-
Until This Instant
I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant. Take a trumpet, herald; Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill: If they will fight with us, bid them come down, Or void the field; they do offend our sight: If they’ll do neither, we will come to them, And make them skirr away, as swift as stones Enforced from the old Assyrian slings: Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have, And not a man of them that we shall take Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so. Henry V, Act IV, scene vii by William Shakespeare A friend sent me a text…
- Books, Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Jinx, Lectio Divina, Photographs, Prayers, Quotations, Reflections
A Catholic Christian
Jinx and I walked this morning under the coverlet of humidity that has parked itself over these mountains and announced that it will not be leaving anytime soon. The crickets and locusts rasped on in a steady note from the damp fronds of green in all directions, and we both walked more slowly than usual. I saw in my missal that today is the feast day of Saint Augustine, the revered Doctor of the Church. I prayed for family members as I walked, and I thought on the sorry things that mar the days in this age. While evil overtakes the Western world, the Roman Catholic Church has paralleled the…
- Books, Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Lectio Divina, Memoirs, Photographs, Quotations, Reflections
No Warmth, No Comfort
Dorothy Day reveals in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, that she craved the deep faith and the spiritual discipline she observed among the poor and the immigrants with whom she lived in New York City during her young years as a radical socialist. Many a morning after sitting all night in taverns or coming from balls at Webster Hall, I went to an early morning Mass at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and knelt in the back of the church, not knowing what was going on at the altar, but warmed and comforted by the lights and silence, the kneeling people and the atmosphere of worship. People have so…
-
Footfalls
Out in the yard this morning with Dixee (Jinx was off rambling, in search of the source of some mysterious howling my wife heard before dawn), I felt the frost crunching beneath my shoes and was reminded that this afternoon I will return to the podiatrist. I hope that he will be able to accurately assess the effect, if any, of the temporary orthotic insert I’ve been wearing since my initial visit. Looking at the state of the Catholic Church today, I am tempted to be disgusted and to withdraw into myself. But then I am reminded that for most of the 2000 years since Christ ascended into Heaven, the…