A Snowy Night, George Sotter; 1939

Each morning in the silence I am struck with how orphaned I am. There is no human parent ahead of me that loves me not for accomplishment but because I belonged to them. Our children and grandchildren cannot ever love us or know us the way our parents did, because they did not watch us grow up.  

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LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

When you posted about the death of your Mother, I made a mental note to write when I had time to do so, thoughtfully.

Both my parents have been gone two years, having died when I entered my 60’s in age. Therefore, I had them for such a long time that the adjustment was not as easy as I had thought it would be. Many people lose their parents at much younger ages.

My parents died within 18 months of each other, in their late 80’s. When my mother went into a retirement place, a friend told her, “It is the end of an era,” and I think it went deeply into her that she would no longer have a kindred soul in my Dad. They had tamed a wilderness together in the 1940’s homesteading era, and she would not find many others to commiserate with that or other things they had seen and experienced.

There are some things people do not tell you regarding grief for parents. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Regarding the painting Breaking Home Ties (discussed here):

You would have to be brain-dead not to be moved by the scene in the painting. I do not like the clumsy inner/outer metaphor, so I will suggest that such paintings do not take us out of ourselves but (to use that metaphor reluctantly) deeper into ourselves. They impel us to realize that what we have known in our lives is repeated in the lives of “others far away at a distant time,” as depicted expertly in this painting. It is a reminder of how much we have in common with those others, and they with us.

The family seated and standing around a table, the mantel, the cabinet, the coffee cups on the table, the mother’s apron, the boy now taller than her, the orderliness of the home—all those features were there in my own life. In the painting, they are acute and painful reminders of what once was but is no more, of a family’s integrity, of gladness and sadness, of loyalty and loss. They are, as you say, the most important things in life.

My grandmother seated at a table in 1956 with Homer Laughlin coffee cups, the uncles standing and talking in the background at so many family getherings, the mantel-place upon which rested my mother’s Christmas candles and figurines, the sadness in the act of parting, sometimes spoken but often left unspoken, a snapshot from 1970 in which I had become taller than my mother—I see all these things in that painting. Such paintings add to our knowledge and appreciation of what we have or once had.

GARRISON KEILLOR IS the latest celebrity accused of sexual misconduct. It wouldn’t be surprising if the accusations of crude behavior were true, given his personal history, but what is astonishing is that his career is publicly tarnished with no due process. [Notice how the stories include few details, as opposed to the many details about Harvey Weinstein.]

What happened to presumed innocence? Brendan O’Neill writes:

Of course we all have our private thoughts on the guilt or otherwise of the accused. But when tens of thousands of these thoughts come together in a mass public verdict, we behave like a mob. And we have a direct effect on the exercise of the presumption of innocence in a legal setting. How is it possible to guarantee a fair trial for any of the accused now that Twitter-echoed whisper campaigns have pronounced their guilt? Good luck finding a cool-headed jury for this stuff.

Maybe every man accused of sexual misconduct is, in fact, guilty. But what if a few did nothing wrong? What if just one man is innocent? If one day you’re accused, my guess is you’d rather like it if I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Read More »

FROM The Anti-New York Times:

We caution our readers against excessive optimism as well as believing, at face value, so many of the unsubstantiated claims now floating about the Internet. Nevertheless, Trump’s chumminess with US military leaders, Putin of Russia & Xi of China, his war on State and “Deep State” holdovers, his cutoff of arms to the CIA / Mossad “ISIS” proxy army, Robert Mueller’s sudden investigation of the Podesta Brothers, the appointment of the first non-Jew to head the Federal Reserve in 30 years, that weird and deadly crash just over Rothschild’s castle in England, an unusually high number of sealed indictments registered in Federal courts, the Left’s sudden abandonment of the Clintons, Obongo’s very odd sudden silence, the outing of one Leftist pervert celebrity, journalist or politician after another after another etc, the sudden political troubles of super-Globalist Angela Merkel (here), and those mysterious boots on Killary and McCain’s ankles (to hide GPS bracelets?) all serve to make this idea of a coming anti-Globalist “purge” a viable hypothesis.

Stay tuned!

Source

And another quote: Read More »

KR writes from Belgium:

I am often a bit surprised by the vehemence you have in attacking the New Order Church. I am sure that some of its members are perfectly good people with good intentions, born in the “wrong ” age.

I do however share some of your concern, especially as I have just now discovered that here in Belgium, the salary of my diocese’s priest is fully covered by the state. It shocked me a bit, especially knowing that Belgium is supposed to be a laic state. But, on the other hand, I now understand why the preaching is so bland in all the churches here. They never mention sin or put forward any Catholic moral teaching. Have you ever considered that, at least in Europe, interference from the state could be a factor in preventing the Church to fulfill its mission? Read More »

THE Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ choral work “Only in Sleep,” based on a poem by Sara Teasdale, may bring to mind the friends who live in your heart as children forever.

It may also reassure you that somewhere in the world, music is still music. This is performed by the Choir of Trinity College in its Anglican chapel at Cambridge.

ONLY IN SLEEP

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten –
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild –
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

JEAN-PAUL writes:

I attach a picture I took in Le Petit Palais during our annual month in Paris. The young girl is, like many of the young Parisiennes, beautifully dressed, a child really, not an adult slob tourist as in your post yesterday.

I also attach a photo (below) of the street in front of our place in Paris.

My mother had a stroke last Christmas and is now paralyzed on the right side. Her mind is still clear but she must live in a wheelchair at a long-term care facility 3 minutes away from us and from her home of 67 years.

She moved into the house when she was a 25-year-old war bride, she was 92 this week. I’m 73, almost as old as her.

We must sell the house as she’ll never live there again and we are beginning to clear out 67 years of her things, her treasures. She was a homemaker and loved her home, it was her life.

Five lives were lived there. Every object, every room, filled with memories.

An interesting experience, not easy, as you must know.

THE CULT OF MAN, which is the modern religion really, says that whatever a person desires, provided it does not physically injure someone else, must be good. This belief system is intensely boorish. People routinely put their feet up on chairs in public places today and engage in behavior that once was reserved for the privacy of one’s home.

Here is a man we saw in the art museum the other day. He is not looking at the pictures. The world is his castle.

IT’S A CLICHÉ but it is true. A picture — especially a good painting — says as much as a thousand words and even more, it may say things that words cannot.

I was thinking about this the other day when looking at this touching painting, Breaking Home Ties, by the American artist Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895). From the description by the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

Voted the most popular painting at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Breaking Home Ties captured the American imagination as few other pictures have. The 1890s saw the decline of small family farms and the necessity of young sons leaving the land to make a living in the city or on what little was left of the frontier. The scene Thomas Hovenden depicts here had been enacted in many homes, and the composition gave American families a visual record of their own turmoil. The artist used models he knew well: each figure can be identified as a relative or friend of the Hovendens, including the family dog.

The sadness of the boy’s departure is movingly conveyed with the gloomy background and the mother’s affection and the dog whose eyes are fixed on what is probably one of his best companions. The men move around in the background as if it is too much to watch and the grandmother is stony. The boy looks off in the distance with apprehension and determination. In such a tiny space, the painter captures the drama of his thoughts so that we may feel as if we are experiencing them too. We are taken out of ourselves and into the world of others far away at a distant time.

Photographs, except those by accomplished artists, cannot convey what a painter can. A painter does not deal in physical reality alone, but in inner realities. The best painters communicate ideals — the only things worth living for. Here the ideal is family intimacy. The fact that it is being broken is cause for great somberness.

THE CATHOLIC GENTLEMAN has good advice for how to beat the temptation to view pornography, which is everywhere and available like never before in human history.

A GOOD piece by Patrick Buchanan on the U.S-supported Saudi blockade of Yemen:

Almost 90 percent of Yemen’s food, fuel and medicine is imported, and these imports are being cut off. The largest cities under Houthi control, the port of Hodaida and Sanaa, the capital, have lost access to drinking water because the fuel needed to purify the water is not there.

Thousands have died of cholera. Hundreds of thousands are at risk. Children are in danger from a diphtheria epidemic. Critical drugs and medicines have stopped coming in, a death sentence for diabetics and cancer patients.

If airfields and ports under Houthi control are not allowed to open and the necessities of life and humanitarian aid are not allowed to flow in, the Yemenis face famine and starvation.

COMPOSER Randall Thompson (1899-1984) put seven Robert Frost poems to words in this gentle choral work titled “Frostiana.” The final poem (if you’d like to listen to that poem alone, you can find it here performed by the New York Choral Society) is “Choose Something Like a Star,” a moving reflection on the night sky. As Frost says, stars ask something of us here below.

CHOOSE SOMETHING LIKE A STAR

— Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud —
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS

O GOD, we praise Thee: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.
Everlasting Father, all the earth doth worship Thee.
To Thee all the Angels, the Heavens and all the Powers,
all the Cherubim and Seraphim, unceasingly proclaim:
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts!
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of Thy glory.
The glorious choir of the Apostles
The wonderful company of Prophets,
The white-robed army of Martyrs, praise Thee.

Full text

IF ANY ONE man can be blamed for the gorge-and-then-shop spirit of Thanksgiving weekend in America it is John Calvin, the 16th-century Protestant revolutionary.

While it is impossible to imagine Calvin slamming a fellow Black Friday shopper for the last flat-screen TV at Walmart, his theological principles have been so influential in America they can arguably said to have formed it. They inescapably lead to the conviction that contemplation and good works do not constitute the Christian life as much as ceaseless industry. Calvin encouraged a life devoid of elevating ritual and the American who turns even his leisure time into a form of competitive work. Under Calvinism, prosperity and success became the signs of salvation.

George O’Brien in An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation sums up the spirit of Calvinism:

The earliest Calvinists did not believe that there could be any outward distinction between the chosen and the rejected, but, as the popular creed developed, it came to be believed that a man’s spiritual regeneration could be testified to by the manner of his life. It was taught that incessant activity in one’s vocation dispelled religious doubt, and assured one of the possession of the state of grace. 195 The new Protestant conception of the state of grace was to belong to the elect, and the only way in which this association could be proved was by the systematic mode of conducting one’s life, and by the avoidance of all indolence and inactivity. 196 The Catholic Church taught the possibility of the gradual accumulation of grace by individual good works, but the Calvinist conception of the state of grace demanded a persevering, systematic course of conduct, by which a man’s spiritual condition could be recognized by the whole world. The judge of one’s spiritual health was not, as in Catholicism, a confessor, but one’s own neighbours. 197 It is easy to understand how this conception would lead to a new kind of spiritual aristocracy, an aristocracy of the diligent, the active, and the zealous – the “saints” – instead of the old aristocracy of the monks. It is also easy to see how it might lead to a close connection between a man’s religious reputation and his worldly success. To be excluded from the category of the elect in a community where such ideas prevailed would be a stigma to be avoided at all costs.

O’Brien, George. An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (Kindle Locations 1403-1409). Ihs Press. Kindle Edition.

John Calvin would surely never have indulged in Black Friday sales, but he helped make a world where what you have matters most and where no one truly takes a day off.

Read More »

ANN KELLY writes:

This is part of the “Typical German” anti-white brainwashing campaign happening in Berlin.

If a German went to Nigeria or Saudi Arabia no one would call him a “Typical Nigerian” or “Typical Saudi.”

This kind of propaganda ONLY happens in White countries …

— Comments —

William writes:

I live in Berlin. Not only are these propaganda posters plastered all over the place, dissent is not allowed. When I clicked the link to read the rest of the story you had posted, I was sent to a page with the following message: “@LadyAodh withheld @LadyAodh’s account has been withheld in: Germany, France. Country withheld content.”

REGULAR readers will not be surprised that “Pope” Francis is shilling for the Pizza Industrial Complex. In a recent video, he romanticized the low-paying and sometimes dangerous job of pizza delivery man.

Recent commentary at Novus Ordo Watch is relevant:

“Pope” Francis is concerned about many things, it’s just that most of them have nothing to do with the job description of Pope (cf. Lk 10:42-43). Were he a true and valid Catholic Pope, his first duty would be to guard the purity of the Faith, to teach true doctrine, to sanctify souls, and to govern the Mystical Body of Christ, ensuring its unity, prosperity, and growth. A great example of how to do this well was given by Pope Saint Pius X (r. 1903-1914), who was canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1954.

Francis, the anti-Pius X in more ways than one, makes his primary concern the temporal welfare of the world. He is concerned about water, carbon emissions, mass migration, the “marginalized”, hunger, communications, mudslides, racism, homelessness, unemployment, sports — all causes that have nothing to do with the primary job description of a Pope and can be addressed by all sorts of people who aren’t, and don’t even claim to be, the Vicar of Christ.

SOME COMMENTARY from Stephen Baskerville at Crisis Magazine:

The Sexual Revolution is now out of control. [Hasn’t it always been?] Initially promising freedom, like all revolutions, it has entered something like its Reign of Terror phase and is devouring its own children. As with other revolutions, it is not because the revolutionaries enjoy broad popular support; it is because civic and religious leaders are confused, divided, and cowed into silence. Those whom one expects to impose some order on all this—conservative politicians, religious leaders, civil libertarians, journalists, scholars—are either hiding under the table or signaling their virtue by themselves fanning the flames of a hysteria that they show no interest in trying to understand.

Even as one hysteria—the campus “rape epidemic”—is finally exposed as a hoax by the common sense of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, another breaks out over Harvey Weinstein and others (and still others) emerge almost daily. The commentariat from the left to the right is either diffident or so intoxicated with sanctimony that they are unable to write about it critically. Yet once we strip away the obfuscating jargon and ideology, it becomes very clear what is going on.

For there is nothing new about the sordid behavior. All that is new—and all that makes it newsworthy—is that it has been politicized.

To begin with, there is not, and never has been, any epidemic of “sexual harassment,” “sexual assault,” “domestic violence,” or the rest. It is not that deeds associated with these terms do not happen; the terms themselves are ideological constructions designed to create hysteria and mean nothing. There are, and always have been, criminal statutes in place to protect women (along with everyone else) from violent crime. There have also long been civil provisions to protect them from sexual pressure from superiors in the workplace. Anyone experiencing either of these offenses can readily file charges or complaints. And no, there is certainly no longer any “stigma” against doing so, if there ever was.

What we do have—as many long ago warned we would have—is a highly sexualized culture controlled by men and women who have succeeded in changing the terms of sexuality because they have both ideological and pecuniary interests in using sex as a financial tool and a political weapon.Privileged men and women have thrown off virtually all controls on sexual indulgence, which they can use not only for personal self-gratification but also—and quite predictably—as the means to advance their careers, accumulate wealth, eliminate rivals, punish opponents, extort money, and generally acquire political power. These practices are especially rampant in the commanding heights of our culture: the media, universities, Hollywood, television, and the fashion industry, all of which by their nature are dedicated to profiteering off sexual appeal and which bestow high rewards on people who provide it. Because most of us are consumers of these industries, few of us can completely wash our hands of responsibility.

[cont.]