There are advantages to living in a house that’s been divided into eight apartments. If I croak alone in my kitchen, I’m not going to lie there till mummification sets in. If I didn’t show up for a day or two, someone would definitely notice.
CULTURE
TO MAKE ONESELF NEW
“We see this spiritual dissonance everywhere today—grounded in hearts made for God, yet lived out by wills ordered only to themselves. It is part of the great secularizing sickness of our times. It is part of the dread we might feel, even if we are afraid to acknowledge it. It is the fear that wakens us at night, the vision of inauthenticity, of prevarication, of a selfishness that cannot be a part of the new kingdom of heaven.”–Fr. Aelred Niespolo, OSB
GRATITUDE VERSUS COMPLAINING
The thing about complaining is generally other people don’t have the same complaints as you. They have other things–their own things–to worry about, and they’re having the graciousness not to impose them on you.
THE SCAPEGOAT
My take on the current cultural imposition of a kind of martial law as to how we’re to speak, act, and think.
Let’s not forget that another name for Satan is the Accuser. And I hope everyone’s read Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
STILL FULL OF SAP, STILL GREEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. I am not going gently into that good night JUST YET.
CHEKHOV’S BLACK MONK ON THE GARDEN
“Here’s the other thing: age. No-one tells you but after you’ve been around for six decades or so a whole thing starts to go on in your psyche, heart, brain and bones where you are constantly but constantly aware of your impending death.”
A WALK IN THE WILDERNESS
“A shaded bench marked the end of the trail. I sat there for a while, feeling my heart beat. I thought about how the adrenaline of constant texts and links and tweets and bad news, bad news, bad news, is both toxic and addictive…Does anyone even read anymore?”
BUILDING ON THE CORNERSTONE
From a friend today: “I think of Psalm 127, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders build in vain.’ Isn’t this the truth! Much of it, perhaps most of it we did build with Him, but there are foundational errors that need correcting.”
VISIO DIVINA: ARTIST MEL AHLBORN’S MADONNA ICONS
Artist Mel Ahlborn has painted a series of Madonna icons, each associated with a contemporary disease: Addiction, Dementia, B.C….and now Pandemic Madonna.
AS THE WORLD TURNS
Catholicism for me is van Gogh saying, “I love my studio in the same way that a sailor loves his ship.” It’s Maria Callas saying, “I prepare myself for rehearsals the way I would for marriage”…
USE LESS, SHARE MORE
“[M]ost of the want and suffering we see in our world today originates not from earth’s inability to provide but from our own inability to share….It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many of us are left with almost nothing.”
From award-winning geobiologist Hope Moore’s “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here.”
THIS SEEMS A HOME
Santa Monica’s ROSEGALLERY is currently featuring a thought-provoking online exhibition called “This Seems A Home.” “Where does it come from, this longing for home?” we’re invited to consider.
INCLINE THE EAR OF THY HEART
Join the Portsmouth Institute’s Virtual Summer Conference on Saturday, June 20. The Conference takes as its theme “Incline the Ear of Thy Heart: Rediscovering the Virtues and Practices of the Christian Life.” I’ll be speaking on the subject of “Pilgrimage.”
WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS
“Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form, that takes us by the hand and leads us into the dream world of our collective past from which we emerge more wholly ourselves. With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this, bringing back to life the rural paper mill town of not only her youth but America’s, too”….