Happy

I am happy to be marrying an incredible man in a little over two months. God is so good to me.

I am happy to have an amazing job where my work is to build relationships and introduce others to Jesus.

I am happy to have a really cool family that teaches me a lot about love every day.

I am happy to know a God who is all-loving, all-good, and all-generous.

Detachment

As my grandfather says, "It's not easy..."

"Because love is a choice, it means detachment from a previous mode of life, a breaking with old bonds" (The World's First Love, Sheen, p. 162).

Poem of the Week CXL

The famous GMH, just in time for all the beautiful Spring weather...


Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Awkward

musicians.

I love 'em.

Poem of the Week CXXXIX

I discovered this poem in Fulton Sheen's The World's First Love. It and TWFL are beautiful.

The After Woman
Francis Thompson

Daughter of the ancient Eve,
We know the gifts ye gave--and give.
Who knows the gifts which YOU shall give,
Daughter of the newer Eve?
You, if my soul be augur, you
Shall--O what shall you not, Sweet, do?
The celestial traitress play,
And all mankind to bliss betray;
With sacrosanct cajoleries
And starry treachery of your eyes,
Tempt us back to Paradise!
Make heavenly trespass;--ay, press in
Where faint the fledge-foot seraphin,
Blest Fool! Be ensign of our wars,
And shame us all to warriors!
Unbanner your bright locks,--advance
Girl, their gilded puissance,
I' the mystic vaward, and draw on
After the lovely gonfalon
Us to out-folly the excess
Of your sweet foolhardiness;
To adventure like intense
Assault against Omnipotence!

Give me song, as She is, new,
Earth should turn in time thereto!
New, and new, and thrice so new,
All old sweets, New Sweet, meant you!
Fair, I had a dream of thee,
When my young heart beat prophecy,
And in apparition elate
Thy little breasts knew wax-ed great,
Sister of the Canticle,
And thee for God grown marriageable.
How my desire desired your day,
That, wheeled in rumour on its way,
Shook me thus with presentience! Then
Eden's lopped tree shall shoot again:
For who Christ's eyes shall miss, with those
Eyes for evident nuncios?
Or who be tardy to His call
In your accents augural?

Who shall not feel the Heavens hid
Impend, at tremble of your lid,
And divine advent shine avowed
Under that dim and lucid cloud;
Yea, 'fore the silver apocalypse
Fail, at the unsealing of your lips?
When to love YOU is (O Christ's Spouse!)
To love the beauty of His house;
Then come the Isaian days; the old
Shall dream; and our young men behold
Vision--yea, the vision of Thabor mount,
Which none to other shall recount,
Because in all men's hearts shall be
The seeing and the prophecy.
For ended is the Mystery Play,
When Christ is life, and you the way;
When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right,
And Day fulfils the married arms of Night.
But here my lips are still.
Until
You and the hour shall be revealed,
This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed.

Won't Back Down

"For decades, the Bishops have led the fight against such government incursions on conscience, particularly in the area of health care. Far from making us waver in this longstanding commitment, the unprecedented magnitude of this latest threat has only strengthened our resolve to maintain that consistent view."
From the USCCB's March 14, 2012 Statement on Religious Freedom and HHS Mandate

I couldn't resist. This song keeps playing in my head. The music provides a nice background for reading the USCCB's statement. Enjoy.

Double Rainbow

over interstate 40 at sunset.

The Unreal Hotel

"Each body possesses within itself precious strands of human history: all the generations that have resulted in their physical beings are, as it were, ready to emerge again to the shores of light.  They are doing the baby-making thing.  They are doing what no human being can do on his own, nor can two members of the same sex do it.  They are forming “one flesh,” organs cooperating in the complex interplay that is oriented towards the future.  The seed of the man is being sown in the field of the woman’s womb, where it may well bring forth fruit."

Wow. Anthony Esolen is incredible.
Follow the link below to read for yourself:

THE STRANGE HAPPENINGS AT THE UNREAL HOTEL.

Spring Break Sights

Please excuse the less-than-perfect quality of these photographic memories of last week. They were all taken on my phone.

1. There were storms in Nashville at the start of the break. Natalie, Maura, and I posed for a picture in the bathroom. Ridiculous, but it was hailing pretty bad. 

2. My mom and I were cracking up over the "toilet paper on the shoe" of this huge truck. I managed to hang out the window for a few (grainy) shots.

 

3. One of my favorite street signs in the Auburn-Opelika area. I have to keep reminding myself that stealing is wrong, and that if I did what I've thought about doing I'd regret it every time I looked at this really cool sign in my house.

Poem of the Week CXXXVIII

(Again) from Vanauken's A Severe Mercy:

The Shining Barrier
Sheldon and Davy Vanauken

This present glory, love, once-given grace,
The sum of blessing in a sure embrace,
Must not in creeping separateness decline
But be the centre of our whole design.

We know it’s love that keeps a love secure,
And only by love of love can love endure,
For self’s a killer, reckless of the cost,
And loves of lilactime unloved are lost.

We build our altar, then, to love and keep
The holy flame alight and never sleep:
This darling love shall deepen year by year,
And dearer shall we grow who are so dear.

The magic word is sharing: every stream
Of beauty, every faith and grief and dream;
Go hand in hand in gay companionship -
In sober death no sundering of the grip.

And into love all other loveliness
That we can tease from time we shall impress
Slows dawns and lilacs, traceries of the tress,
The spring and poems, stars and ancient seas.

This splendour is upon us, high and pure
As heaven: and we swear it shall endure:
Swear fortitude for pain and faith for tears
To hold our shining barrier down the years.

Poem of the Week CXXXVII

The Quickening of St. John the Baptist
On the Contemplative Vocation
Thomas Merton

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee, 

From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well? 

Why do you fly those markets, 

Those suburban gardens, 

The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
 
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes. 

You have drowned Gabriel's word in thoughts like seas 

And turned toward the stone mountain 

To the treeless places. 

Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day Our Lady, full of Christ, 

Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves 
like gold?

Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon 
miraculous Elizabeth?

Her salutation 

Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell: 

And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother's body, 

Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable 

Woke your young faith to the mad truth 

That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?

Oh burning joy!

What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense 

Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament, 

And know her cloistered Christ?

You need no eloquence, wild bairn, 

Exulting in your hermitage. 

Your ecstasy is your apostolate, 

For whom to kick is contemplata tradere. 

Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church's hidden children - 

Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage; 

The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian, 

The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare,
Planted in the night of 
contemplation,
Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon. 

Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air 

Seeking the world's gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners 

With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand: 

Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world's frontier.

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos 

Flying the prosperous world 

Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails, 

Then, like the wise, wild baby, 

The unborn John who could not see a thing 

We wake and know the Virgin Presence 

Receive her Christ into our night 

With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Cooled in the flame of God's dark fire 

Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame 

We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness 

And bound and bounce with happiness, 

Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven 

Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.