Especially meaningful or striking Bible passages

Seen at Eve's. I don't know if I can come up with ten, but I'll try.

1. The Magnificat
2. Psalm 51 ("Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor, lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor.")
3. Psalm 8 (in the Coverdale translation, "O Lord our Governor ...")
4. Psalm 148
5. Wisdom 7:7 - 8:1
6. Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 24:18 [Vulgate 24:24, "Ego sum mater pulchrae dilectionis ..."]
7. Sirach 43:17ff. "He sprinkles the snow like fluttering birds" ...
8. Luke 15, the Prodigal Son
9. Isaiah 42:3, "A bruised reed he shall not break, a smoldering wick he shall not quench."
10. The Song of Songs, esp. 2:14.

C. S. Lewis

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

-- from "The Weight of Glory" in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses: Revised and Expanded Edition (Macmillan Paperbacks, 1980), pp. 3-4.

No, this doesn't quite fit

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You're up for just about anything.

Who's Your Inner European?

Via Dyspeptic Mutterings.

Bumper sticker
seen while riding the #87 bus yesterday

Republicans for Voldemort

Undergrad



Spotted at Clairity Daily.

C. S. Lewis

My brother heard a woman on a 'bus say, as the 'bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, "Oh, Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look -- they're dragging it even into Christmas now!"

-- from Letters to an American Lady, letter dated Dec 29/58

C. S. Lewis
on St. Mary Magdalene

The allegorical sense of her great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box which one must break over the Holy Feet is one's heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage. All very alarming.

-- from Letters to an American Lady, letter dated Nov 1st 54

C. S. Lewis

The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility: where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost that begets Christ in us.

-- from Letters to an American Lady, letter dated 20/2/55

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I missed the question on sanctifying grace ...

November

November, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge.

Champions!

The Boston Red Sox have won the 2007 World Series in four games straight ...

Congratulations!

Sox are kings of the diamond by Gordon Edes of the Boston Globe.

Three games to nil

All right, it got a little scary tonight in the 7th inning, but a win is a win is a win.

Daisuke's 2 RBI were a nice touch. And the (other) rookies came through when they had to.

The box score.

One more ...

Go Sox!

Tracy as a busker

"Change," from 2005:

October 27, 1914

Poem on his birthday by Dylan Thomas.

September 26, 1983

If it weren't for the levelheadedness of this man, we all would have been nuked to death twenty-four years ago.

Via Dyspeptic Mutterings.

Especially when the October wind
by Dylan Thomas (1914-53)

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

fragments


the monastery of the setting sun

*

dream of confession to a pagan priest

*

impediments to liberty abound

*

a spirit that's unused to sacrifice

*

estranged from silence this distracted soul

*

enslavement to the taste of fleeting bliss

*

still slumbering lulled by magic not benign

*

the non-ascetic worshiper of self

*

dark icons of a false humility

*

he runs as one who wants to stand in place

*

how long will God protect the reckless man
who walks through dangerous places drunkenly

*

a plague of pleasures and a scourge of pains

*

peremptory thanksgiving for good health

*

asking a wrathless heaven to bless the dead

All knotted up
at three games apiece

The oh-so-reliable Daisuke Matsuzaka starts Game 7.

Cautiously optimistic.

Go Sox!

Sorry to tell you this, Barack ...

... but it's true.

It is well documented that black Americans — particularly black males — have shorter life expectancies than whites. But blacks do live to become senior citizens.

Not all. But let that go.

A black person born in 2004 had an average life expectancy of 73.1 years, about five years less than for whites, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Imagine that!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Boston   You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
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North Central
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Philadelphia
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The South
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Yeah, right

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

Book quiz

Via Andrew Sullivan:

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A funny Scottish joke

In English, at Credo ut intelligam.

Deborah Kerr has died at age 86

I enjoyed her work in this undernoticed film from the early sixties. Requiescat.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum

A Marian villanelle, the first version of which was written twelve years ago today.

from De Profundis
by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Today is the 153rd anniversary of Oscar Wilde's birth.