion tells us that what we do is evil and naughty then how shall we find...

Silence and Healing

Living, as I did, in an abusive parental system, I found my refuge in books even at four and five years old. Part of the way through my large, beloved lap-book of Sleeping Beauty, or perhaps it was Snow White, there was an illustration which so terrified me that I...

Imperfections

Our imperfections make us gorgeous. Wabi-sabi is a “word-view” from Japanese aesthetics which centers on the willing acceptance of transience and imperfection.  It is often used in ceramics when something “goes wrong” but, actually makes the pot stunning precisely because of the “mistake.”  The notion comes from the Buddhist teachings...