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"Kolbe is the patron saint of our difficult century."
-John Paul II-

Buffalo: Then and Now

Finally!

Finally the Catholics in Boston are outraged!

"God in the Dock" - C.S. Lewis

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may at some point sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Monet Refuses the Operation

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor,

you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors:
Fixed notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night

to become the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.

The world is flux,
and light becomes what it touches:

becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white
and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes to gases.

Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller ~

(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

Dearest Woman...

The phrase "Full of Grace" is in the passive: grace is something Mary has received. And the phrase is in the distant past, so it really means something like, "You have been loved for a very long time".

-Archbishop Carlo Maria Martini

(What a comforting thought! Could you imagine anything better than this to hear from God?)

Broken Bones of the Soul

As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. (Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the difference that comes between them.)

There are two things that men can do about the pain of disunion with other men - they can love or they can hate. Hatred recoils from the sacrafice and the sorrow that are the price of resetting the bones - it refuses the pain of reunion.

-Tho Merton

Point. Taken.

As on old friar once said to me: "In the book of Judges, we learn that Samson, armed only with the jawbone of an ass, slew one thousand Philistines. Now just imagine what God can do with a complete ass."

Well, if you put it that way....

During the Inquisition, Ignatius of Loyola was imprisoned for "teaching new ideas." He replied to his captors, "I didn't know that it was a new idea to teach Christians about Christ."

(nor to remind the Jesuits about him, I assume)

Surprise!

"Instead of choosing 'great' or impressive people in the eyes of the world, God uses the humble, the foolish, the weak and 'those who count for nothing' to accomplish his purposes. It is when we least expect it that the tiniest among us can humble the powerful."

-- Justin Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia (1/21/08)

Christ

Patriarch in the Cathedral

The parish....

It’s in the parish where the loftiest of doctrines and the simplest of devotions both find their home. It’s where the believer and the uncertain can mingle and re-discover God together. It’s where the priest and the parishioner are neighbors, where tabernacles aren’t far from shopping centers, where sacrifices are offered daily in the midst of a bustling city. At times, it’s like a Trappist monastery, and at others, like a zoo. As my pastor once told me, “The parish is really where it’s all at.”

hat tip: Golden is Thy Fame

Two from Anne Lamott

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

LEAVE ME ALONE!!!.... or not?

"Moses spent the last half of his life in the company of people who made demands of him and complained about everything to him. Yet, he flourished, reaching old age with "his eyes undimmed and his vigor unabated" (Deut 34:7). How did he do it? Perhaps when people came to him with demands, instead of thinking to himself, "Why are these people bothering me?" he said to himself, "These people need me. They depend on me. I am not a superfluous old man; I am an important contributor to their lives." When they complained, he might of thought to himself: "They have come to me to share their dreams about how life could be better."

Rabbi H. Kushner (Overcoming Life's Disappointments)

Where "Faith" is a verb, not a noun...

From Steel at http://www.buffalorising.com/

This story started out as just another "look at this great building" story. My recent one-day journey through the East Side had brought me past many magnificent structures, many of them possibly facing sad futures as the Catholic Church embarks on a massive consolidation. The Sunday I was there, this church, St. Luke's was locked up with no one around. I assumed at the time that this was simply another grand Catholic church facing closure (if it had not already been shuttered). As I researched this piece I quickly realized that the story I needed to write was much bigger than architecture. The story became so big that it demanded two chapters. (more...)

and (St. Luke's Website)

Wash over me...

Nothing in the world

Is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet, for dissolving the hard and the inflexible,

Nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;

The gentle overcomes the rigid.

Everyone knows this is true.

But few can put it into practice.

-Tao te Ching-

One Thing First

"Happiness and Freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principal: Some things are within our control and some things are not."

Epictetus (stoic philosopher, 1st c.)