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6th annual Mettlecraft month is here!
During Mettlecraft month — every November — we work just a little bit harder than usual. This year’s Mettlecraft Month challenge is to walk a marathon or, if that’s too much, to set a personal walking record appropriate to your current health status. Post your efforts in the comments or send an email to mitch@heritageartsinc.com with your progress notes and I’ll include them here!
What is “mettlecraft?” Mettlecraft is the art, skill, and cultivation of endurance, unflagging determination, and resolute strength of mind, body, and spirit.
Want to reminisce about Mettlecraft Months of the past? Here are some links…
5th Annual Mettlecraft Month 2022
4th Annual Mettlecraft Month 2021
3rd Annual Mettlecraft Month 2020
2nd Annual Mettlecraft Month 2019
1st Annual Mettlecraft Month 2018
It might not be too lake to walk the Richmond Marathon with us on November 10th. SIGN UP here!
Mettle Maker #379
What’s the weekly mettle maker? Training tips and educational information in support of our free programs, that’s what! What’s mettle? According the American Heritage Dictionary, mettle is, “The ability to meet a challenge or persevere under demanding circumstances; determination or resolve.”
Fitness — Did you ever hear of a Kansas Burpee? For those who are looking for a little something extra to spice things up, try knocking out 25 Kansas Burpees. Watch the video on the left, give a go, and let me know how it went in the comments.
Need a free fitness coach to help you build a program that suits your specific needs and goals? We’re a 501c3 charity! Click here to sign up for our distance learning fitness program!
Martial Arts — try the Kansas Burpee challenge above. The diabolical Kansas Burpee comes straight from the mind of the Immortal Mark Hatmaker, the greatest old-school fighting coach on the planet. 25 of them is plenty. When you get there, let me know how you feel.
Interested in American Rough and Tumble martial arts? Join the martial arts club in Richmond, VA or click here to sign up for the Heritage self-defense distance learning program! For an intro on Heritage Art’s distance learning programs, watch the video above.
Wildwood Outdoor Skills — Engage yourself, and your kids, in the spirit of Fall by stamping with leaves. Last week I suggested you picking up a leaf you can’t identify and sketching it in your training journal as a way to learn about a new tree or plant. This week I’d like to suggest using leaves to stamp images into your training journal. This is another way to switch on the learning process, especially for kids and adults who aren’t particularly comfortable drawing. It’s also a great family activity. The photos above were taken out in my backyard while my wife was helping a two-year-old she nannies stamp leaves on paper. Outdoor play with natural materials has incredible benefits, including improved gross motor skills, healthy eating, eyesight, cognitive development, academic performance, self-confidence, and immune system health, as well as lessening of ADHD symptoms and stress levels.
Looking for a comprehensive adult outdoor skills program? Click here to sign up for the Heritage Wildwood distance learning program!
Holy Communion is LIVE on YouTube every Sunday at 10 am EASTERn. Click HERE to watch live. To view and print a copy of the program for holy communion, CLICK HERE.
Homily for the All Souls Day, Sunday 11/5/23 – Father Mitch
Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a, Psalm 103:8,10,13-14,15-16,17-18, Romans 8:31b-39, John 6:51-58
John 6:51-58 World English Bible
Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. Yes, the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
52 The Jews therefore contended with one another, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
53 Jesus therefore said to them, “Most certainly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you don’t have life in yourselves. 54 He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56 He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will also live because of me. 58 This is the bread which came down out of heaven—not as our fathers ate the manna and died. He who eats this bread will live forever.”
Across a hundred millennia, humanity has developed a myriad of theories about death – reincarnation, metempsychosis, Norse Valhalla, Greek Hades, Jewish sheol, and so forth. In like manner, the fathers of the Christian church, starting with the apostle Paul and flowing downstream, espoused a truly unique viewpoint.
They began with the idea that nothing can move directly from pre-existence into being. Their logic was simple. You can’t say, “On March the 12th Fred went from being nothing to being something” because, prior to March the 12th, there was no Fred. “Being nothing” is a contradiction. Fred can’t move from nothingness to somethingness because there was no Fred to move. Something cannot materialize out of nothing.
Drawing on Aristotle and Plato’s concept of forms, the Christian church fathers – St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and many others – elegantly solved the problem of creation in the following way. Fred is caused. He grew out of the material contributions of his father and mother. Everything has a cause. Otherwise people, objects, animals, and so on would just pop into and out of existence. But, they posited, if we trace Fred back a bit farther, he began with a gleam in his parents’ eye. This is a third state of being sometimes referred to as the prima materia, Latin for “first matter.” This is the state of non-being or potential. We all acknowledge this state when we say things like, “Fred is not living up to his potential” or when we look at a dingy dresser and see what it could be with a coat of paint.
First matter is like an object over which a sheet is draped. If you throw a sheet over a chair, the sheet resembles a chair. If you lay it over a bust of Edgar Allen Poe, it looks like Poe. Anyone who makes or creates anything first works in the realm of potential, conceiving a work of art, a song, a building, an invention, etc. If there was no potential, then nothing could become. The engine of reality would cease to run, and Being itself would cease to be. Only God, as the first cause, can bring something out of nothing. He brought into being potential itself, the prima materia, and this state of potential is the foundation upon which existence rests.
In Genesis 3:21, after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, we read, “The LORD God made garments of animal skins for Adam and for his wife, and clothed them.” Because they sinned, our first parents were given corruptible skins, bodies that deteriorate. This is a metaphor for the fact that everything that exists in the universe now has a “corruptible skin.” All things die, all metals oxidize and rust, all foods rot, and all suns burn out. All things decay.¹
The miracle of Christian theology is at once starkly logical and filled with the beauty, hope, and love of the Holy Ghost. St. Paul sums all this up in Romans 4:17, saying that God, “gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist.”
My friends, Fred’s birth is the draping of his potential with a sheet – the receiving of his imperfect garment of skin. Conversely, his death is his undraping. When Fred dies, he doesn’t cease to exist – he merely goes back to the realm of potential, back to prima materia. And there he remains, awaiting the blessed hope of the resurrection when, by the grace of God, he may realize his full potential and receive a new and incorruptible garment of glory.
¹ St. Gregory of Nyssa said, “Likewise, when we have put off that dead and ugly garment that was made for us from irrational skins…we throw off every part of our irrational skin along with the removal of the garment.” And St. Augustine said, “Adam and Eve, who were stripped of their first garment of innocence, deserved by their mortality garments of skin. For the true honor of man is to be the image and the likeness of God.” https://catenabible.com/gn/3