I have been racking my brain all day trying to think of a birthday present for her.

Hierophany: We have now reached the culminating point of the rite. When the fire bursts forth, the adhvaryu rises, takes away the golden lid and announces: “the gharma is aglow” (rucito gharma). This is one of the key-moments of the whole rite, if not its culminating point. The heat has now reached its Zenith, as also the light which is emitted from the fire. It is in fact the heat which guarantees the hierophany which at this moment takes place in the mahāvira – in the ‘Great Hero’ – which becomes divine. And it is in this highest degree of incandescence that the Sacred appears with all its force and power, assuring its actual divine presence which the sacrifice – sacrum facere – intends to effect and make manifest.

Another peculiarity of this branch is that, like the Chard line, it has no direct connection with the main line, a backshunt into a siding being necessary before this can be reached.

Heredity and environment are not the absolute arbiters of what will be, as Jesus' genealogy details in the first chapter of Matthew's Gospel. As Gardner Taylor, an African-American preacher in Brooklyn, noted, Rahab the prostitute is in the family tree of Jesus Christ.