Among the Pines

Amongst the Pines (1915). Stanhope Alexander Forbes (Irish, 1857-1947).

Is everyone having a good Labor Day? This looks like the perfect activity and I hope that we all are able to enjoy a picnic or good book.

I feel as if I'm there with the dappled light on the page, the earth beneath me as I lie reading....

Mother Teresa's Feast Day

I grew up hearing now and then about Mother Teresa. She's now Saint Teresa of Kolkata (which I'll never be able to think of except as Calcutta — the habits of hearing of her as Teresa of Calcutta over a lifetime die hard). 

Now, many years later, I am caring for my mother at home in hospice. We're facing another new challenge in her care as we go along and I was asking Mother Teresa this morning for her prayers for our strength. Her loving care, as well as that of my grandparents in caring for my great-grandmother when she died, is an example that I strive to follow in this one little example.

Anyway, here's a bit of her story.

After a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta and found temporary lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On 21 December she went for the first time to the slums. She visited families, washed the sores of some children, cared for an old man lying sick on the road and nursed a woman dying of hunger and TB. She started each day in communion with Jesus in the Eucharist and then went out, rosary in her hand, to find and serve Him in “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for.” After some months, she was joined, one by one, by her former students.

[...]

The whole of Mother Teresa’s life and labour bore witness to the joy of loving, the greatness and dignity of every human person, the value of little things done faithfully and with love, and the surpassing worth of friendship with God. But there was another heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, “the darkness.” The “painful night” of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor.

Read much more at CatholicCulture.org which is where the above excerpt came from.

For me, I think of how brave she was to begin her ministry simply by walking to the slums and taking action. So simple.

I know from having to get up my nerve to visit my ailing mother-in-law who suffered from mild dementia and often didn't respond to conversation. You must take your courage in your hands to make yourself that vulnerable to failure, to rejection. I was able to do so only because of Jesus' prodding through a disagreement with a pro-abortion friend and through Bilbo's journey in The Hobbit. Yes, believe it or not. Such weird influences, but God uses what tools He will and I am supremely grateful for that.

I also know of the tremendous rewards I received in doing so. It is one of the reasons I cried through her funeral. I loved not only the woman in her prime, but I had been allowed to love the much simpler person she had become in her extreme old age and illness.

One of Mother Teresa's most memorable acts that always comes to mind is when she spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. She spoke from her heart. She spoke what we needed to hear.

I am so used to seeing the smiles on our people, even the dying ones smile. And Sister said: "This is the way it is nearly everyday. They are expecting, they are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them. They are hurt because they are forgotten." And see, this neglect to love brings spiritual poverty. Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried. Are we there? Are we willing to give until it hurts in order to be with our families, or do we put our own interests first? These are the questions we must ask ourselves, especially as we begin this year of the family. We must remember that love begins at home and we must also remember that 'the future of humanity passes through the family.'

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given to drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that, when those in the West have so many more things than those in the East? And the answer was: ‘Because there is no one in the family to receive them.' Our children depend on us for everything -- their health, their nutrition, their security, their coming to know and love God. For all of this, they look to us with trust, hope and expectation. But often father and mother are so busy they have no time for their children, or perhaps they are not even married or have given up on their marriage. So their children go to the streets and get involved in drugs or other things. We are talking of love of the child, which is were love and peace must begin. These are the things that break peace.

Read the whole talk at Catholic Education Resource Center.

Just as illuminating is Peggy Noonan's article about what it was like to be present at that talk.

Later I was to remember this part as Mother Teresa’s carpet bombing. Then she dropped the big one:

I know that couples have to plan their family, and for that there is natural family planning. The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception. In destroying the power of giving life or loving through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self, and so it destroys the gift of love in him and her. In loving, the husband and wife turn the attention to each other, as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that loving is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily. That’s why I never give a child to a family that has used contraception, because if the mother has destroyed the power of loving, how will she love my child?

It was at this point that the senator turned to his wife and asked if his jaw was still up.

It was something, the silence and surprise with which her words were received. Perhaps she didn’t know that we don’t talk about birth control in speeches in America. Perhaps she didn’t know, or care, that her words were, as they say, not “healing” but “divisive,” dividing not only Protestant from Catholic but Catholic from Catholic. It was all so unhappily unadorned, explicit, impolitic. And it was wonderful, like a big fresh drink of water, bracing in its directness and its uncompromising tone.

That too is available at Catholic Education Resource Center.

There are so many people all around us who need our bravery, our willingness to be vulnerable and give of ourselves. Many of them are not poor. Many are our friends, our family, those we see every day. Today is a good day to look at our lives and see where we can follow Jesus' example, as did his devoted daughter, Blessed Teresa, and ask where we can show his love.

Saint Teresa, pray for us.

Lagniappe: The Thing About New Orleans

That's the thing about New Orleans, now. It's a generous city. Give you what you want before you hardly know to ask for it. Trouble is, acourse, that a man wants a number of things that aren't particularly good for him. And those sort of things are a New Orleans specialty.

Owen Parry, Rebels of Babylon

That checks out!

Turtle on the Path

Turtle on the Path taken by AC Parker

If I hadn't seen the name of the photo I would have been puzzling over just what this object was. And then once you know ... it all comes into focus! I love it!

An Out of Doors Study

John Singer Sargent, An Out-of-Doors Study, 1889,
depicting Paul César Helleu sketching with his wife Alice Guérin

Lagniappe — That Dashed Greek Thing

“Went off in one of his pets as soon as he heard you wasn't home," said Ferdy. "Said he'd call on Revesby to answer for his villainy. Good God. I'm dashed if that Greek thing hasn't got after Monty too, Sherry! Very remarkable circumstance, 'pon my soul it is!"

"What the devil *is* all this about a dashed Greek?" demanded Sherry. "George was trying to tell me about him, but I'm hanged if I could make head or tail of it! All I know is, I'm not acquainted with any Greeks, and what's more I don't want to be!"

"It ain't a thing you're acquainted with, dear old boy. Duke knows what it is. Comes up behind a fellow when he ain't expecting it. Thought it was after me, but it turns out to be Monty. Good thing."

"Yes, but what *is* it?"

Mr. Tarleton said, with a quiver of amusement in his voice: "I fancy he means Nemesis."

"That's it!" Ferdy said, looking at him with respect. "Nemesis! You know him too?"

"Well, it's more than I do!" declared Sherry. "What's more, whoever he is, he had nothing to do with my coming to Bath!”

Georgette Heyer, Friday's Child

Georgette Heyer has long been one of my favorite authors and this lovely bit of inanity shows her at her comedic height. When she's on a roll it's like reading a screwball comedy.

Louis & Lola?

Louis & Lola ?-- TITANIC survivors, [1912 April]
Library of Congress on Flickr

Notes on Mark: Transfiguration as Suspension of Miracle

12th-century icon of the Transfiguration
Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai (Egypt)

MARK 9:2-8

The transfiguration is a mystery pure and simple. I would have been just as dumbfounded as the disciples who were there to witness it. 

I am not sure where I picked up this particular note, however, it is fascinating to see that St. Thomas Aquinas said the transfiguration was actually the cessation or suspension of a miracle. This is because Christ pulled aside the veil of flesh to allow His natural glory to be seen.

Mind-blowing, am I right?

Let's just wrap our minds around that for a bit and then I'll have some other people's take on the transfiguration for further mind-bending.

===== 

Sources and Notes Index   

Atonement Is Not Meant to Placate God

Paul wrote that "God put forward [Christ] as a sacrifice of atonement" (Rom 3:25), but the atonement or expiation is not directed to God; it s not meant to satisfy or placate God. Instead, it is directed to sin, that in its being satisfied it will be eliminated. "it can be said that it is God himself, not man, who expiates sin. … The image is more like that or removing a corrosive stain or neutralizing a lethal virus than that of anger that is placated by punishment" (James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle).

Raniero Cantalamessa, The Power of the Cross

I love this image! I've never had the problem of worrying about an "angry God" but this is the perfect clarification for those who do.

Golden Bear

Golden Bear, Remo Savisaar

 As with every photo from Remo, this is simply gorgeous. Enjoy and click through to get to Remo's blog to see this larger and browse the other wonderful photos.

Vanity

Vanity, 1907, Frank Cowper

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I am continually surprised by how this guy nails it ... from 100 years ago.