Ponder: alive until the end.

Creation calls for self-surrender,
Not loud noise and cheap success.
Life must be lived without false face,
Lived so that in the final count
We draw unto ourselves love from space.

So plunge yourself into obscurity
And conceal there your tracks.
But be alive, alive your full share,
Alive until the end.

Boris Pasternak

He is the new wine

“The mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’”  St. John 2:3

A friend of mine made her debut on reality TV a few years ago.  Now, this was in England, where they spend even less on broadcast production than here, and where they seem to find the clergy endlessly fascinating.  She was part of a series that followed newly ordained clergy in her rural diocese in the West Country.

And when the time came for her to officiate at her first wedding, the BBC camera crews were on hand.  She was nervous, of course, and I guess her hands shook a bit, and she would be the first one to say that she’s always been a little clumsy.  She took the rings, as she practiced many times before, and laid them on her open prayer book for the blessing.  And then she dropped them—right through enormous cast iron grate on the chancel floor, down into the belly of a Victorian coal furnace.  I think they ended up calling the local fire department to get them out.  Of the hundreds of hours of film they shot that summer, well you can guess which scene got top billing in that episode.

For Meditation: Feelings for holy men in winter

“Such is the frame of mind which befits the end of the year; and such the frame of mind which comes alike on good and bad at the end of life. The days have come in which they have no pleasure; yet they would hardly be young again, could they be so by wishing it. Life is well enough in its way; but it does not satisfy. Thus the soul is cast forward upon the future, and in proportion as its conscience is clear and its perception keen and true, does it rejoice solemnly that “the night is far spent, the day is at hand,” that there are “new heavens and a new earth” to come, though the former are failing; nay, rather that, because they are failing, it will “soon see the King in His beauty,” and “behold the land which is very far off.” These are feelings for holy men in winter and in age, waiting, in some dejection perhaps, but with comfort on the whole, and calmly though earnestly, for the Advent of Christ.”

J. H. Newman, quoted in Will Brown’s “The Deterioration ofNature: On the Running Out of Time.”  Covenant.  24 Nov. 2015

Life for Paris

The front page of today’s Washington Post showed a crowd of thousands packed into the plaza in front of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, the congregation for a requiem mass offered for the victims of Friday night’s terrorist attacks.  The Eiffel Tower, notably darkened these days, is surely the structure most deeply associated with the City of Light today. 

But the Cathedral, on the Ile de France, has a much more central and iconic role in the city’s history.  The Kilometre Stone, from which all French roads are measured, is etched in its plaza.  It is probably the world’s most famous example of Gothic architecture, which originated at the nearby Abbey of San Denis and reached its highest point in the Northern French cathedrals of the high Middle Ages.  Notre Dame speaks of an era when France was truly the center of Europe, an age of great monasteries, the world’s finest university, and the home of chivalry’s fairest flower, the saintly King Louis.  The French kings took the Virgin’s emblem, the fleur-de-lys as their standard, and the Cathedral is dedicated to their beloved patroness.