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The House is ours once again!

All who came have taken leave,

Gone their way, left us free!

 

Long had I prayed they’d hurry hence

Who had all arrived at stroke of noon

The men all neat, the women sweet

And children dressed just perfectly.

I welcomed them, but thought I’d swoon.

 

The conversations started then

Of teams and schools, new jobs, weather and pain,

Shopping in the stores downtown;

The pinch faced crone, Mrs. Thatoldhen.

 

I envied her high stone walls, grim and dour

Wondering did she ever smile

In satisfaction as they piled

Through my all too often opened door.

 

They were gone, the lingering last of them,

By five, long past their time to leave

For me and my aching head, my burning feet.

Thanks be to God!  The house is ours once again!

 

Who’s at the door now, Dear?  Let no one in!

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You must be quiet here

Quiet as can be

Quiet when you come, and as you go.

 

It is always like this

The shells of days scattered

Along the shore of memory lie

The bleached limbs of years

Twisted, whitened, dry

Still in the mist of morning

The cool mist from the river rising

The river between the mountains and the sea.

Softly in the mist, hidden deep within the trees

Waking birds morning songs sing.

Nothing else moves, only songs and mist and time

To peel away the day

To wash the past away.

 

Now moves memory along the sandy shore

Toeing this shell, then that one there

By the water’s edge

Not a ripple yet.

Some are polished, white

By water, wind and sand.

Some just pieces once so grand.

Mist and memory mix, which is which?

 

The forest green is gray

In the mist’s embrace

It will green again

As grows the swelling day

 

But now the strangest things

In ragged order lie

Along the soft sand shore

Attracting memory’s eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(Thinking of my Grandmother, Catherine Ann Fanning)

 

She was always old and ever more

She became wander eyed, hollow cheeked.

Her speech left reason in the dust

Rambling among ruins of thought and circumstance.

Leaves and birds were waves along the ocean tops;

Mountains, reveries and sips of wine,

Poetry pulled from a bag of rocks

She carried on her walk through town

Her fortune and her only friend

Baance, ballast and fare to pay

Should the bus come her way.

 

“I have it here in my bag,” she’d say,

Shaking the old thing.  It clattering away

The dry sound of bones in a bag,

Punctuation, and a smile so sad

You’d like to cry.  But still she’d bend

To the work, searching through her history.

Work worn fingers she would spread

To show her strength, her generosity.

Her eyes full.  Her hands empty.

 

Growing stone at the bottom of the sea

One grain, one diatomic shell by shell

Builds white cliffs like waves aling morning shores.

A thousand centuries and ten thousand more

Aren’t enough to raise it man high from

The waves around.  She was Helen, like

The sun at home, and stole herself beyond

The West where she became her own white

Cliff in memory.  Her rock high against

The shadow of the sun emptied into her.

,

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Two robins, the first I’ve seen
Land, one, another soon
On the bare limbed tree,
Take counsel on a lower branch,
Agree and wing at once away.

Wind tossed leaves scuttle by
Along the chilly paving stones:
Ragged refugees they seem
Paying scant attention
To crocus crowds bright hues;
To waking bulbs rising through
Earth still wet from mounds of snow
Melted all and gone just days ago.

Waves of sound from bright blue bells
Hung outside the window sing;
Chiming April’s change has come again
Bringing robins to the trees
Rain to wash winter’s cold away.

Such a child this season seems
Bursting energy and waking dreams.

One still and stolid dove on a lump of rock
Frowns on crocus gossips just below.

(This little thing first appeared on the FB page of The Christian Book Corner.  Visit them over there and “like” them.  They are a nice bunch of folks.)

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THE SIN-EATER
By: Thomas Lynch

Such an odd title attracted me to the book.

That and its cover; a photo of a tower on a cliff above the ocean. “Ireland,” I thought, or some other place of contradiction and beauty.

So, I picked it up and began to read. In a dozen or so pages of introduction and the remaining few dozen pages of poetry and picture I was so glad I had done right by myself. Probably, no one should claim that poems are a treat. Well not unless they are Nursery Rhymes or Nonsense and you are reading them aloud to a little child or having them read to you. So I’ll not say these are like that. But, oh, they satisfy the soul in many ways.

Truly Irish, they even had me laughing aloud once or twice in the middle of matters so serious as sin, death and forgiveness.

Thomas Lynch, Poet, says: “We are all – every being in creation – hungry for the favor of our Creator. We all believe that God is on our side. And yet all of us know the pain of not belonging, the cruel isolation of the shunned and excommunicated. Still, if begrudgery is contagious, so is gratitude. And Argyle (the sin-eater of the title) concludes that to be forgiven we must forgive, everyone and everything..” All of us, he writes, are “…fellow pilgrims, at times ridiculous, at times sublime, but always beloved of God.”

As I read the last lines of the last poem I turned back to the beginning to read the words I just quoted above, and sat thinking of the Suffering Servant who “gave his back to buffets and spitting”, and of Palm Sunday. Read the book and you will understand why.

It is a perfect book for this Holy Week…or any week.

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Lynch uses a word I had not ever heard “swithering”, a Scots word, he says, which means to be of two minds, in two realities at once. His book and his poems worked away at me as I sat thinking about them:

SWITHERING

The church of the dead
has no roof over head
unless the clouds and the stars;

no walls but trees,
nor windows but the wind,
no incense, vestiments

or hymns triumphant,
only a settling of sod
over a crypt of wood below
and of sin absence.

Decay invades their bones
who lie in wait, and confidence.
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“Is it books you like?” It was the cousin of my wife, Sheila, may she rest in peace, who asked me. We were in an old ruin of a farm house on some land he owned in a little glen not far from Newcastle West in County Limerick. “Here,” he said, “take this.” He held out a smallish book, a book of prayers and poems. “Five brothers owned the place, and the last one died here three years ago. I bought it from the estate. No one is left.” He explained that he would “knock the house” and keep the land for his cows, the barn for milking. The old house he didn’t need. I looked around through the empty rooms and leafed through the pages of the book. A letter fell out and I picked it up. One of the brothers was writing to another, telling him about life in England, and how he couldn’t wait to get back home and begging prayers for his safe return. Now they were all gone, and only the little book was there to tell the story, and the cows.

“There’s a Mass Rock above,” my cousin-in-law said. “We’ll go up, now.” I went with him up the path to the pasture where the Mass Rock was and said a prayer there for the brothers, that all of them were safely home. I left the book behind me when I left Ireland all those years ago. The brothers I carry with me still.

If holding well made books is something you like to do, this is a book to hold. It is superbly made, beautifully covered and artfully illustrated with black and white photos of Ireland. If reading good books is something you like to do, you will be well pleased with your purchase…and so will anyone to whom you give it as a gift. I’ve read it and can testify.

And, what you will find inside is worth every step of the journey it will take you on.

“The Sin-Eater”, by Thomas Lynch, is available from The Christian Book Corner.

St. Kevin’s Glendalough, Co. Wicklow

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The Rock of Cashel

Today, on the 3rd Most Holy Day in the Year, the Feast of Great St. Patrick, I wish to bless you all nine times, and to give thanks for the kindnesses you have shown me in the past; to wish you the most happy of days and hope for nothing but light and brightness and beauty for you and all your loves.

May all your problems be far behind you.

May all your joys be ahead and waiting.

May your enemies come to no good and disappear like dark clouds scurry before the sun.

May all your friends rise and shine brightly.

And may the Good Lord, The Great Christ of Beauty, the High King of Heaven, and Patrick His loveable son, and Brigid and all the Irish in heaven along with them, stand with open arms at heaven’s Golden Gate with St. Peter and the Sturdy Twelve and Gentle Mother Mary to greet you some sweet day with the arms of love and smiles of friendship and to welcome you home at last, dear ones that you are!

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Introduction:

In  her essay “The Kingfisher: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Recovery of Wonder” in Issue No. Sixteen of Second Spring, one sentence of Sr. Margaret Atkins, O.S.B., particularly caught my eye.  She had said of Hopkins’ understanding of the “manner in which industrialism was damaging the natural world” that in this he was ahead of his time. She added, “Hopkins does not only identify the problem, he points to its cause: the loss of wonder.”  As I read those words I thought of a morning not too long ago when I was following my little granddaughter Mary Catherine around the yard.  A young woman, now, she was a toddler at the time.  It was a beautiful early summer morning, and Mary was simply walking around learning to see the world; as Adam and Eve might have walked through paradise early in the morning, I have often thought.  She stopped in her ramble and looked down.  Then she bent over, peering intently, as I came closer, at something which had caught her eye.  I stood a pace or two behind her and heard her say, “Oh, little blue flower, I’m so glad you’re here.”  I don’t think I’ve heard such a lovely, simple and beautiful sentence since.

From Hopkins’ sense of wonder, and from his ability to see what was in the world, as well as in what the world is, has come a body of work that is in itself beautiful, lovely in line and lovely in word to hear, to paraphrase the poet himself.  He has taken what he has seen and formed it beautifully, a work like the world itself, this world which has been from the start “charged with grandeur,”  the lovely world that makes us glad it is here, and us in it, lovely ourselves, drawing flame, catching fire.

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I did not see it as it happened, but I did see some clips of Pope Benedict taking final leave of the Vatican, the helicopter carrying him to his retirement home a few miles outside of Rome.  I read that the monastery where he will live or the estate where he now is, I can’t remember which, was once the home of a Roman noble, ruins of which are still on the grounds.  All that area was once the retreat of the upper class from the unhealthy miasma [right word?] that ancient Rome became during the summer months.

Of course, within an hour or two of that historic flight, critical remarks about taking a helicopter to a palace began to emerge.  Folks complained that the man was trading one palace for another only slightly smaller and they wondered what was the sense of it all; that big empty house, all those rooms, all that luxury.  What Would Jesus Do?  From the Pope their remarks rippled out to the Vatican, to the museums, the cathedrals, the art work, the vestments.  The list went on.

I sat quietly in a little room while the sun set and evening came on.  A number of things were going through my mind.  In his book “Inside the Third Reich”, Albert Speer chronicled the life of a young architect, his life, as a member of an inner circle of madmen bent on destroying Western Civilization and raising up in its place a new structure based on a stew of old German myths, discredited racial theories, Wagnerian music, Nietzsche’s philosophy and murderous madness.  Speer illustrated part of the book with photos of himself and Hitler looking at models of the new Berlin, and the monumental buildings that would show the glory of National Socialism to the world.  Most of these buildings remained un-built, but those which were built and remain standing are simply ugly squat reminders of an ugly squat time.  Even the name given to the “style” of the architecture is ugly and squat: “Fascist Stripped Classical”.

They would have replaced an awful lot with their “new” art, their “new” architecture.  They had plans and standards.  One remembers the “book burnings”, but little is known of the looting that went on.  After the war hoards of looted art work were discovered in caches all over Germany and the occupied countries.  These objects were banned for the population by the rulers.  Beauty was to be replaced by “Fascist Stripped Classical”, and the world was to know the power and might of a new thing: Germania.

Funny, that, I thought as I sat thinking about the folk calling for the Church to be stripped to the walls, emptied of centuries of beauty and art, and an old man made to walk away to –  where?  Possibly to a rented room somewhere dark, preferably with bars in an only window …  It has happened before.

When Scipio Africanus had finished with Carthage there was nothing left of her, or her people.  Maybe that was a good thing, but all we know of Carthage now is what the Romans have decided to tell us.  Well, that was the way of things back then.  What was the beauty, what the richnesses of art, poetry or music that might have given us some pleasure, or taught us some lessons today, that were ground into dust or carried off in triumph?  Who will ever know?  Was such complete erasure necessary?  Africanus thought so who came home a rich and famous man and was said to have wept when he saw what he had thought necessary.  He may have been the last one to weep at such a thing.

For better than a thousand years two monumental sculptures of the Buddha stood in Afghanistan, carved from the living rock, wonders of the world, tolerated and admired in that wild and Muslim land, until Mullah Omar and his Taliban seized power.  They emptied schools, especially of girls and decreed an Islamic state which would tolerate no other faith but their own, and worshipped in the way they said it should be worshipped.  And so, one morning the statues were blown to bits and the Taliban praised God.  Now a blank hole is the reminder that Taliban blindness sees nothing good outside itself, and girls in Afghanistan stay ignorant unless some angry “scholar” sees fit to tell them what he thinks they need to know.

In the brilliance of the Enlightenment for the sake of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the French rose against their king, and killed him, and killed thousands of others; all whom the new and better rulers thought needed killing.  Their zeal for humanity led them to kill and to destroy all that had threatened these noble sentiments on which they based their new movement.  Among the most powerful enemies of Man, the New Man, was the Church, and all her riches, and all her servants.  Priests and nuns were martyred, monasteries, convents, churches emptied, goods seized, schools closed, all in the name of man.  And, where God was praised, hogs were fed.  And, life was proclaimed to be made better.

A little more than a hundred years later, The New Man became The State, and man became the state’s slave in Russia then later in China, which together grew fat on the bodies of 100 million slaves.  The same sad story was re-enacted there that had been played out finally, one would have had reason to hope, in France:  death and destruction to all that was not for the equality of gray misery, the “stripped style” of totalitarian dictatorship, the glorious murder of wonder, joy and grandeur.

Begun in the late twelfth Century and completed after a number of years the Cathedral of Chartres is recognized as a work of art almost unequaled in the world.  Her sister cathedrals in Europe, such beauties as Notre Dame in Paris, Cologne and Strasbourg, and in tens of other places throughout the continent stand today as monuments to the faith of the hundreds of thousands who contributed with prayer, labor and donations of money to see them built, to make them their own.  They are works of wonder and praise, filled with the works of wonder and praise, the offerings of and the outpourings of the faith, the love and the devotion of millions of people over a thousand years.

I have not been to the Vatican, but hope to go, to stand before St. Peter’s, to walk up and down its aisles.  I hope to see the Sistine Chapel and view the works of art on display for all in the Vatican museum.  I hope I may wonder at the beauty of it all raised and gathered in praise and  in thanksgiving of the gifts so freely given to us all whose only reason for being here to begin with is Love.

Ignorance may look at them, and the art contained within and say, “it would be better spent on the poor.”  Ignorance melts the precious vessels down for cannon, rarely for poor folks, and fills sacred spaces with swine and cattle, prefers hogs squealing where once hymns rose, and murders the work of God.  Ignorance and blindness; where all is always winter.

“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away” (Song of Songs 2:10-13 – KJV)

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Pope Francis walked out of the Vatican on his first morning and went to Mass.  He preached that we must not be worldly.  Rather we must be disciples of the Lord.

He said those who build on worldly values instead of spiritual values were like children building sand castles on a beach. “Then everything comes crashing down,” he said.

Someone commented, “Refreshing. Perhaps less money will be spent on finery and more sent to the poor.”

He has a lot of work to do, but, oh, Pope Francis I am so glad you are here.

“Contemplata aliis tradere”

(This appeared earlier on the Facebook page of The Christian Book Corner.)

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I had a friend who complained to me recently that he was tired of getting up and slogging off to his job yet again.  And, I remember the fellow in a government office who was fond of saying, “Work is for jerks.” He would often seek a place to hide away from the eyes of his supervisors. They, I thought, judiciously did not look for him when they needed someone to do something that needed doing well.

It is Saturday, the week end has begun. There is a line that Maggie Smith’s character in Downton Abbey was given to say which I think has entered the language. “What is a week end?” she asked in wondrous confusion. If I have heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times since. I smiled when I heard it first, and understood the line coming from the character’s mouth, why she said it and what it meant to all of us hearing her say it; she, a person whose days were always Saturday talking in an age when there were quite a lot of people for whom every day was Monday.When I retired a while ago my un-retired friends used to ask me what it was like. “Every night is Friday night. Every day is Saturday.” That was my answer. The truth is that I miss working sometimes.

But then, I wonder, “What is work?” What is “productive labor”? What is a job?I don’t think I know the answer to those questions. I suppose if the souffle collapses, or the bulb doesn’t light, then the work isn’t productive in a sense, but then, I do wonder. I’ll let an Aristotle or an Aquinas figure out why or whether it was or could be, that mess of eggs, that dim bulb. In the meantime this is what I think. I truly did like what I did all those years…well most of it. There were a few things I would rather not have done, or have had to do. I hope that they will have been good for my soul when I have reflected on them…or done penance for them. But, mistakes and missteps are, as a friend taught me, all part of growing up. I know I still have some of that to do.If I have that work to do now, that is the work most valuable to me, I suppose. And, possibly to the rest of the world? My mother, may she rest in peace, used often to tell me, “If it is worth doing, it is worth doing well.”

My father, Lord have mercy on him, too, was a bit more earthy, “Don’t do anything half-a**ed!”  Busy with the things that busy young people I heard what they said, but gave it scant attention. Their words echo, though, as clearly and distinctly as they sounded when they were first said. Perhaps Mom and Dad were really talking to me today; are really talking to me today.The work is never finished. Or, is it not work at all?  Is it really something different; a game, a song, a prayer, an offering? Here are the two things that had me thinking about it this morning:Life in Christ: Catechism #2168
The third commandment of the Decalogue recalls the holiness of the sabbath: “The seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the LORD.”One Minute Meditations

Work
When you started your ordinary work again, something like a groan of complaint escaped you: “It’s always the same!”

And I told you: “Yes, it’s always the same. But that ordinary job – which is the same one your fellow workers do – has to be a constant prayer for you. It has the same loveable words, but a different tune each day.”

It is very much our mission to transform the prose of this life into poetry, into heroic verse.
– St. Josemaria Escriva

While you go about whatever you do today, work, or play or simply sit and think, rest, too. And keep in mind the real truth, that you, as well as every day, are holy to the Lord:

(An earlier version of this little thing appeared in the Facebook page of The Christian Book Corner.)

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Something else from the Facebook page of my favorite Internet business, The Christian Book Corner:

March is a lamb, today. March is a whole flock of lambs in the snow.

The “big kids” are visiting the family across the street right now; the cousins from somewhere nearby. And the children are outside in the snow while the moms are inside at the table, no doubt, having at least several simultaneous conversations. (I have formulated a theory, not yet tested under strict laboratory conditions, that the number of conversations among women in a group is equal to the square of the number of women present.) Over the past several minutes the children have tumbled down the little slope of snow at the end of the driveway, falling out, more or less on purpose, of their devices for sliding down the hill more a melting heap, a bump, than anything else. They have tumbled and screamed and gotten up to tumble again. What is it about snow, hills of it, that causes such tumbling, such screaming? You don’t need to answer. I know

In the time it took to write those few words above, the hill has been abandoned. That sounds like a line from a combat dispatch, but no enemy has over-run them. No, they have set out through the steadily melting snow and now their joyous coloraturas echo around through the trees behind the house across the street; their mothers inside secure in the knowledge that they are safe and well. “How about another cup?” (This is not the sunny side of the street, by the way. Our primary rides along below a line of tall pines and oaks at this time of the year, and winter sometime stays around until mid-May over there. Perhaps the next Ice Age will begin across the street from me.)

The pile in front looks like a beach after the assault waves have advanced inland. Its slope is littered with a hat here and there, a glove. The upturned shells of brightly colored plastic things for sailing down hills at the speed of lightning lie strewn above the “shore” line; the well shoveled and plowed blacktop. They wait the next attempts of future Olympic athletes and the dreams they dream in between screams of delight.

I suppose it’s time I was on my way now. They’ll be going in for lunch, and I have errands to run. But, maybe I will delay my leaving for a while, sit by the window while the slight wind moves on through the trees, time slows to a standstill and the attentive pines, the guardian oaks wait patiently; the woods to echo once again. I do have things that I should do, but I would rather not do them now. I really would rather not do them.

Oh, well.

When I come back, I will watch the children play and listen to thier music:

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Here is something from The Christian Book Corner‘s Facebook Page:

TODAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2013:  I Will Take Today

The way it feels inside these walls, the way it looks outside, with the snow running away in swift rivulets down each side of the street, the hillsides exposed to scattered little birds and nervous squirrels looking for last autumn’s seeds and nuts, the buds on the forsythia fattening, the weak sun casting pale shadows from behind the light gray clouds and my neighbor across the street in her shirtsleeves, I would swear it was a day in spring.  Winter still has three weeks I know, and anything can happen.  This being New England I am sure anything will happen.  I have seen azalea blossoms on new fallen snow in May.  So I know.

But, wrens sang me awake this morning and fat squirrels scampered across the snow piled lawn.  I looked at my wife beside me and smiled, deciding I really didn’t need two cups of tea when I noticed I could not hear the gurgle of the water in the pot or the furnace in the basement kick on to drive the cold back outside where it belonged.  I was warmed already and awakened quite enough by the songs, the smiles and the discretion of the sun behind the softness of the sky.

There was a fair crowd of folks at St. Patrick’s Church for the Noon Mass.  I saw quite a number of people I know; some growing up, some growing older.  Father announced that we’d be offering the Mass for the Pope on the last day of his papacy as the bishop had asked of us.  It is hard not to love the man, and even more hard to try to understand the many people who don’t love him, and are happy to see him go.

Just before Mass began I read something he wrote which was quoted in the book by Ryan Topping: “Rebuilding Catholic Culture”:   “I can still smell the carpets of flowers and the freshness of the birch trees; I can recall the decorations on all the houses, the banners, the singing; I can still hear the village band, which, on this occasion, sometimes even ventured more than it could!  I can hear the firing of guns by which the local youth celebrated their own joie de vivre while, at the same time, saluting Christ as the Head of State, the Lord of the world, and welcoming him to their streets and into their village.  The perpetual presence of Christ was celebrated on this day as though it were a state visit in which not even the smallest village was forgotten.”

And, I remembered my own participations is such celebrations years ago; years and years ago.  Dr. Topping went on to write of the Pope’s recollection: “The silent background of such memories is most often the faith of parents.”  I’ll not go on from there, other than to say it is a deep truth he tells.  I do not know where I would be, or could I think about the day as I am, were it not for my mother and father, my grandmothers, and the walks we took, the stories they told about their own days, the prayers we said.  I was made rich by that inheritance.

What a poverty some find themselves in for their lack of one!  What greater poverty comes to those who never will know it existed.

I will take today, because I know it for the gift it is, Who gives it and how to receive it with thanks..

Pope Benedict XVI is fond, we have heard, of playing Mozart on his piano.  In his honor, then, I offer this sublime piece of music for your contemplation. Mozart composed it six short months before he died.  May it bless your day, and may the Maker of all that sings and Creator of every song bless you: