Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
The mercy of God is a scandal – Christ offers His infinite mercy to every worst kind of sinner, excluding no one. This eternal upwelling of mercy overflows, cascading upon the whole of the human race. It extends to murderers. It extends to rapists. It extends to thieves, and liars, and stalkers, and vandals. It extends to tax collectors and […]
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For the Order of Saint Benedict, today is the Solemnity of the Transitus of Saint Benedict, the anniversary of his death and birth into life eternal, in the year of our Lord 547. Of the transitus, Benedict’s biographer Pope Saint Gregory the Great writes: The same year in which he departed this life, he told the day of his holy […]
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Today on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, we would do well to meditate on the life of the man who helped raise the Son of God. It can’t have been easy. Tradition holds that Joseph was already an old man and a widower when he married the Blessed Virgin, who was very young, perhaps 16 or so. He had several […]
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Saint Patrick’s family were Roman Catholic churchmen from the Roman Imperial province of Britannia. Yet, today, nobody is going to go around speaking in fake Latin and wearing a toga and sandals, oh no. But I’ll bet you a shiny shamrock that you’ll run into at least one person affecting a fake Irish brogue. Today is a day in America […]
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At our parish of Saint Patrick in Tacoma, we will be celebrating Solemn Vespers in the evening of each Sunday of Lent at 6:00 PM. Please, join us in the coming weeks if you are local and able. Chanted Vespers is a beautiful and traditional way of worship in our faith. This is our second year singing Vespers in Lent, and […]
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Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And with those words, our Lent has begun. Holy Mother Church calls us to make these next forty days until Easter a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Lent is a pilgrimage, in a sense, through time if not space, through death to resurrection. A pilgrimage of penitence. Let […]
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Already tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Where has the time gone? It seems like Christmas just ended. In previous years, my home Archdiocese of Seattle published “Lenten Regulations” to remind us what is expected of every Christian during Lent. In recent years, however, they have taken a different approach. Instead, we have a web page called […]
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It’s a little hard to believe, but Ash Wednesday is less than a week away. How can Lent be so close already? The modern Roman Missal has a set of rubrics that cover the whole of Lent, before it digs into each day separately. Let’s take a look at them, because there may be some surprises. Most folks are familiar […]
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Today is the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter. Now, you might be thinking, “a feast for a piece of furniture?” Read on! Most folks have seen some variation of this photo of Bernini‘s “Chair of Peter” in the Vatican. It’s a masterpiece of baroque art, found in every art textbook covering the period. The chair in question is […]
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Today is traditionally Septuagesima Sunday, the beginning of a liturgical season known as Septuagesima or Fore-Lent or Shrovetide. It consists of the three weeks immediately before the start of Lent, and indeed the name Septuagesima means seventy, in reference to Quadragesima – forty – which is the proper Latin name for Lent. This liturgical season, meant to prepare us for […]
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The memorial of Saint Valentine was removed from the Roman calendar during the calendar reform of 1970. It seems a shame, since this is one of a vanishingly small number of saint’s feasts that have remained in the secular culture. It seems to me that it could be used as a touchstone for the new evangelization. Mind you, he’s still […]
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Saint Benedict was the founder of Western monasticism; to this day, most monks and nuns worldwide follow some variation of his “Little Rule for Beginners“. Benedict had a twin sister, Scholastica, whose feast day is today. Under her brother’s guidance, she founded the first female monastery in the West. I often think that their parents had a sense of humour, […]
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Today was once one of the most solemn feasts of the year. It’s gone by several names over the millennia: the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Candlemas. Coming forty days after Christmas, it was once the end of the Christmas season. Even today, there are relics of this […]
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Today is the anniversary of the death of Saint Brigid of Kildaire. She founded the first monasteries in Ireland shortly after Saint Patrick’s mission. She was named after an ancient Celtic goddess, and over the course of history many of the attributes of the goddess have been attributed to her as well. As you might imagine, this makes a mess […]
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Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one. (J. Michael Straczynski, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars“) Today is the Feast of the Universal Doctor of the Church and one of my name Saints, Thomas Aquinas. When (certain) people, told of my conversion, said to me “oh, you’re […]
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Today is both the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, and the seventeenth anniversary of the day I wed my beautiful bride. It is, as I have said before, a “moment when everything changed, celebrated on a day when everything changed”. It’s important to mark those changes in our lives. Francine actually changed the trajectory of my life not […]
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I can’t speak for anybody else, but I need all the help I can get. As a writer, I often find that I love having written much more than actually writing. I distract myself easily. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I tend to write in bursts like I’m emptying my brain. Then I rather need to recharge the brain […]
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