The name of the 8th Mission to build the Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne is Sagittá Electá - Latin for

Chosen Arrow.

God is a cruel, evil dude. He’s funnier than hell though. Almost droll. I love the way, for instance, victory immediately gives seed to a defeat. But you don’t really need a god for that type of irony; General Systems Theory and Complexity can handle the causality as well as the cosmology without any need for a god at all. Still it’s nice to imagine some kind of head, some kind of "chef " - in the french - who brings it all together in a ganglia of sorts and has the time and the inclination to watch over us. Sometimes lovingly and fat like mothers & fathers who just dote on what they have created. Sometimes like the Bitch-of-Büchenwald the way Saga Magazine in 1955 saw her: the sexually crazed wife of the camp’s former Commandant who with semi-official blessing and forbearance had the strapping Yid bucks and the “bigger” teenage boys impaled on meat hooks because that kind of sudden death can cause a massive and quick hardon and sometimes the Jews would die cumming. That kind of god.
We want something in the universe - besides ourselves - to have a personality. A character. Even if, in the end - once again - we find we really hate each other.

Years ago, when she was a child, my daughter was trying to sleep in the small room of our two-room cabin. I was in the bigger room in the dark listening to an album of the Eagles. I called into her to ask if the music bothered her. Not at all, she said, she liked the music on so she could know there was someone in the other room. That's what we want from the universe. We want to know that there's someone in the other room. So we'll take god if she's a bitch, a banshee, or a full-titted mother who just can't wait to smother you with her bounty. In the end, we don't really care. Just as long as something's there.
Kenny says that's our greatest weakness as well as our crowning glory. That's our Victory and our Defeat. We live in a head that needs an explanation for everything. Most of us insist that the world has to mean something. Even if it only means that you're gonna die. We desperately need something else to know us. Kenny says we have a need to think that our fates have been at least Stochastically arrayed.

That's a great word, a Greek invention from stokhos which means target. And although stochastic in statistics can mean a "random variable," even number apostles like Slag will remind you that conjecture as well as the random always exists along an Attractor - a belt of statistical possibilities whereon the random can sport and romp. But there is nothing at all random about the belt itself - about the attractor. Chance turns out to be what is necessary. Or at least what is needed. We are aimed. Our direction is Chosen. We just never know how well we are on target.
That's John Dee with Slag pictured above. They've stopped in the shade of Lazarus, the dead Oak which every spring greens out from the dead, midpoint on the Long Walk from where we abandon vehicles and take to the Campus of our Cathedral. They are Coolie-Bearing a replacement for the Nipple Rock on Grandiflora. Traditionally, we have started every year's outside activities with a ritual mission to replace the Punto Fijo of Grandiflora on the West Porch of the Cathedral. The Chosen Arrow Mission started the same.

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