2014

The Gothics set stone upon stone, ever higher, not as the giants did, to attack God, but to reach up to Him. And God, as in the German legend, rewarded the merchants and the warriors, but to the poet what was granted?
—Auguste Rodin, Cathedrals of France To the poets in stone and glass who created the great Gothic cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, God granted the grace of anonymity. To us moderns, that seems a double-edged, if not bitter, grace. Continue Reading

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is deeply rooted in the traditions of the Latin Church. Its prompt to compassionate meditation on the sufferings of Christ, to gratitude and contrition, is venerable. Less so is the iconography that attaches to its modern form. Promoted in conformity to Margaret Mary Alacoque’s apparitions, the devotion’s iconic motif remains edifying to many. At the same time, that excised, free-floating organ looks mawkish, even grotesque—a physiological hovercraft— to many others. Paul Zalonski, a Benedictine Oblate and ardent defender of the devotion, states it this way:
Popular piety tends to associate a devotion with its iconographic expression.
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The calendar smiled on us this year. Passover and Holy Week coincided. The week began with the first day of Pesach, folded into the Triduum, and closed with the Paschal mystery. Bracketed by two great re-enactments of the saga of redemption, salvation history colored six successive April days. The Book of Exodus recounts the decisive, saving act of a God of transcendent power and majesty.buy kamagra polo online https://blackmenheal.org/wp-content/themes/twentytwentytwo/inc/patterns/en/kamagra-polo.html no prescription But Egypt is a changeling; oppressions metastasize across borders and down millennia. Continue Reading
Beauty & Accidents of Perception

Nature is terrifying. Aesthetic distance from dread of it increases only in proportion to our mastery over it. Shelter from it frees us to make art of our aesthetic promptings, so easily confused with a spiritual consciousness. It is snowing as I type this. Icicles two and three feet long hang from the gutters. A struggling andromeda outside the front door is bent in two by the weight of ice. My long curving, uphill driveway, treacherous in bad weather, is impassable. Continue Reading
Of Calendars And Memory

The sixties were generous with gifts that keep on taking. I cannot help thinking that one of them was the Church’s 1969 calendar revision for January 1. / /The Church began withdrawing recognition from the circumcision of Jesus in the sixties. Today, circumcision itself is under threat once-Christian Europe, from Switzerland to Scandinavia. Because it is practiced by both Jews and Muslims, it is tempting to see moves against the ritual as the sour fruit of secularist ideology. buy vigora online https://latinohealthaccess.org/wp-content/themes/twentyfourteen/inc/php/vigora.html Continue Reading