Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: faith

  • Saturday, September 26, 2026 – Saturday Reading of “Veronese’s Dogs” by Thomas W. Laqueur, published in The Public Domain Review on September 16, 2026

    The Feast in the House of Levi (1573) from Wikepedia

    When Odysseus returned home after twenty years of war and wandering, the first to recognize him was not his virtuous wife Penelope. It was Argos, his faithful hound, who greeted him and breathed his last after seeing his master once more. In Homer’s time, too, dogs must have been man’s best friend: loyal, devoted, and artless. So, it’s not new that dogs deserved recognition in art over time. Paolo Veronese, a Renaissance painter, joined this tradition by making dogs mirrors of human emotions and behaviors through their unspoken gaze. 

    Thomas W. Laqueur’s “Veronese’s Dogs” tells us what dogs represent in Paolo Veronese’s paintings, most of which depict colossal religious and moral scenes. Because the essay is excerpted and adapted from Laqueur’s own book, The Dog’s Gaze, this reading is like hearing the author’s mind directly, without another critic’s interpretation. Among the paintings he discusses, I am drawn to Veronese’s dogs as silent witnesses to the manifold human characteristics revealed when people are placed in moral quandaries. One that lingers in my mind is The Feast in the House of Levi. The scene shows Jesus at the center of a ballyhoo of raw human expression. Around him, the figures appear exaggeratedly excited and excessively vociferous: dubious-looking clerics and a copious assembly of porcelain-skinned characters displaying their wealth. Only Jesus and the dogs retain a serene, dignified composure, as if they were looking upon all human acts without interfering. Christ and the beasts. But who, then, appears impulsively theatrical, gesturing grandly, while the dogs look almost divine?

    But not everyone was pleased with Veronese’s artistic freedom, especially in The Feast in the House of Levi, so the Inquisition called him to replace the dogs with figures such as Maria Magdalena. But why on earth would she be in the Feast, even if she wasn’t there? But Veronese was braver than Galileo. Instead of removing his beloved canines, he added the inscription “Levi made the Lord a Great Feast” (Luke 5:29), and the painting became The Feast in the House of Levi. His wit saved the painting from a flaming stake.

    Animals do not speak human language. My cats do not speak, but they understand Korean and English. How I know is no mystery: they look happy when I come in from outside, bunting their little heads against my legs and looking up at me with their beautiful emerald and amber eyes. And that’s not all. When I tell them, “I love you,” they snuggle their soft, furry bodies into my arms, and I know they know. Veronese knew.

  • On Reading “In the Reckless Hour” by Barry Schwabsky

    Two things stayed with me after reading Barry Schwabsky’s essay “In the Reckless Hour,” about the recent English translation of Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues—henceforth, the Dialogues. The first was an existential question: How do we ask mortal questions through stories about the immortals? But don’t let the question weigh on you more heavily than it should. We have always asked essentially the same questions in different ways.

    The Dialogues are twenty-seven short dialogues that bring the Greek gods and goddesses back into the human condition—under law, mortality, and fate—and question why things are the way they are: unfair, absurd, and cruel. What makes the gods and goddesses so deeply engaged in human affairs, and so human that they alter human fates? If they cannot show their strength in the realm of Fate, are they truly superior? These Greek divinities could not care less about humans unless humans offer them satisfying sacrifices to feed their divine egos. Even Shakespeare’s Oberon and his wife are more sympathetic than their Greek counterparts. Free will is unthinkable because Fate takes precedence. Humans are toy soldiers manipulated by Fate and deployed by the gods. Are they worthy of being worshipped? If they are, it is only out of fear of punishment in the form of unfortunate events in human life: the gods play their war games with human lives as pawns to see who will prevail. They do not interfere with human affairs but govern them. Then we do not have to work so hard or hope for anything better if our fates are predetermined. John Calvin must have felt the same way I do—and perhaps Pavese did, too.

    Regarding the translation of the Dialogues from Italian into English, Schwabsky is a strict examiner who questions whether the recent English version is a translation made without fully understanding the book. He also believes that its plain language lacks Pavese’s dark grandeur and the gravity of his language. Although I have not read the Dialogues yet, I can’t say whether I agree with his opinion. But I am a proponent of using plain language to make difficult themes and ideas accessible to general readers, so that knowledge can be shared and enrich their minds rather than remain exclusive to academics.

    This essay is apposite to my current reading of Vergil’s The Aeneid, in which a man’s destination is already predetermined, while everything he does seem like an act in a script written by the divine. Then what is the meaning of being human, and what is the purpose of living? If some people are fated to suffer the most violent pain and cruel injustice, would our hopeful search for the meaning of life be merely another futile act of living?

  • Live, Die, Repeat, Repeat…

    Life is still beautiful, even if it deceives you.

    I wanted to find the Church’s stance on reincarnation and, above all, what the Bible said about this seemingly endless shapeshifting until the purification of the soul is complete, so to speak. What about the Christian belief that we live only once and have no return of life?

    According to “A Concise Dictionary of Theology,” reincarnation is the belief or metempsychosis (“animate afterward”) that the soul preexists its embodiment. After death, the soul exists in a ghostly state before animating one again, a body of the same in a different state, which sounds a lot like a demon or malevolent spirit possessing the body of the living. It is this very belief in resurrection and official rejection of the preexistence of wandering souls without corporeal substance that denies reincarnation itself. By maintaining an endless series of chances, the doctrine of reincarnation reduces the seriousness of God’s grace and, most importantly, human liberty exercised in one life that is ended by once-and-for all death.

    Furthermore, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, death is the end of man’s earthly pilgrimage. When the single course of our earthly life is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives as “it is appointed for men to die once” [Hebrews 9:27]. Christianity defends the duality of the body and the soul. However, reincarnation defends dualism that both beings exist separately and that the body is simply an instrument of the soul; existence by successive existence as an altogether different body is repeatedly assumed each time one recycles life. Thus reincarnation denies the idea of the resurrection of the body, as evidenced by the resurrection of Christ, and most primarily rejects the Christian doctrine of salvation. Therefore, there is no reincarnation after death.

    I feel much better now than before. While I succumbed to the belief in reincarnation, I couldn’t accept the thought of my present life as punishment for my wrongdoings in my past lives. To think that I have to live in a miserable state of discipline until my subsequent due recycling puts me on the verge of lunacy in the form of murderous headache for which I recently found myself in the ER. Viktor E. Frankl, the survivor of concentration camps during World War 2 and the founder of Logotherapy, urged us to trust that there is meaning in suffering, which helps us lead to our purposes in life. Samuel Johnson, one of the most significant 18th-century English men of letters and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, describes life as progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment. Forget the arguments about the religious dogma dictating an institutionalized belief for mass mind control. Or it so, then so be it. After all, reincarnation is also another offshoot of mysticism developed into religious thought. Then I will follow the light that gives me a sense of hope. And for this reason, I proclaim that my body and soul are inseparable and that I live only once, and that’s it.

  • Dying today

    For all this time beneath this visiting moon,
    Where treasure is, my heart has not been at it
    with the lights of the lamp glowing in the gloom.
    But now I see the voracious time
    devour the kingdom of the shore,
    And the solid earth rule over the liquid main,
    Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
    When I see such vicissitudes of state,
    Or fate itself repeated over and over;
    Splashes of battle have taught me to ruminate
    That nothing stays the same to remain forever
    And I can’t depend on anything that changes.
    This thought is a truth that hope chooses
    And in the dying moments of today, fears I lose.

  • A gift from a heaven’s dove

    Going to mass every Sunday morning has become a mechanical reflex of programmed biological locomotion ever since I realized that my beliefs were abstract ideals hard to fit in the real world. All those sacraments of the church I learned by rote as a child has become the artifacts of ancient esoteric religion that has turned into institutional paganism itself. In a word, I am on the verge of losing my faith altogether, if not already, still tempted to recourse to the fragments of the belief that I try to reason on my own terms, which I often find hard to win because something such as the message supposedly from the Holy Spirit I randomly picked up yesterday after a mass permanently binds me to the old religion.

    I didn’t care much less about Pentecost Sunday when the Holy Spirit descended from heaven filled the hearts of the faithful with messages from God to each different individual. The little bookmark-like cards containing each of Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit were randomly distributed to the attendants after the Eucharist. The priest said they were blessings from God curtailed to individual needs, never coincidental and ever mysterious. I picked up one that was not what I would like, but that what I had denied. It was not Wisdom, Understanding, or Knowledge that I still crave the most. But it was Piety instead, that not so wonderfully mysterious or romantically awe-inspiring banal word for showing respect for God, the church, and the religious people. St. Thomas Aquinas would rebuke me for my low regard for Piety, but it is rather clerical and prosaic virtue that even the most unlearned would have. After all, absolute obedience to God and the Church was what drew Luther’s bow of the Reformation.

    A Gift from God in the Holy Spirit: “Piety”

    But how could it be possible that my gift from God was Piety amid my own religious turmoil in soul’s dilemma? Indeed, there must be more than a respect for priests whom I think as presumptuous elitists inured to be respected, not accustomed to respect. Piety encompasses dutifulness, fidelity, allegiance, and loyalty, giving the impression of militaristic steadfastness. In my own words, I interpret this augury as indicating patience to endure and fulfill obligations till the ripe time and chance happen to me during my journey to a preordained end. My loyalty then requires fidelity of my consistent devotion to a job, filial duty, and the church by not falling wayside to the current instigation of a rebellious spirit. Am I not being an Oracle of the Holy Spirit?

    I keep the card and wonder if it is a manifestation of synchronicity. Whatever and from whom it may be, one thing is sure that reverence for obligations arising from a sense of duty helps your ship’s sailing across life’s undreamed shores and unpathed seas against the thunderous maelstroms in nature’s whimsical and capricious temper. It might be just a random message, but then there is nothing as coincidence because we are made of such wonderful stuff of fire, dew, and spirit. What’s more, if I can use the message as a divine oracle to guide my journey into the unknown tomorrows, then it will be all the more beneficial, just as the people of the ancient civilizations did the same. And I think that is why religion exists.

  • The Rambler – Religion

    “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary,” said Thomas More, who died for his relentless faith despite Henry VIII’s promise of honor he would confer on to his most trusted counsel in his cabinet. Samuel Johnson also confirmed that faith required no byzantine theories or philosophy for the validity of truth. Until I attended a public Sunday mass in a parking lot yesterday, I had not realized the power of faith, which I doubted I still had in my heart.

    The beautiful liturgy of the mass, which culminated in the Eucharist, was akin to a flowing of streams of life to the eyes of a seasick seaman and the thirst of a weary traveler. I had never expected such exaltation of the soul with faith disappearing into an abyss of despondency populated with a school of doubt, disbelief, and frustration nurtured in a reality of everyday life. But while listening to a priest’s sermon based on the reading of Matthew 25:31-46, which is about the importance of practicing faith into actions, especially by sharing milk of human kindness with people you feel least likable or unkindest.

    The priest further asked if we would counsel with God in making decisions in life or just about anything needful of help. No one answered yes because let’s face it, we regard such tendency to recourse to God as a derogatorily medieval way of living life in this Digital Age of Artificial Intelligence. We try to reason our faith with the validity of practical truth and willfully turn our heads from the Gospel with the usual facade of “Religion has nothing to do with it.” But then can you also prove that we are nothing but of a highly complex living organism made of accidental atoms, sans souls? What is the feeling that urges you to search for meaning in life, our sense of purpose? Can atoms do it?

    It is my wholly solipsistic reflection of hearing mass, but now I feel like finding Ariadne’s Thread in the labyrinth to find a way out on this last day of the church calendar. What a feeling. Peace to be with you, and God bless you all.