Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in the Month of the Holy Souls

It is fitting that Thanksgiving should fall in the month of the Holy Souls. November, of course, marks the anniversary of the Pilgrim landing. But more than that, it memorializes the lives—and deaths—of those who were instruments in forging the religious and cultural lineaments of our nation. A day to commemorate simply a life-sustaining harvest might readily have been set on or close to the autumn equinox. That would have followed ancient precedent honoring the divinities of harvest time, guardians of the threshing floor. Continue Reading
Pilgrim Art

Mortals that would follow me, Love Virtue, she alone is free; She can teach ye how to clime Higher than the Spheary chime. John Milton, “Lydidas” What do you mean, “Pilgrim art”? There wasn’t any. Precisely. There was none as we moderns understand it: a product of leisure and affluence enjoyed largely by spectators. The concept had no hold on their attention. They did not conceive of culture as we do, as a kind of sauce spread like Bechamel over the nexus of values that animate a civilization. Continue Reading
A Gladsome Thanksgiving

Glory be to God for dappled things For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings; Landscape plotted and piecedfold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty Continue Reading