A Bunny Story By Crispina (as dictated -- absolutely verbatim, says the scribe -- to Hilaria)

So Crispina loves to make books. Grab a bunch of printer paper, run it through the three-hole punch, tie it together with pieces of yarn, and there you are:  a book crying out to be written in. For this one, she went so far as to draw lines, as on notebook paper, on all the pages that she didn't illustrate with smiley-face flowers. Anyway, 14-year-old Hilaria, who is spending the week with us, was so good as to write down the following as it spilled from the lips of the author:

Down beneath the sunny banks of a shore lived a rabbit and his family and they liked to play under an oak tree. The little rabbits liked to fish for fish and they liked to play with their friend Squirrel. They had fish dinner every night and they liked flowers.

One of the bunnies liked to think that the flowers were smiling at him. Momma bunny thought she liked to think that, too.

When the skies were gray all the bunnies liked to sit by the fire. When the skies were sunny they liked to run and play. Even Momma bunny and father bunny. Every night when the stars were out they liked to have Momma bunny's good fish stew.

Momma bunny called her siblings to come jump into bed at the end of the moving day. Momma bunny said, "In the morning, Father bunny will wake you up to explore with Red Squirrel." "Whee!"

In the morning father bunny woke them up like mother bunny said. She sent them out to play and explore with Red Squirrel. When they finished exploring with Red Squirrel, Mother bunny invited them all in to have some cool chocolate milk.

When they played hide and seek it was fun because they could run fast. Even Red Squirrel.

When the sunny bright day was new, they all woke up with a startle! It felt like yesterday was a hundred years ago.

First they washed the dishes, then they swept the parlor, then they looked at the clock, then Rosie said it was one. Second, Momma bunny woke with a startle, a clatter of dishes being put away and dust being swept into the wastebin.

Mother bunny said, "My, my! You children have been working all morning!"

Father bunny had been up all along of their cleaning. He heard voices like thunder. He thought that they had been up all night! They had breakfast as soon as Dad bunny said that. Then Jamie said that she wanted to cook a apple pie.

After breakfast they washed and bathed as Momma bunny said. After they cleaned theirselves, they played with Red Squirrel. Then the water turned into ice in the freezer. When it was finished freezing, they had a piece of ice and they wanted to play some more. So they did play some more. When they were tucked into bed, they slept.

After the morning's coming, Red Squirrel's daddy came to deliver the mail. Red Squirrel came along with him. Daddy bunny answered the door and got the mail.

The End.

And I have typed it out just as it appears in the book, minus the illustrations, which are very cheerful.

Speaking of the author, she fell on the front steps last night and cut her knee badly enough to require five stitches. The author's mother revealed herself to be a bit of a wuss when it comes to gaping bloody wounds;  the author's daddy, who is not a wuss about anything, scooped her up, carted her to the emergency room, read to her for roughly four hours straight from a collection of Little Golden Books, and then, when she was all sewn together again, took her out for a late-night burger and strawberry milkshake.

Today she's no worse for the wear, though a little stiff and sore in that knee. Helier, who had tried unsuccessfully to wait up for her last night, greeted her this morning with breakfast in bed -- my bed, thank you very much -- and welcomed her to "the scar family."

Dad has an old knee-surgery scar;  Mom has a scar from falling down and cutting her knee when she was nine and hiding it from everyone for two weeks afterwards (because she already had a broken arm in a cast and wasn't supposed to be playing in a sprinkler at her friend's house where it happened, that's why).  

Amicus has one scar, under his eye, from falling against a chest of drawers when he was two, and another on his scalp where his birthmark used to be. 

Helier, at three,  cut his head bouncing on a bed and had to be glued together -- I was in New York at the time and talking to Aelred on the telephone, when without warning he handed the phone to Amicus and I found myself involved in some Star Wars conversation.

When Aelred came back, he said, "Well, it's stopped bleeding, but we do have to go to the emergency room now."

Only Epiphany is scarless, though she did once, in Cambridge,  slice her thumb with a saw. She was seven, and I had given her the saw and some wood to saw. It was a very small saw, but quite functional.

Holy Week Readings: Wednesday

from "The Silent Outcry," a  fourteenth-century letter of spiritual direction by an unknown mystic:

Learn how to let go of God through God, the hidden God through the naked God. Be willing to lose a penny in order to find a guilder. Get rid of the water, so that you can make wine. The creature is not strong enough to take God away from you, not even the least grace, so long as you yourself want him.

If you want to avoid things, learn to suffer;  if you want to eat of the honey, you should not be put off by the bee's sting. If you want to catch fish, learn to get wet;  if you want to see Jesus on the shore (Jn 21:4), learn to sink down into the sea first (Mt 14:30).

Were it the case that you should see the heavens torn open and the stars falling, you should not let it make you lose your composure;  God will not take himself from you unless you will it;  how much less can a creature remove him.

Listen. Look. Suffer and be still. Release yourself into the light. See with intellect. Learn with discretion. Suffer with joy.  Rejoice with longing. Have desire with forbearance. Complain to no one. My child, be patient and release yourself, because no one can dig God out from the ground of your heart.

O deep treasure, how will you be dug up? O flowing fountain, who can exhaust you? O burning Brilliance;  outbursting Power;  simple Return;  naked Hiddenness;  hidden Security;  secure Confidence;  simple silent One in all things;  manifold Good in a single silence;  You silent Outcry, no one can find you who does not know how to let you go.

Release yourself, my child, and thank God that he has given you such a way of life.

Holy Week Readings: Tuesday

from The Dream of the Rood: 

"It was long ago -- I remember it still -- that I was hewn down at the wood's edge, taken from my stump. Strong foes seized me there, hewed me to the shape they wished to see, commanded me to lift their criminals. Men carried me on their shoulders, then set me on a hill;  foes enough fastened me there. Then I saw the Lord of mankind hasten with a stout heart, for he would climb upon me. I dared not bow or break against God's word when I saw earth's surface tremble. I might have felled all foes, but I stood fast. Then the young Hero stripped himself -- that was God's Almighty -- strong and stouthearted. He climbed on the high gallows, bold in the sight of many, when he would free mankind. I trembled when the Warrior embraced me, yet I dared not bow to earth . . . "

Read the rest.

Some Unschooling-Break Notes

I decided this year, in a tacit kind of way, that we weren't really going to have a "spring break" as such. If the children asked, I would say it was last week, when we went to visit family in Memphis. In fact, the trip did constitute a break from our regular core-et-elective daily structure;  on the other hand, we all went to the zoo, talked to people, watched "educational" PBS children's shows ("Hey! Reading is fun! Almost as fun as watching this television show!"), and the like. Epiphany read Brideshead Revisited and worked on a paper on Henry James's Portrait of a Lady which is part of her application for a college summer program. From a friend, Amicus picked up a bunch of back issues of a magazine called Mental Floss and has been regaling us with quantities of arcane trivia, which is to him as a staff of life.

Looking back at the week, I'm inclined to think that that was our yearly dose of what a friend of mine refers to as "the Friday movie." This week her children are supposed to lose a day of their public-school spring break to make up a snow day, but she remarked to me that she was inclined keep them home instead. "The teacher already told me they're just going to watch movies all day." Apparently, in her daughter's fourth-grade class, the Friday movie is a standard M.O.:  the kids watch Shrek III, and the teacher gets her grading done. So I'm thinking that we just had a week of what passes for educational time by official standards, as well as a good visit with the grandmothers.

What about this week? It's Holy Week, when in the past I've called off regular learning, though having been away last week, I'd been wavering . . .

Epiphany has to go to school this week, the college's spring break having happened two weeks ago. Today, thus far, she has done geometry and studied for her Latin midterm.

Amicus is somewhere reading.

Our fourteen-year-old family friend Hilaria, who returned with us from Memphis to spend her school break in Fabulous Fiat, has been helping Crispina to write a book. I think it's about bunnies;  a while ago I overheard Crispina dictating a sentence involving "Mother Bunny" and "all her siblings." Now Hilaria, Helier and Crispina are playing board games -- Mancala is finished, Risk just got vetoed, and I think they're settling on RummiCube, though the instructions have gotten lost, and the success of the venture depends entirely upon Helier's powers of explication.

Later, depending on the weather and people's level of restlessness, we'll either rake up fallen sticks from last night's storm and turn the compost pile and weed the herb bed;  or we'll hit a museum.

Tomorrow:  the diocesan Chrism Mass, followed by . . . well, Epiphany has to meet her SAT math tutor, but if we don't visit a museum today, the rest of us might do that in the afternoon.

Wednesday:  preparations for our Maundy Thursday seder:  grocery-shopping, cooking, cleaning, table-setting, and so on.

Thursday:  the seder, plus services in the evening.

Friday:  liturgy+Stations of the Cross:  the live outdoor version offered by the Spanish youth of the parish, if weather permits. Perhaps in the morning we'll make an Easter garden.

That takes us through the week, with no real shortage of learning experiences of one kind or another. At this stage in our homeschooling, I'm not comfortable with unstructured life-learning all the time;  things too quickly go pear-shaped, especially where the younger children are concerned. Freedom is all too apt to become chaos. At the same time, having come from a more unschooly place, I see periods like this as a necessary part of a healthy learning rhythm. We're not not learning;  we're just not doing school.

And now I'd better get up from this chair and go join it. The board games are over, the sun is shining, and Helier's packing a lunch for his campus-bound father and sister, which process may require some oversight.

Weather Report

Our friends in the wide world may have seen the news this morning that something like eight tornadoes hit the Carolina Piedmont last night, destroying trailer homes and injuring, but not killing, thank goodness, a number of people.

Here in Fiat we had periods of heavy rain with thunder and lightning, and during the course of a cheerful evening with friends, someone reported that a tornado had touched down within the city limits.  As far as I know, no damage  resulted;  at this writing our lights are on, which is more than can be said for residents of several neighboring counties. Spare them a prayer today, if you're so inclined.

Readings for Holy Week: Monday

from Pearl: 

In Jerusalem my true love died,
Rent by rude hands, in pain and woe;
Freely he perished for our pride,
And suffered our doom in mortal throe.
His blessed face, or ever he died,
Was made to bleed by many a blow;
For sin he set his power aside
Though never he sinned who suffered so.
For us he was beaten and bowed low
And racked on the rood-tree rough and grim,
And meek as the lamb with fleece of snow,
He breathed his last in Jerusalem.








(as a bonus, here's a handy medieval literary timeline plus conjectures  regarding the identity of the "Pearl Poet.")

Vespers for Palm Sunday: The Last Last Word

Pray the office here, and join Aelred in meditating on the Seventh Last Word: 

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit!”  And having said this he breathed his last.  (Lk. 23: 46) 
 
+   +   +

For Lent, I have been re-reading T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the story of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.  The story is probably familiar to you:  Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, was formerly Chancellor of England, the right hand man of Henry II.  Henry makes him archbishop in order to unite the two offices in one friend, and, thus, to stabilize his authority and reign.  It seemed like a very good idea until something strange happened:  Thomas started to take his office of archbishop seriously.  Thomas abandons his role as Chancellor and becomes a shepherd for his people.  Since the king did not really wish for this archbishopric to pose any obstacles to his reign, Thomas’s solicitude for the things of God brings friction between Thomas and the King.  Protracted arguments with the king, long periods of exile, and, finally, death await the archbishop.  It is said that Thomas is a prideful man, who intentionally sets himself up as a rival to the king.  It is said that he plots with the king of France, and, of course, the Pope, against the king and his realm.  Many accusations are made about him, but what becomes clear in Eliot’s version of the story, in which Tempters come to torment Thomas in his decisions, is that he refuses all of the ways in which he may escape his fate for some sort of peaceful, but morally and spiritually compromised, solution.

Thomas meets three Tempters, much as in the same manner as our Lord in the wilderness, who propose alternate courses of action to him:  ease, more power, and so forth.  But a fourth Tempter materializes who does not propose an alternate course of action for him, at all.  This Tempter proposes that Thomas go through with his Martyrdom, because what is more powerful and influential than a martyr?    The Tempter asks him to think of the jeweled shrine in which his relics will be kept, the pilgrims standing in line, and his enemies coming in penitence to where he lay.  It will be a glorious victory.

Thomas recoils in horror at the Tempter’s vision.  It is not that he is afraid to die, or even that he will die as a martyr, that is all but assured.  He is horrified at how the Tempter would have him approach his impending death: puffed with pride, tempting God with His own designs.  This last temptation is the most dangerous, to displace the inner meaning and Providential nature of what he is going through with a vision of himself, of Thomas Becket, the vindicated hero.   It is a vision of damnation of the most subtle type.  It is an Apostasy at the last and in the fulfillment of divinely ordained events.  Thomas rejects the Temptation and utters these words:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Our Lord could never be tempted with this final kind of temptation, because he is God in the flesh.  His will is completely consonant with the Father’s.  But, as his disciples, we certainly can be tempted in this way.  When we know that a course of action is correct, and we know, by grace, that this is something we are given to do, we can still change the essence of that deed, that course of action, by our prideful attachment to it.   “The last temptation is the greatest treason/To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”  No one else can know the true, inner character of our motivations—only God and ourselves.

But we should take the lesson from Becket.  Even though he senses that his motivations can be compromised and the act turned to sin, he pursues the act, nonetheless, in the trust that God can and will purify his motivations, that in the acting and the suffering for what is good and right, God will act through him, far above whatever it is that he, Becket, will do and suffer.  So, he says, “I shall no longer act or suffer, to the sword’s end./Now my good Angel, whom God appoints/To be my guardian, hover over the swords’ points.”

The outcome is historically famous.  The swords’ points do bring Becket to his end, but God’s ends have been achieved in him.  Becket is the instrument of God’s designs, even if he appears passive; and he is not active on his own behalf, but on God’s behalf, by his act and his suffering.

Sometimes Catholics are berated for all of the good works and pious practices that they offer.  The idea is that we are purchasing our salvation through our activity and forcing God to deliver on an agreement that we have made with him.  But we know that this is not true in the least.  We know what Becket knew; there is no immunity from pride and from doing the right deed for the wrong reason.  We understand the “treachery of the heart” as Father put it this morning.  And we know that to do anything in a manner that helps our soul is to do it in penitence, in faith, and with a broken heart.  Sometimes, the same people who berate us for being too confident in our religious practice, berate us again for being too penitent, too in touch with the fact that we are all deeply disordered by sin.  As G. K. Chesterton put it, for some people, any stick is good enough to beat Catholicism with.  He also says that if people are smacking us down from different sides for contradictory reasons, perhaps it is because what we believe is just, right, and true.

That doesn’t keep some people from smacking away, however.  We have seen that a lot this past week with reference to the sex abuse scandals in different countries, sometimes said to implicate the Pope himself.  Now, there is no evidence for that, but it is not the truth that our media opponents are after.  They simply want an insinuation that they can distribute to the confusion of the masses.  What noble sentiments!  Presumably there is some reason that the press is wilding on the Pope and the Catholic Church—I mean apart from the ordinary reasons.  Perhaps it is because of the fuss we made over abortion in the deliberations concerning the pro-death medical bill.  One bridles at calling it health care, because at the heart of the bill is a desire for a healthy culture of death.  In England, the land of Thomas Becket and Thomas More, the press is wilding on the Pope and the Catholic Church because Benedict is going there in September to beatify John Henry Newman, one of the greatest men to ever draw breath, and, though he is not a Martyr, clearly a worthy complement to Thomas Becket, Thomas More, and the other English saints and martyrs.  The word “martyr” means witness.  Newman certainly witnessed to the faith, and did, in fact, suffer for it greatly in his lifetime.  Perhaps it is the bad conscience in England over the treatment of Thomas Becket, Thomas More, Edmund Campion, and John Henry Newman that has produced such a reaction.  Perhaps it is a bad conscience about the current state of the UK—in many places a lawless, immoral, decadent, and not even creatively decadent, but lumpen-socialist pit.  As one often hears it expressed:  the “sceptred isle” has become the “septic isle.”  The Pope, on the other hand, loves England, for all of its saints and the traditions that even the Continentals have not preserved.  Above all, he loves Newman.  That is why he is taking the extraordinary measures of making the trip and beatifying Newman on his home turf, and not simply in Rome.

It is amusing to me, and I hope it is to you, that the Catholic-beaters think they are actually doing damage to us by all their rage and spite.  Quite the contrary, we band together, and marvel together that our faith in our Blessed Lord is such a thing that enrages the world.  Did not our Lord say that it would be so?  Doesn’t all of the venom of the world just prove him truer and truer?  Is there anything that he cannot turn to his advantage in this world?  No, nothing.  Everything will serve him—either intentionally or unintentionally--and we Catholics rejoice to see his victory spreading with every slur, sneer, insult, and lie that worldlings spew in the short spaces of their all-too-mortal lives.  To put it another way, people will still be sneering at Catholicism long after our current sneer-mongers are gone.  Catholicism will be present and active, and these sad people will be so forgotten that they will not even rate a sneer.  Perhaps some charitable Catholic will pray for their souls; that is the best they can hope for.  Let us pray for them in our own day.

We ought to pray for our enemies—our slanderers and calumniators—because they provide us with a very handsome opportunity for suffering and making satisfaction for our own sins and those of others.  Another thing we Catholics know, in addition to the possibility of the incursion of pride into all we do, is that suffering never lacks a purpose or fails to offer an opportunity.  No suffering is wasted on us; we “offer it up” as a participation in the passion and death of our Lord, “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings,” as St. Paul says.

We feel such a kinship with the sufferings of the Lord, because we know that he suffered for us--because of what we are--and that he overcame every obstacle to our redemption, and fulfilled all the righteous required thereunto.  It is a happy piece of knowledge, but it flays the heart, and fills us with profound humility and reverence.   “Alas! and did my Savior bleed/And did my Sovereign die?/Would He devote that sacred head/For such a worm as I?”

Thomas Becket’s sufferings he purchased for his own good and salvation by the grace and sufferings of Christ.  Finding the meaning, the reason, the possibility of his sufferings in Christ himself, Becket overcomes the temptations to pride, sloth, and cowardice, and is free to fulfill God’s will for him.  The outward circumstances—the approval and disapproval of any or all—are irrelevant to him, if only he can suffer with Christ in order to be raised with him (Rom. 6:1—11; 8:17).

What has every Martyr likely said or thought as he goes down to death?  “Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit!”  It is the perfect thing to say, because it is the perfect one who said it.  If we die with him, we should follow his example to the letter.  If we suffer with him in less drastic ways, we should commit all our suffering to Him who committed his spirit to the Father.  In this way, we have fellowship with God through and beyond our suffering.

“Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit!”  It is the final thing that Jesus says, because it is the final thing any of us should say—or so he has taught us, his disciples.  We might not actually die as, in a crisis or trial, we say these words, but they will do for us in all circumstances as a preparation for that time when indeed we shall die!  “Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit!”  If we can do that now, we shall be able to do it then; it will be our habit and our joy to join our sufferings to Christ’s in all things, great and small.

When Jesus breathed his last, his soul was safe with the Father, and the eternal plan of salvation was accomplished.  How would it be—how will it be—to be at home in our souls with the Father, to have our life’s work done?  How much happier to have done Christ’s work in our lives!  We all have the possibility of doing so.  Preparation for our homecoming can—and must—be done now!  What will Christ say to us when we arrive?  Will he see his own sufferings, his own yearnings, and designs in the life we have led?  Again, we have the opportunity to determine the character of this future meeting.  We can love those closest to us with an Almighty Love, as unlikely as it seems.  We can forgive our persecutors and slanderers.  We can allow the Holy Spirit to colonize all of our thoughts, words, and deeds to the Glory of God.  We can resist temptation, and rend our hearts and not just our garments.  We can be faithful and devote ourselves to all of the prayers and pieties Mother Church has prepared for us, especially in this holy week to come, knowing fully that as we do, so shall we be.

We have spent the last six weeks, at least at this hour, looking at the last words of Jesus which terminate in this one, “Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit!”  It is a word for the time when words will no longer matter, when a spirit that lives in us will be everything, and the Father’s love all that can possibly bear us up. “Father, Into Thy Hands, I commit my spirit, for thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, thou God of truth.” (Ps. 31:5)  That latter half of this verse from the Psalms is for us to say.  We are the redeemed ones.  It was superfluous for Jesus.  Nevertheless, his committing his spirit to the Father was essential, not least for the very possibility of our salvation.

Are we ready to commit ourselves to Love Himself in and through all things, this Holy Week and forever?  “Forever” is the operative word here, for Jesus now dwells with the Father, awaiting our appearance before his Throne for judgment, for mercy, and spiritual communion, forever.

Hosanna to the Son of David (Orlando Gibbons)

Hosanna to the Son of David (Thomas Weelkes)

Ghosts of Holy Weeks Past

From March 24, 2008:

Easter itself was chilly, with temperatures in the low 50’s, but the sun shone on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday with more than the usual enthusiasm for this time of year. Here are some scenes from the Triduum as we lived it out at our house:

Good Friday we went to a Living Stations of the Cross put on by the Mexican congregation at Saint M’s. It was all in Spanish, but of course we know the story, so we trudged round with the rest of the large crowd, getting sunburned and lifting up Helier and Crispina so that they could see the action at each station. It’s my guess that the men of the parish come nearly to blows over who’s going to play the Roman soldiers; these soldiers discharged their unpleasant duty of tormenting and crucifying the Messiah with obvious and cheerful zeal, taking great pleasure in the realistic whip-sounds they could produce by striking the cross with pieces of rope. The crowd followed not only the soldiers but a holy SUV loaded with amplifiers and attended by acolytes bearing heaps of tangled cord, plus a young woman with an electric guitar, who provided musical accompaniment. The children were spellbound, even Epiphany who was pretending not to be.

After the Stations, we came home to keep silence until three in the afternoon. That is, Aelred and the big kids kept silence, while Helier and Crispina and I went outside to make little Easter-Garden terrariums in the sunshine.

On Holy Saturday, Aelred came home with flowers, wine for after the Vigil, and – out of the blue – a pet fish for the children. He is a betta, one of those fish they sell in plastic cups, and his name is Alpha. Get it? Alpha Betta? Yuk yuk. (sniff. he was with us until this winter, and we miss him.)

I sang all the Masses of the Triduum; Epiphany came to them all with me to enjoy the view from the choir loft; Aelred, Amicus, Helier and Crispina went to all the Masses except the Vigil, which we all agreed was still a bit more than certain patiences were prepared to accomodate. Amicus and I, the procrastinators, went to Confession Saturday afternoon and came out shriven and white and new. Yesterday we did the rounds of the grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and when we’d come home and gotten everyone to bed, Aelred and I sat in the kitchen and drank a thimbleful each of chartreuse in the warm lamplight and the quiet.

This post originally had photos to illustrate it;  if you want to see them, go here.

What I Learned This Week . . .

 . . . about hosting blog hops:   they start small, but are fun to do nonetheless. Many thanks to the DHM (who's just posted an excellent meditation on books which have formed her language-arts philosophy), and to Mr. G. Sheehy of A Teacher's Writes for their contributions, as well as to Lucy, who left some good thoughts on Flannery O'Connor in the comments.

There will be appropriate silence here on Holy Saturday, but What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book will return the following Saturday, so by gumbo, go open a book sometime between now and then, and come tell the rest of us something about it.

Unfinished Song (in more ways than one)

The green tree in the garden stood,
Its laden arms outspread.
Bold Eva, told the fruit was good,
Ate death's black seed instead.

The cherry tree, the cherry tree,
Persimmon, peach, and pear,
Flower all in Eastertide,
So sweet and pure and fair. 

Amid the thorn Maria came.
The wind mourned through the land.
The sky stooped low to speak her name.
An old man held her hand.

The cherry tree, the cherry tree,
The apple and the plum,
Cast to the wind and sunshine
Their  frail and tattered bloom. 

The holly bright with ivy wreathed
Dropped berries on the snow.
Fresh from the dawn's womb, Jesu breathed
The mortal air below.

The cherry tree, the cherry tree,
The orchards hung with white: 
Winter blooms anew in spring,
Light on a moonless night. 

The barren branches crowned the hill
And, stark against the sky
Where in its course the sun stood still,
One flower bloomed to die.

The cherry tree, the cherry tree
Hangs heavy now with red.
The long hours pass, and on the grass
The windfalls spill their blood.  



Just as I roughed it out on promotional notepaper some cause or other sent my mother. Maybe this week I'll think of an Easter verse. As you can see, I'm very much enamored of all those old tree-themed carols which seek to put the pieces of salvation history together. I'm also not that great a metricist. (or a metrist. I can't convert feet to meters, and my metrical feet can be stinky, too.)

Friday Poetry: More Little Gidding

II

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house --
The wall, the wainscot, and the mouse.
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire. 

T.S. Eliot
The Four Quartets
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971 

As you read this, I'm driving east across Tennessee, on my way home. I queued it up before I left, in between packing, laundry, and chasing people to bed, thinking that if I had more time, I'd like to talk about some of this, if anyone's interested. So if you are inclined to talk about Eliot, Four Quartets, and/or this passage in particular, jump right in and I'll catch up when I get home. Otherwise, carry on . . . with whatever it is you normally do at this time on Fridays, that is.

Drop, Drop, Slow Tears

words:  Phineas Fletcher
setting:  Orlando Gibbons

Brother Michael Mary Says

Order your Mystic Monks coffee for Easter before it's too late! There's still some Pascha Java left, but it's going fast.



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Laus Deo, Says Aelred

No, no, no, it's not that the house is so nice and quiet without the rest of us. It's that he's found a contemporary hymn with words you actually don't cringe to find yourself singing. Far from it, in fact;  the words are beautiful:

The Apple tree spread wide its shade

To shield the garden from the sun;

In dappled light the Virgin prayed

That, cloud or clear, God’s will be done.

The apple blossoms frothed and fell

In pools of white about her feet,

Wing-brushed when heaven came to tell

Of earth’s release and sin’s defeat.

She trod the blossoms to the ground,

For she would bear a finer fruit

Whose flesh would make the sick grow sound

And heal the wounded world at root.

The apples on the market stall

Are tempting to the eye and tongue

But her fruit has surpassed them all:

High praise to Christ, our life be sung.

Genevieve Glen, OSB  (b. 1945)

I'm not sure where he came across this hymn, and he didn't send me a link or any hint as to the tune. Anyone else more clued in than I am?

The Feast of the Annunciation: Some Marian Reruns

More light to sharpen the Lenten shadows. Here's some music for the feast, plus the text of a little talk on Mary which I gave to a group of Anglican churchwomen several years ago: 

Everything that is important about Mary stems from this one crucial fact of her motherhood: though she was human, what she was Mother of was GOD. Her role was to clothe God in human flesh. In taking on that flesh, He in no way became anything other than divine; His human nature at no moment ever trumped the divine nature He had had, always and always, outside time. She was simply – simply! – the portal through which eternity and infinity entered human history.

Here in Memphis, where I'm writing this, we're having soft, overcast spring weather, with a little spittling rain now and then. In the liturgical calendar, however, today the sun is shining.

Adoramus Te, Christe (Palestrina)

Christe, Adoramus Te (Claudio Monteverdi)

Adoramus Te, Christe (Quirino Gasparini)

What I Learned This Week . . .

. . . By Opening One Book remains open until this weekend. As reader Lucy points out, it's a great way to write about a book without having to write a whole review;  if, like  me, you have an ADD-ish approach to reading, and are constantly picking up and putting down things and gleaning snippets on your way to doing something else, this is the book talk for you. 

So if you've happened to pick something up and gleaned some fascinating snippet, do write about it, even if it seems too small or disjointed a snippet to bother with. If you've recently reread something -- the DHM has been revisiting Mortimer Adler, for example -- that counts, too.

Really I'm trying out this link gizmo for the first time, but after Holy Week and Easter I'd like to bring Opening One Book back as a regular feature:   book talk for those on the fly, or for those who, like me, tend to shy away from book clubs mostly because they can't ever seem to do what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it.

Anyway, I'll keep the list open till Saturday, then resume the carnival weekly after Easter. All comers welcome!

Adoremus Te, Christe (F.C.T. Dubois, 1837-1924)

Entering Passiontide

The end of Lent is a season in itself, when the statues in the church, even the Crucifix, are veiled in purple. It's as though the Agony in the Garden were beginning to begin;  it's as though the holy personages want to hide their faces from the unfolding tragedy;  it's as though God Himself, afraid in His human nature of the human suffering before Him, goes apart from us to pray while we sleep.

Yesterday my First Communion class prayed the Stations of the Cross together, with the lights off and fourteen candles lit, each one to be snuffed at the end of each Station (and let me say right now that if you want second-graders to be quiet and still, the threatening and addictive qualities of fire are supremely useful). Coming from Mass and the covered images, I was struck by this children's prayer at the Sixth Station, in which Saint Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, and her cloth retains the print of His suffering face:

Jesus, Veronica has pity on You
and gives You a cloth
on which You leave the picture 
of Your holy face. 

Put Your picture on my heart
that I may always think of You . . .  

In Passiontide, as Father noted in his homily, even the customary images which feed our faith through our senses are withdrawn, to compel us to nurture the living Image within ourselves. Interesting, too, that via a veil, the face of Christ becomes mysteriously manifest.

On a more prosaic note, I'll be away from the computer this week, but I won't leave you completely bereft. I've queued up some settings of that great and simple prayer before the Cross:

Adoramus te, Christe,
et benedicimus tibi,
qui a per sanctam crucem tuam
redemisti mundum.  

We adore thee, O Christ,
and we bless thee, 
who hast by thy holy cross
redeemed the world.  

 Hopefully I've got the videos arranged in proper reverse-chronological order, from the lush fin du siecle rendering of Francois Clement Theodore Dubois to Palestrina's polyphony. For Friday there's this text by Phineas Fletcher, in Orlando Gibbons' setting:

Drop, drop, slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet, 
Which brought from heav'n
The news and Prince of Peace. 


Cease not, wet eyes, 
His mercies to entreat;
To cry for vengeance
Sin doth never cease. 


In your deep flood
Drown all my faults and fears;
Nor let his eye
See sin, but through my tears.

 Like Veronica, now that I think of it, the woman in Luke's gospel who washes Jesus' feet with her tears receives from Him far more than she has given, even when she has withheld nothing of herself. Her tears, with which she "bathe[s]those beauteous feet," are tears of contrition;  washing Him, she is given His cleanness, His image in exchange for her own. Simon the Pharisee, personifying sin which "to cry for vengeance doth never cease,"is silenced.


All this seems a good way to prepare for the solemnities and sacrifices of Holy Week. Meanwhile, What I Learned This Week by Opening One Book remains open. I began in a sunny-Saturday-afternoon spirit of lighthearted trivia, but  all kinds of reading and reflection are welcome, in both comments and blog links.

Lenten Vespers 5: The Fifth and Sixth of the Seven Last Words

As always, you can pray the office here. Tonight Aelred offered the following meditation:

The Gospel according to St. John, chapter 19: 28

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.  29Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put [it] upon hyssop, and put [it] to his mouth.  30When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

+   +   +

The fifth and sixth words of Jesus from the cross continue the theme of dereliction and suffering—how could it be otherwise? The seven last words of Jesus are all from the Cross; they are the divinely revealed words of dereliction and suffering.  They are not a sampling of Jesus’ teaching or of New Testament events.  Those who preach on these words are in the same boat with Father, who is preaching on the seven deadly sins: all the news seems dire and dreadful, and so it is.  Also, as Father reminded us this morning, we have entered Passiontide.  We are intensifying our affiliation with the events of Lent and the Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.  These last two weeks will wring everything out of us, even if it is only in analogy to what the Lord himself actually suffered.

It is good that we make this pilgrimage to the Cross each year; to do so any less often would mean that we would totally forget the emotion and meaning of the Passion of the Lord.  A biblical Jubilee, according to Leviticus 25, can be celebrated only every seven or every forty-nine years, but that entails no injury to one’s ability to celebrate.  Our natural desire to avoid pain and our propensity to forget it, on the other hand, mean that we must memorialize suffering far more often, indeed, as the Jews do with Passover.  So, every year, Lent and Holy Week bring us back to an awareness from which we must never stray too far: the Passion that is at the root of our salvation, the suffering that has completed the Eternal Passover.

Completion is the theme of Jesus’ penultimate word:  “It is finished.”  It is finished: all of it!  The life and teaching of Jesus, his suffering, the obedience to the Father he came to enact, the exchange on the Cross, the covenant history of Israel, the tradition of the Patriarchs, the royal lineage of David—all of it is consummated with Jesus’ dying breath.  There ensues then a silence that is deafening—the sound beyond sound of a cosmic door slamming shut without interruption forever.  Other gospels than John record strange phenomena that occur at the death of Jesus:  darkness, opening tombs, the rending of the Temple veil.  John simply passes over these things to Jesus’ burial.  One intuits that the era of the world is over: its events purely derivative of the Great Sacrifice that has been accomplished.  History is turned over; the era of the Church has begun.  Glory has only to mop up.

It is finished.  It is consummated.

According to St. John, the last thing Jesus does before he hands over his spirit is to enact a final fulfillment of Holy Scripture.  In Psalm 69, we read, “They gave me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty, they gave me vinegar to drink.”  Jesus says, “I thirst.”

At one point on the cross, Jesus is offered some wine mixed with gall or myrrh—but he does not drink it.  It is meant as a drug, as a sedative, but he refuses the false and disordered comfort of it.  It is meant as one of those ways the world reaches out to us with its stupefaction and deadening comforts.  Jesus does not heed the world on his cross, or ever, for that matter, but he receives the vinegar because he has caused Holy Scripture to tell the tale of his life beforehand, and he will manifest its fulfillment in his own flesh. 

I find it startling that Jesus does not decline to endure this last little bit of suffering (added to the immensity of what he has suffered already) and drink the stinking vinegar that he is offered.  Truly he has drained the cup of suffering to the dregs.  “I thirst”—he says it, certainly because it is true, but also knowing that what he will get will not help that thirst.  There is no indignity that he will avoid until death closes his eyes. 

It is true that many people have gone thirsting and fainting to their graves—it is not uncommon in the history of our race.  One need only think of soldiers in fierce wars, in deserts, or crawling to a source of water to get a last drink.  When I was a child, and again much later as a parent with my own children, I would go Shiloh, the Civil War battlefield on the border of Tennessee and Mississippi, and never miss the opportunity to see the feature known as Bloody Pond.  There, soldiers from both sides would come for water—the woods were literally on fire during the battle—and many, along with horses, would die there, staining the water dark red.   That landmark, though no longer bloody, provided a moment of deep recollection, amidst the quiet hills and peach orchards of that place, concerning the horrors of war and the real character of sacrifice.  One can surely say that the thirst and dereliction of Christ on the Cross was for the sake of these similarly dying men.

Early on in his ministry with his disciples, Jesus told them, “He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst (Jn 6:35).”  He also told them, “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink (7:37).”  He proclaimed the reality of the living waters of his Spirit. 

We all thirst.  We usually do not realize in our souls how much we thirst.  There are many things that distract us from our dehydration of spirit, including those things we think do quench our thirst.  They are always short-lived,  however, and we find ourselves thirstier than before.  Like salt water, money, attention, reputation, physical comforts, and success do not satisfy, and we are made fools for these things.  We perish of thirst, drinking in all of these things in the greatest amounts we can manage.

A river flowing with the water of life is just what we want.  In Jesus Christ, it is what we get.  But that river comes at the cost of His thirst.  It also comes at the cost of our lives.  We must abandon ourselves to come to this water, just as in our baptism we drowned the old self with its desires and passions (Gal. 5:24). 

If the taste of the living water seems strange to us at first, and we hanker after the old, still, we can become thirstier and thirstier for the real thing.  We can ask God in prayer to give us the thirst for the real thing.  We can live lives of virtue and realize more and more that the living waters—and these only--sustain the life we truly long for.

We can and should interpret the “dry spells” in our life of faith as the evidence that our thirsts are finally being redirected to what is real and true, and not to the short-lived satisfactions we were used to.  That is to say, what we “feel” and what is actually going on with us can be at odds.  We must trust God that he is bringing us to the place flowing with the waters of life.

Indeed, the next time that we do hear from the lips of Christ “It is finished,” we shall hear it in the place of the river of life.  We shall hear it at the consummation of the ages, in the Kingdom, and it will be for us the end of all thirst and all yearning.

John the Evangelist, who recorded for us these words of Jesus from the Cross received late in his days, by a gift of grace, this vision of the consummation of all things, recorded in the last chapters of the book of Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. [. . .]  And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." [. . .] 
And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. [. . .]  Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
[. . . ]I, John, am he who heard and saw these things. [And the Lamb said]"Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."  Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.
[…]  The Spirit and the Bride say, "Come." And let him who hears say, "Come." And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price.

[. . . ]  He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon."

Such is the vision that the Cross of our Lord both conceals and enables.  The Lamb of Sacrifice will be the Lamb of the eternal Jubilee, of the wedding feast, of the new Jerusalem. He will give us of the waters of life forever.  Then it will be finished. The Crucified one will return for his ransomed flock, and we say with John,


Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book

The book: THE LIVING GARDEN: The 400-Year History of an English Garden, by George Ordish. It's something of a sequel, or an ex-quel, maybe, to The Living House, which chronicled the story of a farmhouse in Kent from 1555 to the mid-20th century.


(sponsored Amazon links;  not all copies of this book are quite this expensive, I don't think.)

The Living Garden is so far -- I haven't finished it yet -- a fascinating read, part history, part horticulture, part nature-study. From the first chapter, in which the enterprising wife of an Elizabethan farmer starts a plot of medicinal herbs outside her front door and ends with a thriving business in remedies, not to mention a large plot of cultivated land blooming with roses, fragrant with strewing herbs, and abundant in vegetables for the pot, I have learned

*that the creation of a thyme garden, in Elizabethan times, by gathering wild thyme in great quantities from the surrounding woodlands, contributed to the extinction of the Large Blue butterfly in Kent. Why? Well, it has to do, very complicatedly, with the taste of ants for honey. The caterpillar of the Large Blue butterfly, which hatches from eggs laid on thyme blossoms, secretes a honeylike substance which the local woodland ants find so irresistible that they kidnap the caterpillar from its thymy element and cart it back to their nest. There, they drug themselves into a stupor on the caterpillar's secretion, while the caterpillar devours their larvae. It passes through its pupal stage in the ants' nest;  when the adult butterfly emerges, it makes it way through the tunnels to the open air, spreads and dries its wings, and flies merrily away.

The removal of much of the woodland thyme in the vicinity of this particular house -- Ordish refers repeatedly to the "stripping" of the woods -- inevitably removed the caterpillars and the ants from each other's easy reach, disrupting the butterfly's parasitic cycle.

*The herb rue was said to prevent "lewd thoughts," says Ordish.

*Because nitre (potassium nitrate) was so valuable in the manufacture of gunpowder, it was illegal for people to collect it from the earth beneath their own stables, where it was crystallized from the urine of the farm animals. Says Ordish, "The Queen's nitre men could enter any premises, dig up the earth in stables, extract the nitre and carry it away, and nobody could say them nay."

Nevertheless, Mary Barton, the Tudor farmwife, decided to collect nitre from beneath her stables and use it to burn out troublesome tree stumps preventing her cultivation of more land.

Meanwhile, from the flyleaf I learned that "in a pasture, the earthworms below the ground weigh as much as the cattle above ground."

What exactly I am going to do with this knowledge remains to be seen. Still, as always, knowledge is something to have;  it takes up no space, and may at any moment turn out to be useful.


Soooooo . . . . What did you learn this week by opening one book? Leave me a comment and, if by some chance you've blogged about it, or are now inspired anew, pop a link to your post in the handy widget below.



While you're at it, go visit the lovely ladies at Mystical Rose Design,  who have been hosting a Friday "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" blog hop. The link list is now closed, but they'll be running it weekly,and it's a fun read. I still owe them a link!

The Feast of Saint Joseph

Lux et tenebrae:  we wear Lent like a rich purple cloak, with its swells and folds of light and shadow. An icon like this one, of Saint Joseph with the Christ Child, maps those contrasts starkly. The saint's clothing seems sinewed as a laboring man's body, but with the play of darkness and brilliance -- though light doesn't fall on the figures so much as it simply emanates from the golden element in which they stand.

Today is one of those days of the golden element which lighten, in every sense, the sobriety of Lent. A feast like this sheds light;  it eases the burden of a long fast;  as a baby drops into head-down position to be born -- they call this "lightening," though it feels awfully heavy -- this late-Lent solemnity is a shift towards the great birth from death of the child who clasps his foster-father's fingers with such serene tenderness.

Over the dazzling white garment of his divinity, he wears the red of the human blood which is also his to shed. He is God, the Second Person of the Trinity which cannot be sundered, whose members commune eternally in love and joy;  yet he is a child, and suffers himself to be held. Co-eternal with the Father, he places himself in the trust of this creaturely father, to show us -- to show even the foster-father himself -- how to be little children, and to trust.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Saint Joseph should become the emblem of God's utter trustworthiness, particularly in matters of the family and the household. Take Mary as your wife. Take the child and go to Egypt:  he had to learn this trustworthiness even as we do, and by learning it, learn to be a father and caretaker, trustworthy in the divine image. As we struggle towards a more perfect mirroring of that image in ourselves, it is good to have his prayers.

The feast observed around the web:   

At Intentional Disciples:  Saint Teresa of Avila on her devotion to Saint Joseph

Deacon Greg Kandra on  intercessory  real  estate

Saint Joseph and the interior life

The Pious Sodaility of Church Ladies ask:  was Saint Joseph old or young?
 
The Virtual Saint Joseph Altar Blogfest  (via Paper Dali)

Friday Poetry: Little Gidding (Continued)

     If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city --
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

                                     If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or any season,
It would always be the same:  you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead:  the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
In England and nowhere. Never and always.



T.S. Eliot
The Four Quartets
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971

Under Troubled Skies

Yesterday my friend Rachel and her family buried their stillborn daughter, Dominica Marie:  a white casket smaller than a toybox, borne as if effortlessly by two of her sisters to and from the church. Another sister read, in a ringing voice, this passage from the Book of Lamentations:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is thy faithfulness.
"The Lord is my portion," says my soul,
"therefore I will hope in him."

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.

The day, as my friend said later, was shot through with miracles of one kind or another. They had wondered how to bring their married daughter from Oregon with  her two little children;  already the cadets of another daughter's cadre at the Air Force Academy had pooled their money for plane tickets. When the Knights of Columbus got wind of this, they paid for the plane tickets instead,  leaving the family with enough money for a headstone.

Through some channel they were given a plot in the corner of a monastery graveyard, and the simple burial took place there:  no canopy, no hydraulic lifts, nothing but a small, square hole in the red earth. There, under a troubled March sky, my friends settled their baby to sleep. Her parents, her sisters and brothers, all took turns spading the dirt back over her, patting it down, smoothing it, tamping the slabs of sod back over it at last and laying the spray of purple and white spring flowers on top.

Afterwards, the boys roamed off to pelt each other with pine cones by the woods which edge the graveyard. As Amicus remarked, it was all they could think of to cheer up the brothers. The girls picked daffodils and little vinca blossoms and laid them on the other flowers blooming briefly on the baby's grave, while the grownups clustered around Rachel and her husband to offer whatever ineffectual consolation we could.

"That was beautiful," one friend said of the burial. "It was exactly right."

Rachel's husband replied, in his quiet way, "Well, I don't like it."

And of course both things hold:  death happens to all of us, and we're right not to run from it, but being made for life and joy, we don't like it, don't want it, wouldn't ask for it.

 Rachel's eyes rested on the daughter who had read the Scriptures at Mass, and whose face now, as the wind whipped her hair across it, was overwritten with sorrow.

"You know, I told all my kids, our lives are just an eyelash longer than hers." She nodded at the flowery grave. "It's a powerful thing to realize that. But I wouldn't want anybody else to have to learn it this way."

A Quickie Before The Morning Gets Away From Us

Much to do today, here in the real world, and not all of it happy. At eleven this morning at Saint Dymphna's, we will bid a sad farewell to my friend Rachel's tiny daughter Dominica;  please, if you are inclined to prayer, remember Rachel, her husband, and their nine surviving children today, as well as Dominica herself.

Before I begin the task of rounding up children and their church clothes and shoes, though, let me draw your attention to some new items in the sidebar. You will already have noticed the butterfly button linking you to Donna Young's homeschooling site.  This is a resource I discovered in my earliest homeschooling days and have recently  rediscovered with a vengeance -- nothing like a new printer/copier to make you feel like printing and copying stuff. She has made it her mission to provide quality materials -- writing paper, handwriting lessons, math worksheets, forms and lists and planners of all kinds -- to the homeschooling world, for free. It sounds a little nutty, but if you're slogging through a late-year Slough of Despond, as many of us annually do, there's nothing like a new form for revitalizing things. Seriously. All winter long, you say to the hoi polloi, "Look at the trees. Notice the trees. Let's study the trees." Yawn, yawn, say the hoi polloi. Finally one day you hand them a printed notebook page with lines for writing and a space for drawing, and they're knocking each other over to go outside and look at the trees. Go figure.

Finally, if you've visited in the last 24 hours, you will maybe have noticed that we have yet another little business venture afoot. I'm not a brilliant photographer, but I've managed, in playing around with my digital camera, to take a few striking pictures over the years -- which any monkey could probably do, given enough time, but there it is. Anyway, at CafePress, you can have your images printed on a wide variety of items and sell them via a nifty little storefront gizmo, as you can plainly see there on your right. So if those flamingos on that coffee mug look familiar, there's a reason. You can also get them on a mousepad, a coaster, and divers other items. I'll be rotating images periodically, so there's a certain limited-edition quality to what's available right now. And if you've seen an original image on this blog which you'd like to have reproduced on a mug, mousepad, magnet, or other consumer good, do please let me know. I'll be happy to oblige you.

Of course, as always, we are immensely grateful to our readers simply for being our readers.

All right, we have outfits to approve and shoes to find. More later, as time permits.

Some People Go Out of Their Way to Court a Firestorm

Maclin, for instance.

I'm noting in my sidebar, by the way, that Light on Dark Water has moved to Typepad. You might want to change your bookmarks, too.

Breaking News

Breaking news which I had to wade through about ten pages of Google Blogs to find, mind you:

An eighteenth-century play called Double Falshood either is or is not based on a lost play by Shakespeare.

The ayes:

Brean Hammond, who has spent the past ten years researching the origins of the play, believes that Theobald was working with a genuine Shakespeare script, written like Henry VIII, in collaboration with the playwright’s protégé John Fletcher. The whole thing was tinkered with to suit Theobald’s notion of what an 18th-century audience might want but “Shakespeare’s hand can be seen in Act One, Act Two and a little bit of Act Three”.
Passages in the first half of the play, before Fletcher took over, “have the density, metrical sophistication and metaphorical richness” characteristic of Shakespeare. There are also words “that you won’t find anywhere else (again characteristic of Shakespeare) such as ‘absonant’ which means ill-sounding, not pleasant to the ear.” (more and more)

The nays:  Well, there seem not to be any, actually, though my favorite headline goes only so far as to say, "Not Not By Shakespeare."

According to a BBC News wire story, the play, Double Falsehood, originally “dismissed as a forgery,” is now believed to have been on a “long-lost” play by William Shakespeare called Cardenio, “which was itself based on Don Quixote,” and was co-written with another playwright named John Fletcher, whom many scholars now credit as the Bard’s co-author on two other plays recently accredited as late-in-life Shakespeare, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsman.

As the narrative now runs, it's officially, yes yes yes, probably, Cardenio which a lawyer named Lewis Teobald picked up and remodeled into his 1727 play.

Meanwhile, a shrug from the Shakespeare Geek.

 

March Monday Homeschool Notes

What's on my mind? Books and binders, baby. There's nothing you can think of that you can't turn into a book, as the lapbooking people have been saying forever, though as a card-carrying non-crafty person whose idea of hell (when it doesn't involve sorting children's socks) is an eternity of printing out and folding multi-page brochure-type things, I think I tend more towards a "notebooking" kind of outlook.

For years now, we've been pegging away slowly at a timeline project, using a very beautiful book from this purveyor of cool history stuff. 

See how pretty it is? (No, they're not paying me for a product review. I just happen to own the thing and like it. So there). Until recently we've just been noting dates as we run across them in our reading, conversations, and travels, but increasingly it's turning into something more like a lapbook, with fold-out illustrations and written commentary.

Meanwhile, I've been using up our formerly-plenteous stock of manila file folders for book covers. You run them through the three-hole punch, snip yourself three little lengths of yarn, and there you have your instant, customizable binderette, good for collecting coloring pages, or anything else you want to collect. Currently, as part of his First-Communion preparation,  Helier is making a book about the Seven Sacraments, involving copywork, drawing, puzzles, and anything else I can think of to have him put in it. He's also making a "commonplace book" using another folder and lined paper printed out from Donna Young's indispensable site.  To help him with proper spacing of letters and words, I've given him some sheets of paper that's not only ruled horizontally, but is also marked with little vertical spacing lines, and on this he's copying poems and short passages from our reading.

Crispina has a "my favorite random coloring pages" folder-book, plus a nature book we started today. At Donna Young I found printable half-sized weather-journal, garden, animal and tree pages:  they print out horizontally, with a double-page spread on one 8.5x11 sheet. Each weather page, for example, has a space for the date, time and temperature, plus some lines for writing a description of the weather -- today was "warm, sunny, windy" -- and a space for drawing a sketch of the day's weather. What we'll do is collect a number of these into a little stapled half-sized booklet, then glue it sidewise onto one half of the inside of the folder. My idea, and I guess this is kind of lapbooky, is to have a decorated cover that you open out to reveal four little booklets on the aforementioned themes. We could also punch holes to accommodate some full-sized pages if we wanted to.

For Amicus and Epiphany I'm in the midst of drawing up summer reading lists which -- it is my devout hope -- will be both all-encompassing and manageable in reality. My thought for both of them is that, when they're home, they can do math daily and always have a book going, which will cover no end of bases. Donna Young -- bear with me;  I just got a new printer, and the paper is flying around here -- provides an assortment of reading-list and reading-log pages;  what I think I'm going to have them each do is to keep a reading notebook with some kind of format, rather than blank pages, which seem to cow the readers in my house, rather than otherwise. Either they never get started journaling about what they read, or else every journal entry is a tome in itself, and the benighted reader gets mired in Chapter 2, never to escape except by losing the book altogether behind some heavy article of furniture. This way they have the way marked out for them, chapter by chapter, with just enough space to make some useful notes and not get run away with. We could add scrapbook-type pages for any related research they might happen to do, artwork they might happen to produce, and so forth.

Here's a selection from Epiphany's list so far:

Kristin Lavransdatter
O Pioneers/My Antonia/The Song of the Lark (choose one)
The Red Badge of Courage
Middlemarch
The Age of Innocence
Mrs. Dalloway
Murder in the Cathedral/The Cocktail Party (choose one)
Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor

I'm going for a decent cross-section of nineteeth- and twentieth-century literature with which I think one ought to have at least a passing acquaintance, even if Virginia Woolf is not going to be one's spiritual life-mentor, necessarily. I also want to include some good non-fiction, including science reading for a non-scientist. Suggestions enthusiastically welcomed.

Finally, some links which may be of interest and use: 

Book list forms
Nature notebook pages
Writing paper
Notebooking Forms
Liturgical-year lapbooks using Cay Gibson's Catholic Mosaic
Rosary lapbooks
Lapbook templates
Egyptian-hieroglyphics lapbook
Owl lapbooks
Lapbook lesson guide
Science notebooks
Famous people notebooking pages
Math notebooking

The sun is shining, and Crispina's waiting for me to go garden with her. Maybe we'll notebook it while we're at it.

Lenten Vespers 4: Why Have You Forsaken Me?

It's been a hell of a day in our parish. At this morning's Mass we prayed for the repose of the soul of a very small person named Dominica Marie, the daughter of a friend whom I'll call Rachel. Last fall, at forty-seven, already the mother of nine and the grandmother of one, Rachel was astounded to discover that she was pregnant. It took her, she said, the space of a week to realize that if anything happened to this baby, she would be devastated. On arriving  at this realization, she almost immediately began bleeding heavily and was sure she had miscarried. The baby's heartbeat, sure and steady on the sonogram, was an even greater miracle than the pregnancy itself:  in a very short time she had been handed a life, a death, and a resurrection.

We are a small parish in a small town, and even in a Catholic church where big families aren't weird, everyone knows this family. One daughter works in the bakery on the square. Another daughter does us all proud at the Air Force Academy. Another has a developmental disability which keeps her, at twenty-three, forever a toddler. Yet another drives a hard bargain at Pokemon-card-trading with the boys. Rachel's soft-spoken husband serves the church as sacristan;  Rachel herself, lively and talkative and surrounded by children, is the kind of person you'd have to try, actively, not to be friends with.

When she announced that she was pregnant, everyone gasped, then cheered. When she thought she was losing the baby, we all held our breath, then let it out in a collective sigh of relief. Everything was all right. We still had our miracle baby. Rachel remained our miracle mother, a role she played with self-deprecating humor. Not long ago, some restaurant or other offered her a senior-citizen discount;  "Have you ever seen a fifty-five-year-old woman this pregnant?" she demanded of the waitress. "Not that I wouldn't have taken it," she confessed later, laughing at her own indignation.

Last Friday evening, after Stations of the Cross, we sat talking in the church social hall while our children were making pretzels. "This kid," said Rachel, "he's going to be a priest. No question. He's God's."

She did not mean, This kid will be a priest, or I will be disappointed. Not at all. What she meant was, There is something at work here, and it is bigger than I am. All the miraculous mothers of the Bible would understand:  Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary. All were given children -- as any of us is given a child --  not for their own gratification, ultimately, but for the working-out  of a larger story. A mother does not say This child belongs to God from a deficit of love. It's what conscientious parents labor all their lives to say of their children. This person is not my creature. God's plan and my dreams may have nothing to do with each other.

Late this past week, a week or two shy of the due date, the baby stopped moving. This time, the sonogram testified to no miracle. The doctors induced labor, and on Friday she was stillborn:   a girl, belonging to God. The announcement of her death at Mass this morning, in the midst of Laetare Sunday,  cast a shadow in all our hearts. We all wanted to hold that baby with Rachel. Instead, we'll hold Rachel herself, and all her grieving family, because as their joy has been our joy, now their suffering is ours as well.

Against that backdrop, we prayed Vespers tonight, and Aelred delivered the following meditation:

The Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter 16:
[33] And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. [34] And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "E'lo-i, E'lo-i, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" which means, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" [35] And some of the bystanders hearing it said, "Behold, he is calling Eli'jah."
+   +   +

The fourth word of Jesus, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” is found in both the Gospel According to St. Mark, and the Gospel According to St. Matthew.  It is originally found, of course, in Psalm 22, from which Jesus is quoting,

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
[2] O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
[3] Yet thou art holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
[4] In thee our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
[5] To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed.
[6] But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the people.
[7] All who see me mock at me,
they make mouths at me, they wag their heads;
[8] "He committed his cause to the LORD; let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!"
[9] Yet thou art he who took me from the womb;
thou didst keep me safe upon my mother's breasts.
[10] Upon thee was I cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God.
[11] Be not far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is none to help.

This is a psalm of dereliction on the lips of Jesus, who, as a good Jew, knew the Psalms intimately.  In fact, Jesus uses his own native tongue, Aramaic, to give voice to this psalm—so intimate is the Psalm to him.  "E'lo-i, E'lo-i, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?"  Or, perhaps, it is better to say that the evangelist, the gospel writer, preserves this Aramaic elocution of Jesus to show just how deeply his suffering penetrates his person.  On the Cross, Jesus has no one but his Father, and he has no better words to offer than the revealed words of scripture itself.  They are the perfect words; they are his words in the first place, for he is God.

The Psalm goes on to describe all that he is going through, for he is the fulfillment of the Psalm.  And so, Psalm 22 continues:

 [12] Many bulls encompass me,
strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
[13] they open wide their mouths at me,
like a ravening and roaring lion.
[14] I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax,
it is melted within my breast;
[15] my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
thou dost lay me in the dust of death.
[16] Yea, dogs are round about me;
a company of evildoers encircle me;
they have pierced my hands and feet --
[17] I can count all my bones --
they stare and gloat over me;
[18] they divide my garments among them,
and for my raiment they cast lots.
[19] But thou, O LORD, be not far off!
O thou my help, hasten to my aid!
[20] Deliver my soul from the sword,
my life from the power of the dog!
[21] Save me from the mouth of the lion,
my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild oxen!

Never before has scripture lived like this!  God quotes God.  God lives his own prophecy about himself.  Anyone hearing Jesus begin this psalm, anyone who was a Jew or acquainted with scripture, would have known how the psalm develops and all of its contents.  Could they deny that it applies to Jesus as he hangs there?  Certainly not.  Some do not understand the psalm, or the Aramaic, however, and suppose that he is calling upon Elijah.  Well, Elijah cannot help here.  This is a matter between the persons of the Holy Trinity:  Son calls to Father, and the human nature of Jesus Christ is in torment, completely in need of vindication by the Father, if the plan of salvation is to succeed for the good of all mankind.

It is not the case, as some have mistakenly supposed, that Jesus is really and ultimately God-forsaken in his sacrifice.  God cannot split from God.  The Son is God, the Father is God, the Holy Spirit is God.  This is the eternal and triune God whose unity is the precondition of all that is.  There is no doubt, however, that Jesus’ human nature—his body and soul—is pressing the limit of limits of that which pertains to human nature, namely death, and that this death is a pure sacrifice, undeserved, purely voluntary, vicarious, that is, solely for us.  It is the miracle of the life of our Lord that never does his human nature buckle under its strains as he presses it toward the end he has in view:  the salvation of all of us.  He will die, but he will not forsake us.

When you or I cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we utter what Jesus uttered first, and may cling to him in a way that assures our salvation and our vindication, for he has won for himself the victory over all that afflicts us.

Jesus gives us the perfect words to repose in him when we are in agony and our lives in torments, great or small.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  These words are pleasing to God, for they recall the sacrifice and vindication of the Son of God, whose image we bear in baptism.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I do not believe what many have said about our condition:  that its hurts and troubles and tragedies are matters of indifference to God.  We can no more say that than we can say that the human suffering of the Son of God was irrelevant to salvation.  No, God came to save us.  He knows we are but flesh.  He took the flesh to himself.  If we deny the reality of our sufferings, we deny the extent of God’s remedy for them.

What does God want to do for those whom he will redeem one day in body and soul to eternal life?  Well, everything.  There is no limit to his mercies and providence—to his love for us.  Will he die for us?  Yes.  Will he live in us.  Yes.  Will he heal and redeem us.  Yes.  If we are God-forsaken, it is never because he has abandoned us; it is because we have abandoned him who is our Life and our entire Good.

God forbid that we should abandon him—especially by abandoning him on his Cross, by our refusal to share his sufferings.  God forbid that we should forget or fail to adore his sacrifice.  Indeed, God has forbidden it, and has given us his Spirit as the power to renew ourselves in his Passion—this Lent and always.  He has given us the Blessed Sacrament to adore.  He has given us sufferings and trials that he might again triumph over them, this time in us, which thing will be to us the source of an unutterable joy!

But this is not all that he has given.  To understand this last thing, we must go back to the Psalm which Jesus begins with his lips and finishes with his life.  In the final portion of Psalm 22, we read:

[22] [Yet] I will tell of thy name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee:
[23] You who fear the LORD, praise him!
all you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!
[24] For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted;
and he has not hid his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.
[25] From thee comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
[26] The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD!
May your hearts live for ever!
[27] All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.
[28] For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.
[29] Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and he who cannot keep himself alive.
[30] Posterity shall serve him;
men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation,
[31] and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
that he has wrought it.

Yes, the final words of the Psalm that begins “My God, my God” contain a hymn of praise to the God who delivers and vindicates and restores life in the face of death.  In bringing this Psalm to the Cross, Jesus implies this victorious ending.  He is the victorious ending.  He is the one to whom the proud of the earth must bow down.  He is the one whom posterity shall serve and praise as their deliverer.  He has established his Dominion forever, and we who have been crucified with him will reign with him there forever! 

Was ever a victory so complete, so perfect, so evident, so definitive?   God did not forsake himself, or us!  No evil has survived his perfect offering; no future is emptied of its hope and no life of the potential for joy!  “Blessed be God . . .who has not shut me up in the power of the enemy (Ps. 31).”

If ever there was a basis for hope on earth, this fourth “word” of Jesus from the Cross is it:  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Though all the world has forsaken him, he has not forsaken us.  He has put us into the hands of the Father.  He has made this Psalm an everlasting token of his victory.  He has routed suffering by suffering, conquered death by death, and remembered the God-forsaken by bearing their sins on the Tree.

Amen.

(All day I've wanted, honestly, to hit "rewind." I've wanted it to be last Friday night again, when the Cross was just the Cross, there on the church wall. The obvious point, however, bitter though it seems, is that it isn't just the Cross, there on the church wall. When it rests on us, we rest in God, though our rest may feel to us like toil in the desert. I wish I could put the pieces together better than this, but it's all just notes . . . )

Note to Self: Daylight Savings

Set the clock forward already. You're going to hate tomorrow if you don't.

Or, well, you're going to hate yourself tomorrow if you don't. And other people who like to get up and take long showers before church aren't going to think so highly of you, either.

A Dark and Stormy Night

The Boy Scouts of our district are jamboreeing this weekend in a mudfield somewhere on the outskirts of Panacea Falls. Amicus went off with them late yesterday afternoon having concocted his contribution to the weekend menu:  garlic-cheese mashed potatoes in a gallon baggie. These were the instant sort -- he wasn't actually hauling a gallon bag of mashed potatoes as such, but of flakes and powders of various kinds to be prepared in situ, the potato, the butter, the just-add-water skim milk, which I'd say was an exercise in redundancy, except that I drink skim milk and am not bothered by its thinness. So I won't be catty about it. Epiphany did remark, on entering the kitchen in the wake of the menu-preparation travails, that the counters and floor appeared to be suffering from severe dandruff. Be that as it may, we got him packed off, and almost as soon as we did, the heavens dropped down from above, and the skies rained not righteousness, but rain.

I was at home alone with the dog. The first indication that something was wrong with the weather came from him. I was typing away at something here at my desk, when suddenly I realized that sixty pounds' worth of bear-hunting hound had procured a baby quilt from someplace and was arranging it, and himself, with the anxious urgency of the obsessive-compulsive beneath the desk at my feet. That was when I realized I'd been hearing thunder -- before, I must have thought dimly that it was the heat kicking on again and again and again. The rain came down as if it had been weighted with sandbags, racketing on the porch roof and causing the dog to start up from his nest and press his trembling frame against my knees, drooling hard. I know that there are medications for this kind of thing, but alas for the dog, I only think about needing them when it's actually raining like that, and I'd have to leave him alone and scared while I went out through the storm to the vet's. So there we were.

Of course, the dog is a pantywaist compared with the Boy Scouts, who were setting up their tents in the open field while this very same rain bucketed down. It was ten o'clock and black wet dark before they gave it up. The water, Amicus said, was ankle-deep inside the tents;  in another part of the field, as it were, a gigantic chrome-laden Ford F-Something pickup was mired to its axles. In short, it was manifestly not a night for knot-tying and campfire singing, and so they came home.

As of right now, there's no water falling from the sky, so they're giving it another shot. Amicus is in the kitchen enjoying a nutritious breakfast of instant oatmeal and beef jerky -- replicating what he'd be eating in camp, no doubt -- and then it's back to the rendezvous point for Take Two. Meanwhile, the dog seems to have given up the idea of beef jerky for breakfast and is replicating his own daily routine of aspirating the dog chow in his haste to move it from the bowl to his insides.

And so another day begins.