ALISON Chabloz, a small-time British singer and comedienne, was recently sentenced to jail for criticizing "a vulnerable community." Chabloz has been harassed for years for songs that allegedly "incite hatred." Somehow she keeps going. Here are some of her recent musical productions.  

Part One of this essay can be found here.

ALAN writes:

On many days I worked on upper floors where I would comb through hundreds of boxes of books in perfect disarray, many of which had not been opened in years. I was excavating for books or periodicals or ephemera that I knew would sell or that I would set aside for myself or for customers whom we knew were looking for certain subjects or authors. As a booklover, I enjoyed the work. It was clean work except for the dust. Occasionally I opened a box and found a spider or two dwelling within. But I tried not to disturb them because they didn’t make all that much noise. Some customers were not that courteous. I remember one woman who climbed a ladder to reach books on a high shelf and then purposely dropped them on to the floor. We objected to that. She was one of a kind.

At the end of many workdays I would come downstairs by way of the ancient freight elevator at the back of the building and then walk down a two-tiered carpeted staircase leading to the ground floor. The proprietor and one or two employees (there were never more than two or three) would be standing there, getting ready to close the shop in late afternoon, and I would say to no one in particular, “Is everybody happy?” (more…)

IN 877, Alfred the Great ordered all his subjects in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to abstain from servile labor during the week after Easter. In the seventh century, Kings Receswind and Wamba in Spain issued similar decrees, but this was not uncommon; for more than a thousand years, church and secular leaders commanded Easter joy and celebration for the entire week after Easter Day, a week which was typically filled with festivities, dramatic reenactments of the Resurrection and solemn liturgies. The faithful were considered newly sanctified and thus in need of strength against new assaults by the devil and his legions, who are steaming mad when people make spiritual progress and hatch new plans to ensnare the unwary. Americans, despite all their material wealth, have never lived the sort of collective festivity, leisure and sacred ritual that was common during those times. Easter week --- well, it's back to normal. A tree expert I had called a couple of weeks ago showed up at our house early yesterday morning to look at a dead limb we needed to be removed. "I'm sorry, I couldn't make it last week," he said. "I was sick from the vaccine." He was ready for a full week of work. Americans used to at least take Monday off and some schools once had even the full week after Easter off. The most important event in human history, honored to this day in every nation of the world,…

I HOPE this glorious day fills you with happiness and peace of soul.  

"OUR Lord's resurrection is the strongest proof of His being what he declared Himself to be. If Christ is not risen, says St. Paul, our faith is vain and we are still in our sins. Christ's resurrection is also a pledge of our own resurrection from the dead. "The reality of Christ's resurrection is substantiated by the most solid proofs that any historical fact can possess. In the first place Christ foretold His resurrection. It was known and feared by his enemies. See St. Matt. Chapters xii. and xxvii. on these two points. On that account they took every possible means to prevent it, and, if possible, to give the lie to His prediction and so discredit His teaching. That He rose as He foretold is a fact beyond all possible doubt. On the morning of the third day His body had disappeared from the tomb, though guarded by a band of soldiers. "But, it is said, His body was stolen while the soldiers slept. Both were impossible. That they should have slept and not be put to death for it, and that the timid Apostles could have taken it while they were awake, either suggestion is childish. "Modern disbelievers say that He had only swooned on the cross and had revived in the sepulcher. It is hard to imagine how He could revive, whose Heart was pierced with a spear and who was then embalmed, or how, if He…

"SUFFERING spoils many souls. There are many pious souls who turn away from God through suffering. Self and its claims to attention are too strong and --- then love and devotion or fidelity to Our Lord give way to self-pity, murmuring, resistance, bitterness. Punishment and purification too frequently embitter the heart, turn it from its end -- from its Divine Master and Lover -- and harden it in perversity. But if under sufferings, humiliations, trials and repugnances, we have the light, grace and courage to accept them in submission, in resignation and in self-humiliation, and with a closer movement to the bosom of our Heavenly Father, our Loving Lord and Master, then never, never has our love of that Father in heaven, that blessed Master, been more thorough, more effective and more intensely sincere. "The history of the Sacred Passion and Death of Our Lord contains excellences and advantages of its own above all other subjects on which we can exercise ourselves in meditation. Meditation on the Passion of Our Lord is good for all persons and for all conditions of men. It has the power to turn sinners from evil and rouse them to sorrow for their sins and abhorrence of them. It gives strength and a powerful example of virtue to those who are making progress and it is the most forcible incentive to love for the perfect." ---- Meditation on the Passion, Compiled from Various Sources, with an…

“My soul is sorrowful even unto death. Stay you here and watch with me.” [St. Matt. 16:38]

FROM “Discourse 16: Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion” by Cardinal John Henry Newman:

There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Saviour of the world, putting off the defences of His divinity, dismissing His reluctant Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe,—of a foe whose breath was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There He knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He never could be, and which His foe would fain have made Him. (more…)

"THE LAST HOURS OF JESUS" (Sheed and Ward, 1960) by the Rev. Ralph Gorman, C.P. provides many interesting historical details connected with Christ's Passion, from his seizure in the Garden of Gethsemane to his trial to his burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. "It has been my effort to tell the story of the last hours of Jesus accurately and in a manner that is interesting and intelligible to the ordinary reader," Fr. Gorman wrote. He largely succeeded. The Jewish rejection of Jesus; the dilemma faced by the Roman procurator, who was already in trouble with his superiors for inciting rebellion, and many other events of that fateful week are difficult to fathom without some context. It's easy to get distracted and forget that this is the most sacred and profound week of the year. If you would like to know more about figures such as Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas and Judas, I recommend his book.  

  FROM the 1977 movie Jesus of Nazareth, which features the excellent portrayal of Jesus by the actor Robert Powell, comes this recreation of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It's not a perfect movie and takes liberties with the Gospels, but does include realistic scenes.  

From Meditations for Lent, a compilation of excerpts from Thomas Aquinas:

The Passion of Christ is by itself sufficient to form us in every virtue. For whoever wishes to live perfectly, need do no more than scorn what Christ scorned on the cross, and desire what He there desired. There is no virtue of which, from the cross, Christ does not give us an example.

If you seek an example of charity, Greater love than this no man hath, than that a man lay down His life for his friends (John xv. 13), and this Christ did on the cross. And since it was for us that He gave his life, it should not be burdensome to bear for Him whatever evils come our way. What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things that He hath rendered to me (Ps. cxv. 12).  (more…)

MILES MATHIS shoots holes through the Boulder “mass shooting.” He comes up with connections to Hollywood, intelligence, the military, Wall Street and AstraZeneca. It’s no accident that this event took place in the Denver suburbs, where other fake massacres distracting and terrorizing the American public into submission have been staged. He ends his research article with this:

OK, I am tiring of this, but if you want to do more, I suggest you read closely the Washington Post victims announcement, which doesn’t read like it should. What a sensible person would expect is a few lines about each victim, sticking to the facts. You wouldn’t expect them to be unloading a lot of tearjerking emotionalism on you, since—if real—the event is sad enough on its own. You don’t need your response telegraphed like this, do you? You don’t need to be told what to feel. But as is usual with these events, the whole thing is being keyed up with pregnant women, dancing people, balloons, and other sugary anecdotes. To be blunt, the whole page reads like amateurish propaganda, composed by the usual set of barely literate recruits in sub-basement 10 at Langley. You don’t really learn anything about the victims; instead you read a bunch of unverifiable treacle about how they loved puppies or puppies loved them or something. It’s pathetic. You could judge the whole event by the tone of this article, and I do. The way it is written tells us without further research we are being yanked. The page reeks of desperation and miscalculation.

This is not a blanket endorsement of Mr. Mathis. I sincerely appreciate his hard work here. (Please avoid his artworks page.) You have to have courage, a healthy sense of outrage and a capacity for hours of thankless tedium to go into the details of these events. (more…)