The Pantheon

Today's fantastic word is "pantheon", representing the gods of a people or a place to worship those gods. The above picture is from Sweetness's bedroom capturing what I refer to as The Pantheon, a.k.a. The Hall of The Lesser Gods. Puppy (white, at right), must be tucked into the blankets in precisely the proper position, pitch, yaw, and roll for napping and bed time to occur. At left one can see Triceratops (from the Yale Peabody Museum gift shop) and Reindeer. Triceratops sort of performs vital security functions, as far as I can tell, since he joins the family in plastic or imaginary form on most outings. Reindeer is mostly a lookout, I think. Rabbit (seated) is just a pretty face.

Why do I think about this? I'm on a quest to read the bible cover to cover. I'm over halfway through, 2 chapters a day or so. This puts me into Isaiah and Jeremiah, two prophets who I refer to as The Wet Blankets. They spent their lives railing against the apostasy of the Israelites, and predicted the destruction of their society because they abandoned the true God for sake of their false gods (idols). Every last forecast was proven true to the letter, so they were spot on. But I have to think, from the point of the individual Jew, that even the good hearted (who were being lied to by their own holy men) had to roll their eyes or cringe when they saw ol' sourpuss heading their way (yet again) proclaiming that nobody would bury the body's of their sons and the land would be left desolate. To say it got old is surely putting it mildly. Although the prophets got their instructions straight from High Command, I have to wonder how we can practice righteous correction... more diplomatically and probably find a more receptive audience.

We are most fortunate in the New Covenant we have today. Nonetheless, we still have the same human flaws the ancient Israelites saw. Sweetness puts great importance on various material (corporeal) things being in the right place for her routine. We do the same thing in a cup of coffee in the morning, or maybe a newspaper, or maybe a TV show, or washing our car on weekends... I habitually wore a pewter lizard around my neck for about a year until it had been progressively flattened by bench press bars to the point that it looked like it had been picked off a train track. These material things are truly immaterial for our happiness, but we cling to them to the point that they become little idols. Let's try to shake them off.