THE earth adorned in verdant robe
Sends praises upward surging,
While soft winds breathe on fragrant flowers
From winter now emerging.
The sun shines bright, gives warmth and light
To budding blossoms tender,
Proclaiming summer’s splendor. Read More »

[Originally posted Dec. 2, 2016]

ALAN writes:

Depravities like the “Teen Drag Show” in the library in Ames, Iowa, [Nov. 15] would not be taking place today if American libraries were still run by grown-ups worthy of that name.

You suggested that American libraries today are temples of junk. That is a charitable description.

What we should realize about libraries is that our greatest enemies are shrewd enough to permit them to continue functioning qua libraries while at the same time using them as focal points for cultural subversion.

Not that they are needed, but here are three more examples of this:

1)  Last May, the St. Louis Public Library promoted its third annual “Hip Hop Appreciation Week”, during which “workshops” in “beatmaking” and “music production” were offered.  There were also live performances in the building of the noise called hip hop “music.”

Observe the qualities in such “music:” Loudness, arrogance, anger, self-righteous bombast, Ebonics, profanity, and contempt for restraint, women, and law.

Compare that with these words that appear on a lunette above the entry to the Library’s Main Hall:

“Speak low – tread softly through these halls;
Here genius lives enshrined, –
Here reign, in silent majesty,
The monarchs of the mind.”

 These words are the first stanza in Anne Lynch Botta’s poem “Thoughts in a Library” (1852). Read More »

“SUFFER not thy mind to be ever either lifted up or too much cast down, but labour always to preserve it in peace. For our Lord saith: Blessed are the peaceable. Then will our Lord build in thy soul a house of pleasure. All that He required of thee is that, when thy passions raise thee up, thou shouldest sit down again, keep- ing thyself quiet in all thy works, thoughts, and emotions. But as a house is not built in one day, so thou must not think in one day to attain to this perfect peace and inward rest. And the Lord Himself it is that buildeth this house of peace. Without Him thou dost toil thyself in vain. But the foundation thereof is humility.”

— Fr. John de Bovilla, The Quiet Of The Soul: To which is added, Cure for Scruples

“DIFFERENCE of race or condition or sex is indeed taken away by the unity of faith, but it remains imbedded in our mortal interactions, and in the journey of this life the apostles themselves teach that it is to be respected, and they even proposed living in accord with the racial differences between Jews and Greeks as a wholesome rule.”

— St. Augustine, Sermon on Galatians 3:28

WEDDING DRESS FOR SALE: Worn once by mistake. Call Stephanie.

FOR SALE BY OWNER: Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, 45 volumes. Excellent condition, $200 or best offer. No longer needed, got married, wife knows everything.

(Source)

THE PURITANS of early America were famous for their austere clothing, as in this portrait of the famous poet Anne Bradstreet. While it is not true that the Puritans wore black all the time, they certainly scorned colorful and ornate dress. Laws in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut forbade clothing accessories such as silk scarves, cosmetics and pointy boots. Clothes were deliberately drab and they were also highly uniform.

The pursuit of exterior beauty was considered sinful in Puritan theology. Elegant clothes and buildings were too reminiscent of the magnificentia of Old Europe. All those cathedrals with their elaborate ornamentation, all those paintings and glorious archways, all those golden chalices and illuminated manuscripts — all were a lie. All this must be repudiated. It was impossible to please God with beautiful appearances. What mattered was whether you were one of the elect.

The modesty in dress the Puritans admired has been long cast off — militantly cast off. To defend the standards of modesty of that age is to defend tyranny and “supremacism.” Modesty indeed is positively wicked today.

But, as for the Puritans’ disdain of beauty? In that sense, we haven’t really come that far.

A young woman at the cash register at my local hardware store has bright pink hair — sometimes purple — and lurid-colored tattoos of a skull and a dagger plunging into a heart (or is it a hand?) on her arm. She also has black ear plugs. She seems so far from the gray-woolen skirts and white coifs of the Puritans that one can be sure she would never hold these as her model.

She has taken great pains — physical pains — to make herself as ugly as possible and I sense that she is proud of the look. But I get a lump in my throat when I see her. I realize we’re not supposed to notice these things. We’re supposed to travel through the world of dark and depressing imagery, of fashionable mutilation, unmoved. It would be ruthless elitism and snobbery to care.

But I wonder. Does she dress this way because she too believes beauty is a lie?

After all, she has surely been taught in school that her heritage, with its great artistic achievements and history of modest and quite beautiful clothing, was hypocrisy. She has been taught over and over again that beneath the beautiful appearances of the past were power and oppression of the weak.

In embracing ugliness is she saying: “Beauty is false?” In glorifying the horrific is she part of an ethical project, an effort to be more “authentic,” more true, more real? It’s interesting that so many people who dress in demonic-looking tattoos and black, Puritanical T-shirts are very nice people. They are not street toughs at all. In fact, they seem as if they could be knocked off their black-booted feet with a feather. Their niceness and their ugliness perhaps go hand-in-hand. Both are creating the perfect society, a world where all standards that might make anyone possibly feel left out are abolished.

The Puritans couldn’t imagine nor would they have remotely approved or intended the anti-fashions of today. But they were building a better world too. Though they punished certain violations in clothing, they believed ultimately externals don’t matter. In some ineffable way, they were seeking the sort of place the tatted and pierced want too.

If beauty is finally conquered then all can be equal in ugliness.

When God’s altars were stripped, it was only a matter of time before the Prince of Darkness, who has no body of his own to adorn and hates with a passionate jealousy the incarnate, would move in and start to make his hideous altars of flesh. Read More »

ALAN writes:

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. — Pascal, Pensées 139

That statement, often rendered as “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”, was written nearly five hundred years ago. But it applies especially well today to a population drunk on distraction, commotion, and noise-making.

Pascal’s thought occurred to me when I read the following remarks written in 1991 by St. Louis radio announcer and amateur historian Ron Elz:

“A couple of years ago while working on behalf of Dr. Charles Bryan, then director of the Mercantile Library, I occasionally spent some time late at night long past the library closing hours, just sitting alone in that darkened two story balconied Victorian era room contemplating how close we can be to what’s past.  There, six stories above the street and out of reach of the eerie rays emitted by our modern streetlights, it was easy to imagine you could almost travel to days gone by.  ….I recommend such an experience to help add perspective to the meaning of life and just to offer deep relaxation in these trying times…..”

[Ron Elz, “The More Things Change in St. Louie, the More They Stay the Same,” St. Louis Inquirer, January 1991 ]

Ron Elz was writing about the Mercantile Library, the oldest subscription library in St. Louis. It was not “open to all”, as today’s public libraries describe themselves.  It was exclusive, not “inclusive”.  It was open to those who purchased membership for an annual fee.  Men who spoke in the Mercantile Library Hall during its early decades included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold.  Read More »

“THERE is no tradition of casualness in the liturgy of any Catholic Rite. In fact there is no tradition of casualness in the religious ritual of any group in the world, no matter how pagan, how primitive, or how polytheistic. Reverential fear is the most elemental attitude of anything which purports to be worship. Read More »

                                                  The Dormition of the Virgin Mary, Fra Angelico

“IT WAS not necessary for her love to exert itself by any extraordinary emotions. As the slightest shock causes the fully ripe fruit to drop down from the tree, so was this blessed soul culled, to be suddenly transported to heaven. Thus the holy Virgin died by a movement of divine love: her soul was carried to heaven on a cloud of sacred desires. Therefore the holy Angels said: ‘Who is she that goes up… as a pillar of smoke of aromatical spices, of myrrh, and frankincense?’ (Canticles iii. 6). — a beautiful and excellent comparison admirably explaining the manner of her happy, tranquil death. The fragrant smoke that we see rising up from a composition of perfumes, is not extracted by force, nor propelled by violence: a gentle, tempered heat delicately detaches it and turns it into a subtle vapour which rises of its own accord. Thus was the soul of the holy Virgin separated from her body: the foundations were not shaken by a violent concussion. A divine heat detached it gently from the body and raised it up to its Beloved.”

— Bossuet, First Sermon on the Assumption (quoted here)

“There is no one in existence who is able to praise worthily the holy death of God’s Mother, even if he should have a thousand tongues and a thousand mouths. Not if all the most eloquent tongues could be united would their praises be sufficient. She is greater than all praise.”

— St. John Damascene, Sermon on the Dormition of Mary 

Virgin of all virgins,
To thy shelter take us,
Gentlest of the gentle,
Chaste and gentle make us.

Prayers and Devotions for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin

LINK Read More »

Kathy G. writes in this entry:

As a rural dweller, it always amazes me how city people know best how “redneck,” rural people should live, how people who live in concrete-coated metropolises ship their mountains of trash “away” to the ocean or rural areas, even other countries; how they have so little wildlife habitat, but demand rural areas accommodate their ideas of how much habitat must be provided to wildlife and how wetlands be preserved, etc.. It is irksome. Maybe if they kept some lions and tigers in cities, these animals could eat the millions of rats infesting them. Possums and coons love garbage. Maybe every apartment building should be required to house one or two? Provide habitat for something other than rats?

                                                  Beach Scene, Coney Island; Edward Potthast

“WHEN God created the world He commanded each tree to bear fruit after its kind; and even so He bids Christians,—the living trees of His Church,—to bring forth fruits of devotion, each one according to his kind and vocation. A different exercise of devotion is required of each —the noble, the artisan, the 9servant, the prince, the maiden and the wife; and furthermore such practice must be modified according to the strength, the calling, and the duties of each individual. I ask you, my child, would it be fitting that a Bishop should seek to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? And if the father of a family were as regardless in making provision for the future as a Capuchin, if the artisan spent the day in church like a Religious, if the Religious involved himself in all manner of business on his neighbor’s behalf as a Bishop is called upon to do, would not such a devotion be ridiculous, ill-regulated, and intolerable? Nevertheless such a mistake is often made, and the world, which cannot or will not discriminate between real devotion and the indiscretion of those who fancy themselves devout, grumbles and finds fault with devotion, which is really nowise concerned in these errors. No indeed, my child, the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything; and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of any one is, you may be sure, a spurious devotion. Aristotle says that the bee sucks honey from flowers without damaging them, leaving them as whole and fresh as it found them;—but true devotion does better still, for it not only hinders no manner of vocation or duty, but, contrariwise, it adorns and beautifies all. Throw precious 10stones into honey, and each will grow more brilliant according to its several color:—and in like manner everybody fulfills his special calling better when subject to the influence of devotion:—family duties are lighter, married love truer, service to our King more faithful, every kind of occupation more acceptable and better performed where that is the guide.

— St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life