Veni, Veni

Your light will come, Jerusalem. The Lord will dawn on you in radiant beauty.

--Responsory, Morning Prayer, December 19th

For Mary and Joseph

Blessed Woman,
Excellent Man,
Redeem for the dull the
Average Way,
That common ungifted
Natures may
Believe that their normal
Vision can
Walk to perfection.

--W. H. Auden

Joseph

If the stars fell; night's nameless dreams
Of bliss and blasphemy came true,
If skies were green and snow were gold,
And you loved me as I love you;

O long light hands and curled brown hair,
And eyes where sits a naked soul;
Dare I even then draw near and burn
My fingers in the aureole?

Yes, in the one wise foolish hour
God gives this strange strength to a man.
He can demand, though not deserve,
Where ask he cannot, seize he can.
But once the blood's wild wedding o'er,
Were not dread his, half dark desire,
To see the Christ-child in the cot,
The Virgin Mary by the fire?

--G. K. Chesterton

For the Time Being

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

W. H. Auden

I heard a Hymn

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.”

— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2,3

I heard music in a word

There’s not much difference between music and magic.

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Happy feast of the Immaculate Conception

“Mary was as pure as the glass of a very clean window that has no other function than to admit the light of the sun.  If we rejoice in that light, we implicitly praise the cleanness of the window.”
                 --Thomas Merton.

To reflect upon the Immaculate Conception of Mary is thus to allow oneself to be attracted by the “yes” which joined her wonderfully to the mission of Christ, Redeemer of human- ity; it is to allow oneself to be taken and led by her hand to pronounce in one’s turn “fiat” to the will of God, with all one’s existence interwoven with joys and sadness, hopes and disap- pointments, in the awareness that tribulations, pain and suffer- ing make rich the meaning of our pilgrimage on the earth."
             --BXVI, Message for the Sixteenth World Day of the Sick January 11, 2008



Mary, the Medium through which the Light enters the word, Ora Pro Nobis.

I dreamed a dream

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true. --Woodrow Wilson