It spoke to my soul

Abraham Piper is so right.

We called our pending offspring "them"... once. Then we discovered what we'd said. :-)

You know you married a law student

...when he bends over a new section of notes and says, "Forcibly resisting arrest, hurrah."

:-)

So that's what the Dream of the Rood is about

This evening I was catching up a bit on blogs, and came across this one from Brandywine Books talking about, of all things, evangelism methods used for the ancient Vikings. How on earth do you show the humility of Christ to warriors with no use for humility?

“Milk first, then meat” is the old formula. For the Vikings, the humility of Christ was meat that they had to be introduced to over time. ...

Warriors understood very well what it meant to go willingly to death. By emphasizing the courage of Christ in His self-sacrifice, the missionaries presented the Gospel story in a way that their listeners could begin to comprehend. The greatest warriors always die in battle. They fall and lie at their enemies’ feet, as if in submission. Their bodies decompose. What is that but humiliation? And yet they are victorious, celebrated in song, for they did not flee and they did not fail their oaths. In the same way (said the preachers) that which looks like defeat and humiliation in the eyes of our flesh can be true victory, if we turn our backs on our sins and turn our hearts to God, the great King who Himself bowed down to death.

The original post quotes a great passage from the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood talking about the Master of mankind hastening to the Cross (the Rood) for death and great victory. It was very moving. I wonder, now, if we've got a copy of the whole poem.