Same Old Lang Syne

 

I don't know if you've ever experienced this; but sometimes you just find something...just the right thing, at just the right moment, for just the right mood...and it's like, in that moment, it's the most beautiful thing there is.

Who is This?

The American Dream

This is my only comment on the matter.

My Most Precious Gift

I went to my safe deposit box in Charlottesville yesterday, to retrieve the things that had been stored there while I traveled. The contents were telling--vital documents (the main reason I went), some things of my father's, gifts for a girl who didn't love me, and this.

This was the first thing that was ever given to me--as you can see from the inscription, given on the day I was born. The Word of God. A prophetic gift indeed.

I never met Pastor Wesberry within my memory, nor have I ever visited Morningside Baptist Church (though I love the name). But as I sat here at the end of my devotions-and-coffee this morning and picked up this little New Testament, I realized that he set me on a path the day I was born, and that I wanted to thank him one day for that in Heaven. I used, as a very small child before I even learned to read, to sit and hold this lovingly, and gaze at the one picture inside--appropriately enough, the Adoration of the Magi. 

I wonder now how much of my taste and preference was formed before I was even fully aware. From the very Anglican title page to the Authorized Version and the pictures of the church I attended as an infant with my parents, I'd say that they were setting me well on the path to becoming an Anglican.

Baptistism is, after all, just stripped-down Anglicanism, as is also evident in the Hymnal--one of the reasons I love the Anglican liturgy so much: it combines the sublimely beautiful high-church classical music with the old-time hymns that are closest to my heart. 

What is certain, however, is that this gift somehow created for me, in my deepest heart, a love for the Word of God and therethrough for God Himself, that has defined my entire life, and will define my eternity. So, thank you, Pastor Wesberry.

"Even if I were the greatest sinner on earth, I should not have less trust in God, for my hope does not rest upon my innocence, but on God's mercy and omnipotence."

-- St. Therese of Lisieux

 In the natural order, in proportion as the child grows, the more self-sufficient he should become, for some day he will no longer have his parents. In the order of grace, on the contrary, the more the child of God grows, the more he understands that he will never be self-sufficient and that he depends intimately on God. As he matures, he should live more by the special inspiration of the Holy Ghost, who, by His seven gifts, supplies for the imperfections of his virtues to such an extent that his is finally more passive under the divine action than given up to his personal activity. In the end he will enter into the bosom of the Father where he will find his beatitude.

A young person, on reaching maturity, leaves his parents to begin life for himself. The middle-aged man occasionally pays a visit to his mother, but he no longer depends on her as he formerly did; instead, it is he who supports her. On the contrary, as the child of God grows up, he becomes so increasingly dependent on his Father that he no longer desires to do anything without Him, without His inspirations or His counsels. Then his whole life is bathed in prayer; he has obtained the best part, which will not be taken away from him. He understands that he must pray always.

-- Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life

Bookshelves

So here's why not to buy cheap particle board bookshelves:

 

When I bought these, some years ago, I really didn't have any other option: real wood ones were quite expensive, and for the number of books that I own the cost would have been prohibitive. So when this happened the other day, I looked around but still, didn't want to spend what they're asking for them. But unlike back then, now I've got tools and space to work in. So....

It's not exactly fine furniture, but it looks alright and it holds my books.

How to Heal a Broken Relationship — Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon

"We must ask of souls only what they can give: of some, a continuous upward surge of heroism; of others, little steps, which bring them ever nearer the end to be attained. But, to be configured to Christ, every soul must sacrifice itself under some form or other."

-- Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life

I've been looking and looking for my dishes, and today I finally found this.

😄❤️😥

I guess they were one of the last things that got packed last year. 

"I love with an immense love the soul that loves Me without falsehood....God asks only love from the soul; for He Himself loves without falsehood, and is Himself the love of the soul."

 -- Jesus, to St. Angela of Foligno

"Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never alone and never afraid when we were together."

-- Ernest Hemmingway, A Farewell to Arms

"If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it is yours forever. If it doesn't, it never was."

- unknown

"He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely." -- Dostoevsky

I hope that I treated you well
for the time that you were mine
I hope that I did everything I could
to cherish your heart and mind

I hope that I made you a better woman
as you made me a better man
I hope that we found, and didn't miss
the paths for our lives in The Plan

I hope that each moment you spent with me
was as good as I spent with you
a moment of healing, a moment of love
a moment of beauty and truth

I hope that as you go your way
on the road that your life takes
that you will remember with fondness and joy
our moments of love and faith

I hope that one day, we'll see one another
and that in that moment you'll say
"Thank you for letting me go, for now, I know
that it was The Way."

...it had to be

A year ago today...

My beautiful daughter, Adina, has passed on to a better life. I love you, and I will see you before too long.

"Through error you come to the truth."

 -- Dostoevsky 

When You're Gone

Ballade pour Adeline

Ballade pour Adina. Parce que tu aimais la musique triste au piano. Tu me manques tellement.

"He to whom the eternal Word speaketh is delivered from a multitude of opinions."

-- The Imitation of Christ

Back Home Again

Well, I'm home. Sort of. I'm staying with my brother in NoVa while my trailer undergoes repairs at the dealer in Pennsylvania. And looking for a new place to live. I've actually made an offer on a place over on the other side of the Blue Ridge, near Shenandoah and Luray. I think it will be good for me to be away from Charlottesville. There's a Latin Mass Catholic church up in Front Royal, and a traditional Anglican one down in Waynesboro which belongs to the same denomination as the one I attended in Tucson while waiting out the winter in Arizona, so I can go to mass and not have to worry about the issues at the ones in Charlottesville. Also I'd be right between the Shenandoah Forest and River, so lots of things to do.

It's been a good trip, overall. I've seen many things: Niagara, the Great Lakes, Route 66, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Palo Duro Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Mojave Desert, Yosemite, Mt. Shasta, Yellowstone, the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats, Boston, New York, Chicago, L.A., Toronto, and all the stuff in-between. Experienced sweet love, made some new friends, saw some old ones, had a long talk with John Michael Talbot. But the main thing is, and always was, that I went in search of encounters with God, and I found them. I'm not totally healed yet--I didn't get that big miracle which I'd hoped for, but I did get miracles, encounters, and answered prayers, and continue to. But I am glad to be home. It's time to be still for a while, to have a real house to live in again, to have some stability. It's turned out to be a particularly challenging time to be out there blowing in the wind. Also, as beautiful as so many places I've seen are, I don't think any of them are more beautiful than Shenandoah.

"There are persons advanced in the ways of God, who are, as the result of an illness, inclined to exceptional irritability. They are like people badly dressed, because their illness increases, as it were tenfold, the painful impression produced by contradictions, and sometimes the latter are incessant. There may be great merit in this struggle, and great patience in seeming impatience."

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life

"The only thing to be feared [in obedience to spiritual directors] is that superiors may sometimes follow human prudence excessively, and that for want of discernment they may condemn the lights and inspirations of the Holy Ghost, treating them as illusions and reveries, and prescribe for those to whom God communicates Himself by such favors as if they were invalids." -- Fr. Louis Lallement, S.J., La Doctrine Spirituelle

Yellowstone

"Whatever naturalism may say, in loving our neighbor in God and for God we do not love him less, we love him much more and far more perfectly. We do not love his defects; we put up with them; but we love in man all that is noble in him, all in him that is called to grow and to blossom in eternal life.

Far from being a Platonic and inefficacious love of our neighbor, charity, in growing, disposes us to judge him well and to condescend to his wishes in whatever is not contrary to the commandments of God. Condescension thus born of charity makes indifferent things good, and the painful things that we impose on ourselves for our neighbor, fruitful. There is great charity in thus preserving union with all by avoiding clashes which might arise, or by effecting a reconciliation as soon as possible. Charity that grows has thus a radiating goodness; it makes us continually love not only what is good for us, but what is good for our neighbor, even for our enemies, and what is good from the superior point of view of God, by desiring for others the goods which do not pass, and especially the sovereign Good and its inamissible possession. St. Thomas sums up all this briefly:

'Now the aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God. Hence it is clear that it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor. Consequently the habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of our neighbor.'

Thus sight perceives light first of all and by it the seven colors of the rainbow. It could not perceive colors if it did not see light. Likewise we could not supernaturally love the children of God if we did not first supernaturally love God Himself, our common Father.

Whereas justice inclines us to wish good to another inasmuch as he is another or distinct from us, charity makes us love him as 'another self,' an alter ego, with a love of truly supernatural friendship, as the saints in heaven love one another."

-- Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, O.P., The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. 2

Yosemite

I've finally escaped California. I'm at Yellowstone right now, last on my list of must-see for this trip; but that reminds me that I never got around to posting my pictures from Yosemite, which I managed to visit just as everything was beginning to shut down. So here they are.