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.”
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.
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.
Johann Christoph Rhard, Two Artists Resting in the Mountains; 1817
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.”
“WHEN a country’s Christianity is reduced to the proportion of domestic life, when Christianity is no longer the soul of public life, of the power of the state and of public institutions, then Jesus Christ will treat such a country as He himself is treated. He will continue to bestow His Grace and His blessings on those who serve Him, but He will abandon the institutions and authorities that do not serve Him. And such institutions, authorities, kings and races become like sands in the desert or like the dead leaves of autumn which can be blown away by a gust of wind.”
“BUILT squarely on equality and religious liberty as governing principles, democratic government in due course of time proves utterly incapable of protecting its citizens from harm within or without, for a system which grants equal rights to individuals and freedom to all beliefs has no legitimate means of excluding either error or its consequences from the body politic. In other words, democracy promotes and encourages evil by the very way it works, without necessarily intending it. Sooner or later republics auto-destruct for want of an auto-immune system. To dissolve them, nothing beyond the original sin at the heart of each of its citizens is required. Democracy is to politics what usury is to economics.
BERNARD Nathanson (1926-2011) was one of the most influential people in the movement to legalize abortion in the 1960s and 70s. Not only did he help found the National Abortion Rights League in 1969, but for two years he was the director of the largest abortion clinic in the world. By his count, he was personally involved in about 75,000 abortions in his work at the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health in Manhattan. Calling an abortion clinic a center of “reproductive health” was one of the brilliant propaganda moves of that era which continues to this day.
By a miracle of God’s grace, Nathanson had a profound change of heart. He later campaigned against abortion and was immediately shunned by the media outlets which had previously so warmed to him.
Today, on the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we remember those who like Nathanson have given themselves to the fight against abortion. “Since 1973, there have been over 61,679,000 abortions performed in the United States alone. Since 1980, the worldwide total number of abortions exceeds 1,562,298,000.” [Source] (more…)
Let this maiden, Agnes, convicted of sacrilege and blasphemy against the gods, be stripped and led thus to be exposed in the place of shame.
— Symphronius, a Roman magistrate, in 304 A.D.
“AS Agnes concluded her prayer the flames subsided, leaving her untouched, and the holy virgin remained unmoved, prepared for the next act of barbarity which the fiendish mob around should prepare for her. Their fury and hatred were in no degree lessened by the last phase of their cruelty. The yells, Death to the sorceress! Destruction to the Christians! were again caught up. They re-echoed through the palatial halls around the square. Aspasius was nervous and embarrassed. He felt that the mob was well-nigh beyond control. To postpone the sentence was out of the question, and yet they had been so often baffled that he feared a fresh failure and a renewed outbreak on the part of the populace. Meanwhile the demands for the virgin s blood grew fiercer, and the judge, fearing for his own safety, called upon a lictor to put her to the sword.
“Whatever may have been the feelings of the executioner, he had no option but to obey his instructions.
“He stepped forward with a show of boldness to the spot where the maiden was still standing. At his approach she fell upon her knees, her eyes turned towards heaven.”
“THE depth psychologist Carl Jung, possibly as early as the 1920s, based on a trip he made to America, predicted that American whites would eventually be unable to resist the heavy downward pull of the primitive life of blacks.
“Jung predicted that whites would eventually ‘go black’: ‘
“‘What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it going black… The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche, which has lived through untold ages of similar conditions… Blacks remind us not so much of our conscious as our unconscious mind—not only of childhood but of prehistory.'”
What Jung could not foresee at the time was that American culture would later celebrate integration as its greatest moral triumph and encourage whites to ‘go black’ as proof that integration was succeeding, that America was the exceptional nation that had perfected its liberal constitution — creating, as Obama put it, a ‘post-racial’ culture in which, as Michael Jackson sang, ‘it don’t matter if you’re black or white,’ since whites now behave like blacks.
When Trump first came to power in 2017, I repeatedly and publicly asked a question that has only grown harder to dismiss over the past decade: if someone deliberately set out to destroy the United States from within and dismantle its position in the world, what actions would be taken differently from what we are witnessing now? Trump’s conduct has never resembled mere incompetence, impulsiveness, or even corruption. Instead, it has always been a sustained pattern of national sabotage carried out through strategic chaos—one that Russia openly welcomes and is publicly celebrating as they watch America’s power, alliances, and credibility erode.
The current crisis surrounding Greenland only reaffirms this. Greenland has become the clearest test yet of whether NATO can survive when the danger comes from inside the alliance, because Trump’s renewed threat to invade allied territory cannot be dismissed as bluster or theatrics, particularly given that NATO was created explicitly to contain and deter the Soviet Union and to prevent precisely this kind of coercion against Europe by a dominant power. (more…)
“Apollo Trying to Assault Daphne,” mosaic floor; Princeton University Art Museum
IN THE Princeton University Art Museum’s collection of Ancient Mediterranean Art, a stone mosaic floor from the 3rd century A.D. depicts the ancient Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo.
The beautiful stone floor is displayed in a prominent, backlit glass case so you can walk above it and examine it closely.
As retold by the Roman author Ovid in his Metamorphoses (I.438–567), the story, as you probably know, involves the god Apollo, who has been struck by an arrow from Cupid’s quiver. Under the influence of Cupid’s magic lance, Apollo falls in love with the beautiful nymph, Daphne. Unfortunately, she has vowed to remain a virgin. Daphne flees and Apollo follows, awed by her beauty.
Despite her not yet knowing who pursues her, Apollo seems to know exactly who she is, calling, “Wait nymph, daughter of Peneus, I beg you! I who am chasing you am not your enemy.” He comments that she is running from him as prey would from a predator, but tells her that he is spurred on by love and a desire to be with her, not destroy her, so she should have pity on him. He then says that he is worried that she will be injured in the chase and cause him guilt, so if she slows down he will too, but she continues. (Source)
Finally as the nymph approaches a river, she calls out for help to her father, the river god Peneus. Seeing his daughter’s predicament, he turns her into a laurel tree.
Apollo loves her still. As Ovid recounts it:
Even like this [Apollo] loved her and, placing his hand against the trunk, he felt her heart still quivering under the new bark. He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god said ‘Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree! Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed, with you my lyre, with you my quiver. You will go with the Roman generals when joyful voices acclaim their triumph, and the Capitol witnesses their long processions. You will stand outside Augustus’s doorposts, a faithful guardian, and keep watch over the crown of oak between them. And just as my head with its un-cropped hair is always young, so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves.’ Paean had done: the laurel bowed her newly made branches, and seemed to shake her leafy crown like a head giving consent. (more…)
