The White Stone (by George Macdonald)

Here are some thoughts penned by George MacDonald concerning the new name we will receive, based on the words of Jesus to the Church in Pergamum, recorded in Revelation 2:17b: “…I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” 

MacDonald writes: “The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the ‘Come, thou blessed’, spoken to the individual…The true name is the one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol – his soul’s picture, in a word – the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is…It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with his name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because he made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant…Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God’s name for the man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in his thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success – to say ‘In thee also I am well pleased’.”

MacDonald continues this theme when he writes: “Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him…For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret – the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter…There is a chamber also...in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man – out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made – to reveal the secret things of the Father.” (Emphasis added).

(All these readings can be found in C.S. Lewis’ book George MacDonald: An Anthology)

Extracts from the writings of George Macdonald: on nature...

“...the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they…It is through their show, not their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it – just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work…So Nature as well exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s farther use.”

“Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him – His intent, that is, His perfected work – behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where His work culminates in revelation. “[Emphasis added]

“What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without the solidity of matter?… How should we imagine what we may of God without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude? What idea of God could we have without the sky?”

“The truth of a flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk – the compeller of smile and tear…The idea of God is the flower: His idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means – of canvas and colour and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.”

“The truth of a thing, then is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing.” [Second emphasis added]

(All these readings can be found in C.S. Lewis’ book George MacDonald: An Anthology)

Crashing waves, exploding surf

Bubble iridescence

(Photo by Matthew Adam)

EPOD , 1/4/2012

The interplay and light on water is an endless source of fascination. Take a source of light (usually the Sun), add water and a little wind or in this case a tossed pebble, and viola! A unique, evolving pattern of light is formed illustrating, as always, the laws of physics.

On an irregularly wave-rippled surface, a more commonly seen glitter path would have been present. In this picture however, the laws of optics, not in any way perturbed by the imposed circular symmetry of the expanding waves, still have their way. Only those portions of the water surface that have the appropriate slope and orientation will reflect light into the observer's eyes. These are seen as glints. The star-like glints are optical artifacts of the camera, creating a pleasing symbiosis of nature and technology. Photo taken in early November 2011 at Lake Wylie, North Carolina.

Published on EPOD (http://epod.usra.edu/), 12/16/2009

Shimmer tree

What is going on here? Has the space-time continuum been distorted by a pulse of gravitational waves from a nearby supernova? Well, not quite. Gravity waves (not gravitational waves) are responsible for the shimmer effect: surface gravity waves on the surface of the pond. But why is the distortion most pronounced near the top of the picture? By now you’ll have realized that you’re seeing the distorted reflection of a deciduous hardwood tree in that pond, and as the waves spread out radially, their "curvature" decreases, so the waves at the top of the photograph were in reality nearer to me as I took the picture. By the way, it was only after I photographed this scene that I noticed a sign “Please do not throw rocks in the pond!”
Notice how the reflection of the cloudy sky is darker near the bottom than the sky itself – a consequence of the varying reflectivity of light at different angles of incidence on the pond. Photo taken in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on December 4, 2009.

Published on EPOD (http://epod.usra.edu/), 12/30/2007



The photo above was taken in the middle of June 2007 during a visit to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. One can view the impressive Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River from several vantage points, each offering a distinct perspective. This shot was taken near the bottom of a 328-step descent on a metal stairway. The stairway provides excellent views of the waterfall on the way down. Spray from the water as it thunders onto the rocks below drifts quite some distance from that point, resulting in attention getting spray bows, when the Sun is shining. Though I took many pictures, some exhibiting the secondary bow as well, this was my favorite. The Sun was of course behind me, and the spray droplets were of such a size and density as to reproduce typical rainbow colors and intensity, yet, unlike many rain showers, still allow the background to be clearly seen.

Published on EPOD (http://epod.usra.edu/), 11/2/2011

The photo above shows a chunk of scalloped ice, about 65 ft (20 m) in width that broke off from the Sawyer Glacier near Tracy Arm Fjord in southeastern Alaska. Note the pure blue color emanating from within the “chasm.” The mechanism responsible for producing this robin’s egg blue color, as well as the blue color in deep snow, is essentially the same as that giving deep water its blue color. The longer wavelengths (yellow and red light) present in the incident white sunlight are preferentially absorbed by ice crystals. As a result, what we see is what’s not absorbed -- reflected light that’s dominated by the green and blue portion of the spectrum. In general, the thicker the ice the greater the absorption, and thus the bluer the color. Though this color may look sky blue, Rayleigh scattering causes the colors we see in the sky on a clear day, not absorption and reflection by air molecules.

The melting patterns on this medium sized iceberg look as if someone has scooped out the ice with a scallop shell. So-called "spontaneous pattern formation" is ubiquitous in nature. The particular mechanism inducing these undulations may involve local melting of parts of the surface, which grow locally as a result of a feedback mechanism. For example, perhaps there’s an initially small and shallow depression that creates a region of shadow, outside of which more melting occurs, changing the shadow boundary, and so on. Photo taken in June 2011.



Published on EPOD (http://epod.usra.edu/),  June 1st, 2011.

A golden glitter path has its linear form furrowed by the waves emanating from a passing speedboat. As the waves expand and arc out, the reflection sites change and a previously undisturbed ‘cylinder of Sun’ is restructured and distorted. A glitter path is made up of a myriad of glints; tiny, almost point-like transient reflections of the Sun from suitably placed wavelets on the surface of the water. The shape and angular extent of a glitter path is determined by the solar elevation, the distribution and size of the waves and the position of the observer. So they can, and do, vary enormously from place to place and hour to hour. This photograph was taken in Sandbridge, Virginia on the evening of April 30, 2011.

Yosemite Sunset

Fibonacci Spirals!