God doesn’t will us to suffer anxiety but, given the human condition and the order of creation, we are bound to. Knowing that we are in solidarity with all the anxiety of the world doesn’t calm our nervous systems but it does allow us to offer our suffering to relieve someone else’s.
THE TRAGICOMEDY OF THE CROSS
CROWN HIM WITH MANY CROWNS
Like Jesus nailed to the Cross, Dennis couldn’t get away from the many people who besieged him: wanted to seek his counsel, longed for a kind word, just wanted to touch his hand because he was a champion who ran his course and everyone who ever met him could see it, and bowed before it.
CALLED TO GIVE UP
![HILMA AF KLINT'S "PRIMORDIAL CHAOS, NO. 6," 1906-07. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) "was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.” [wiki] The painting is a reflection of my inner state after a long home-invasion siege by a recalcitrant ground squirrel.](https://i0.wp.com/www.heather-king.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Hilma_af_Klint_1906-07_Primordial_Chaos_-_No_16-2.jpg?resize=337%2C335&ssl=1)
The trap sat there untouched for days. This morning I went out and found that The Squirrel had managed to REMOVE THE TOWEL, thrust it aside like a messy teenager, probably nab a candy bar or two, and leave the door wide open.
THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Instead of spouting identity-politics ideology, “New Statesman” columnist Louise Perry turns to evolution, biology, and psychology and asks: What is best for the well-being of women? What do women really need?
EVERYTHING PROFOUND, PART III
“Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’” mountaineer John Muir once asked an interviewer. “It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’”
EVERYTHING PROFOUND: PART II
The notion that “enlightenment” consists in 24/7 calm, in short, had never sat well with me. True, Christ curled up in the back of the boat during a storm and took a nap—but that wasn’t impassivity; it was trust.
EVERYTHING PROFOUND MOVES FORWARD IN DISGUISE: PART I
As the Italian novelist and poet Cesare Pavese observed: “Religion is the belief that everything that happens to us is extraordinarily important.”
PIANIST MARIA YUDINA: HOLY FOOL
“Yudina was a strange person, and very much a loner.” “Strange things kept happening to her.” “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” Shostakovich observed. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.”
MAKE CLEAR MY WAY
We long for purity, we humans: purity of heart, purity of motive, purity of way of life. But life, culture, our era and place inevitably make it so we can never be as pure as we’d like to.
MY SHEEP HEAR MY VOICE
Do you ever feel that you have “nowhere to lay your head”–in and out of the Church? Join the club. The good news is that makes us available and open to everyone.
AFTERLIFE, INTERRUPTED
“I don’t want to be the guy with the one talent who buries it in the ground out of fear,” says Fr. Nathan. I have a gift. I feel I should use it.”
CHARITY, CARYLL HOUSELANDER STYLE
It seems to me that somhow or other we ought to be strong-minded enough to work in one’s home unassailed, but it is a great problem.