The Old Masters
by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

There is no need to say anything else today.  Robert Royal has pulled together The Entire Mystery of Christ.  Have a blessed Easter.

a woman at the last supper

i knew exactly what he meant
for i know about body and blood
as well as flowers and yeast and sewing
he used words i could understand about giving life
and during those moments
i felt the world revolved around me instead of only men

but now
there are dishes to wash, a floor to sweep
and food to put away
yes, i know about body and blood; about giving life
and i will remember

Sr. Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S. in America Magazine

This weekend the veil will lift on Lent.  The darkness will be dispelled.  Life and light will enter in.

It was such an amazing gift to launch this blog two years ago in April 2009 with RJR.  I felt like I could share much of my interior and exterior self with friends, family, and strangers who happen along to find us talking here.  Today I find myself looking back at all that was co-created.  The space has really taken on a shape and delightfully surprised me.  As Thomas Merton remarked, “The things I thought were so important – because of the effort I put into them – have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.”

Alas, my time here will also conclude with the rise of the sun on Easter morning.  It is with a full measure of peace that I say good bye.  Yet, I also find myself with this petition, please pray for all that lies ahead.  The horizon is much blurrier than it used to be.

Warm wishes to RJR as he rejoins Wonder and the Wooden Post and carries it forward.

In a chapter in Letters to a Young Catholic: The Art of Mentoring, the author George Weigel unites two of this blog’s favorite leitmotifs: Brideshead Revisited and conversion.  If you aren’t familiar with the book, it uses fourteen physical locations around the globe to explore fourteen themes that a young Catholic or “curious soul” might want to grapple with as he or she matures in their faith.  Weigel visits G.K. Chesterton’s favorite pub in London to talk about a sacramental world.  He takes the reader to a churchyard in Warsaw, Poland to examine how vocations (vowed religious life–priests, sisters, brothers) change history.

Let me start by saying I am not completely convinced that the artifice holds up.  And Weigel is a contested figure in American Catholicism because of his political commentary.  However, neither of those condemn the book in its entirety.  In fact, one particular letter stood out to me.  In the seventh letter, buried near the middle of the book, Weigel transports the reader to a large estate in the north of England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire.  This happens to have been the site of two film adaptations of Brideshead Revisited, a novel set largely between the world wars.  Again, I’m not the Brideshead or Waugh expert here, RJR is, but I can say that we both have journeyed to this very location that Weigel uses to frame a concept he calls “the ladder of love.”  In fact, this ladder the metaphor he uses to describe the conversion of the primary character in the novel, Charles Ryder. Weigel points out that both the book’s author, Evelyn Waugh and his creation, Ryder, both found the ascent up that ladder steep.

“Charles Ryder is a man who grows from lesser affections to harder, yet truer loves,” Weigel explains. He goes on to describe how Charles’ relationships, first with Sebastian Flyte, and then with his sister Julia Flyte, and ultimately with the entire family, are loves that allow his love for God in Christ to flourish.  There is a sort of growing nobleness in the truer and deeper loves that each subsequent relationship brings.  Yet still, as human love, they are finite and limited.  When Julia and Charles finally part company (ending their adulterous relationship), we see him beginning to realize that there is a greater love present, a divine love.  Weigel remarks, “His relationship with Julia takes place on a higher rung of the ladder, but it’s still a spiritually deformed love, an incomplete communion–indeed a communion that can never be complete, and thus it must be abandoned, at least in its present form.  Love, and the truth about a true love’s true object, can never be separated.”

The remainder of the chapter moves into two other vignettes, not from the novel, but from another great film of faith: A Man for All Seasons, and a scene from Weigel’s own life.  Both seek to embody his primary point: “The truth that we have come from love, that we have been redeemed by an infinite love, and that we are destined for an eternity of love with Love itself.”  The letter to a young Catholic like me (celebrating 6 years at the Vigil on Saturday) is a refreshing reminder that we are moving upward, perhaps slowly, perhaps with several detours or falls, but that our journey and the destination are both to be embedded in a pure and true love that is greater than that even between two people who care about each other deeply.

Weigel closes with an exhortation: “What does all this business about love and Love come down to for you? Simply this: never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur which, by grace, can be yours. They are your baptismal birthright as a Christian.  You will fail. You will stumble on the ladder of love, and you will fall.  That’s no reason to lower the bar of expectation. That’s a reason to get up, dust yourself off, seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and try again…Let His grace lift you up to where, in your heart of hearts, you want to be.”

You can also listen to them on Mountain Stage here.

I wrote a review of this amazing film for The Curator, a digital art and culture magazine.   Come on over and check it out!

Oh, and notice that the monks are beekeepers.  I could write a whole other piece on the themes of simplicity and sustainability that the film explores…