“PURSUIT of achievement in literature, science and the arts is a single-minded ambition that will never be restructured … men are right when they say that the required expenditure of time and effort leaves little room for life’s other rewards.”
— Feminist author Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (Ballantine Books, 1985)
CANDLEMAS HYMN
The angel-lights of Christmas morn,
Which shot across the sky,
Away they pass at Candlemas,
They sparkle and they die.
Comfort of earth is brief at best,
Although it be divine;
Like funeral lights for Christmas gone,
Old Simeon’ s tapers shine.
And then for eight long weeks and more,
We wait in twilight grey,
Till the High Candle sheds a beam
On Holy Saturday.
We wait along the penance-tide
Of solemn fast and prayer,
Whilst song is hushed, and lights grow dim,
In the sin-laden air. (more…)
“SHE was in the Temple of Jerusalem what she was in the house of Nazareth, when she received the Archangel’s visit — she was the Handmaid of the Lord. (Luke 1:38) She obeyed the Law, because she seemed to come under the Law. Her God and her Son submitted to the ransom as humbly as the poorest Hebrew would have to do; he had already obeyed the edict of the emperor Augustus, in the general census; he was to be obedient even unto death, even to the death of the Cross. The Mother and the Child, both humbled themselves in the Purification, and man’s pride received, on that day, one of the greatest lessons ever given it.”
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin”
CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE
by Robert Herrick
DOWN with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe ;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box (for show).
The holly hitherto did sway ;
Let box now domineer
Until the dancing Easter day,
Or Easter’s eve appear.
Then youthful box which now hath grace
Your houses to renew ;
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew. (more…)
NOW Candlemas is come at last, therefore my dearest friend,
Since Christmas time is almost past, I mean to make an end
Of this our mirth and merriment, and now the truth to tell,
He must be from our presence sent, O Christmas, now farewell.
Now Christmas will no longer stay, my very heart doth grieve,
Before from us he take his way, of him I’ll take my leave: (more…)
“THE man without a country is like the man suspended in mid-air because he lacks the concrete things that a nation offers — a village, a language, a way of life and a means of providing it — in order to accomplish even his most basic tasks. Are there problems inherent in the individual-nation relationship? Many, because one may be tempted to break the moral code for the benefit of his country just as one can be led astray in his family’s self-interest. Do the difficulties that it engenders justify its abandonment? No more than a father’s crimes on behalf of his children legitimate rejection of the family structure.”
— Dr. John C. Rao, “Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States”
ALAN writes:
One night last year, in the darkness just before I fell asleep, my eye was attracted by a light in an upstairs window of a neighboring house. It prompted me instantly to recall nights in the Autumn of 1965 when I glanced out my bedroom window just before going to sleep and saw a light in an upstairs window of the house next door. And that memory brought a trainload of others with it.
In late summer that year, we moved to a new residence in south St. Louis in the “Mount Pleasant” neighborhood, where daily life was indeed pleasant. I was fifteen and going to classes in a Catholic high school. To me at that age, life was still inviting and enchanting. The whole universe lay before me, or so it seemed. In one corner of my bedroom, I kept a small collection of books and magazines about astronomy, a prism, binoculars, and a telescope. On a wall, I placed maps of the night sky and the moon. I was blissfully ignorant of cultural trends and wholly unaware that a cultural revolution was taking place in America.
FROM What’s Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton:
Some people do not like the word “dogma.” Fortunately they are free, and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
FRESH-fallen snow is a visual medium used by God to soften and elevate the harshness of this world. It has a purpose that is solely aesthetic and solely a message of benevolence and love. Imagine if black chunks of ice fell from the sky. Given the dirty layers of atmosphere that water must travel through before it hits the ground, it is a wonder it is not black.
Snow is pure white, so white it suggests innocence and ignorance of all that is dark. A 19th-century farm, as in this painting by Thomas Birch, would not be so idyllic without this white fluff covering mud and old farm implements, animal debris and dead weeds. The white contrasts so well with the ocean of blue above. An artist did this. Birch is merely rendering the truth before his eyes.
Snow transforms ugly city neighborhoods into quaint villages. An old factory becomes a castle. A stark rowhouse becomes a home in a European lane where everyone knows everyone else. A broken sidewalk becomes a path through the woods. You can almost hear sleigh bells in the quiet as snow absorbs and obscures the sound of engines. It is not just a visual medium, but an acoustic one as well.
The many hassles and problems snow creates, the discomfort and the labor, are just reality. Everything comes at a price. Even the greatest gifts remind us of that.
But there is a world where snow comes and goes, and it brings with its silent descent only peace and joy. A civilization has fallen. A world has vanished, but the village reappears. Innocence is restored. Mercy and justice cascade from the sky. We must always keep before us the message of snow. One of the highest purposes of the human artist is to tell us the truths we only momentarily glimpse.
“FITS of anger, vexation, and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride, and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect.”
— St. Francis de Sales
THE GREATEST fault among those who have a good will is that they wish to be something they cannot be, and do not wish to be what they necessarily must be. They conceive desires to do great things for which, perhaps, no opportunity may ever come to them, and meantime neglect the small which the Lord puts into their hands. There are a thousand little acts of virtue, such as bearing with the importunities and imperfections of our neighbors, not resenting an unpleasant word or a trifling injury, restraining an emotion of anger, mortifying some little affection, some ill-regulated desire to speak or to listen, excusing an indiscretion, or yielding to another in trifles. These are things to be done by all; why not practice them? The occasions for great gains come but rarely, but of little gains many can be made each day; and by managing these little gains with judgment, there are some who grow rich.
—- St. Francis de Sales
IF YOU are reading this post you have found your way to this site after it disappeared and reappeared, then disappeared and reappeared, then disappeared and reappeared, etc.
Problems began last year when my hosting company was sold to another company. In more than 15 years with my original provider, I had called Technical Support maybe a dozen times, but probably less. I have spent many hours on the phone in the last year. I couldn’t count up all the calls I have made. My site was moved to a new server and the problems got even worse.
Earlier this week, I logged in and everything seemed normal. That was a real thrill. The next day my header, as you can see, disappeared. So far, I have not been able to get it back. I do have backups, but the backup service was not connecting to the site yesterday. Good grief.
O sola magnarum urbium
Bethlehem, of noblest cities
None can once with thee compare;
Thou alone the Lord from heaven
Didst for us Incarnate bear.
Fairer than the sun at morning
Was the star that told his birth;
To the lands their God announcing,
Hid beneath a form of earth.
I pray for them, I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me; because they are thine.
— St. John 17:9
THE subjects of Heaven and Hell are always worth pondering. We can’t think about them too much. We can’t overestimate how much reflection upon them can set us in the right direction, like a compass pointing the way in a storm. Countless problems would be solved if more people spent 15 minutes a day meditating on Heaven and Hell, as they really are.
Sadly, fear, ignorance, prejudice and a lack of God’s grace keep people away.
I recently came across a sermon by an Episcopalian minister in the course of research and in it, she point-blank said to her prosperous congregation gathered beneath an historic, white steeple, “You may have noticed that we don’t talk much about Hell here.” Of course, they noticed it. They probably wouldn’t have been there if she talked about it. Hell is not a successful product in the religious marketplace. The slightest suggestion of it is enough to send a shopper to another retailer down the street. Still, I thought, “That’s sad.” If they don’t talk about Hell, well then, they must not understand a thing about Heaven. I wondered anew at this phenomenon by which the most important and interesting subjects are averted, subjects Jesus Christ placed in the forefront again and again of his sublime and unexpected message.
One aspect of Heaven that people don’t consider enough is the friendships to be found there.
Heaven is a place of love. Not the sentimental, false thing often called love. The moment Adam and Eve fell from grace they institutionalized betrayal. They wounded our capacity for love and brought about this meretricious imposter. No, not that, but love that is true and deep. The closest bonds of earth are a pale foreshadowing of this love. Yes, the happiness of heaven is supremely social. There is no unwanted isolation, no dissension, no conflict, no distrust and no disappointment. No cliqueishness, no gossip, no stabs in the back. No desire for understanding or acceptance is unmet. The social joys to be found there will be, after the general judgment, all-encompassing: intellectual, emotional, physical — on every plane of a glorified being.
Albert H. Dolan, O. Carm., in his little book St. Therese Returns (Carmelite Press, 1932) writes quite profoundly on this issue:
Love, historically, is the strongest human passion, the greatest natural motive power on earth; yet the purest and holiest of earthly loves, yes, the love of all lovers on earth together cannot equal the love of the lowest soul in Heaven. In Heaven we shall love and be loved with a great, indescribable love, of which earthly parental, filial, conjugal, and fraternal loves are only poor imitations, and only represent some portions or elements.
Have you considered how often you take a utopian view in social matters? Have you considered that if you kept this truth of Heaven always in sight, you might bear with the disappointments of this life, realizing they are only a passing phase?
“A government functioning independently of any supernatural authority, as if the supernatural did not exist, floats in a utopian dream from which the ultimate, transcendent reality is excluded on principle. It is not a political state at all, but a deranged state of mind.”
— Solange Hertz, Apostasy in America
