This Week’s Miscellany: Vol. 18

We had a simple, relaxed Fourth of July with my brother and just a couple friends: burgers, sparklers, board games. It was an epic day for Benjamin, though. His very first time watching Star Wars. He and Daddy were dressed appropriately:

Check out the intensity of his precious gaze!

Coming Up in the Liturgical Year: The Feast of St. Maria Goretti tomorrow.

In the Garden:

Quotes:

I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

– Wendell Berry from the novel, Hannah Coulter.

The Mass was not an event that takes place in ordinary time, like eating a fine dinner in some hall, or sailing in a boat between two islands, or sharpening an axe; wherein the participant is a little more withered and ripe at the end than at the beginning (such are the desiccations and renewals and subtle minute engravures of time); it takes place both in time, wherein time’s conditions obtain, and also wholly outside of time; or rather, it is time’s purest essence, a concentration of the unimaginably complex events of time into the ritual words and movements of a half-hour. A loaf of bread is a fitting symbol for agricultural man. The blood and sweat that men have given to secure their nourishment and cheer come at last to this simple shape on a table. The bewildering babel of languages in every country since Eden, by which men strive to understand themselves and their human condition and things that cannot be properly understood but only wondered at celebrated (being too subtle for understanding) are touched to silence in the Mass; they are resolved into a few secret whispers. If -the man thought dully- we could look with the eye of angel on the whole history of men, sub specie aeternitas, it would have the brevity and beauty of this dance at the altar.

-George Mackay Brown , Magnus

Links:

Catholicism in the South: Once a Strange Religion, Now Forging Ahead with Evangelical Fervor: National Catholic Register

Your Screaming Kids are Distracting Me: His Pierced Hands

The ‘Busy’ Trap: New York Times

Real Food Books for Children: Mama and Baby Love

Memento Mori: Simcha Fisher

The Quotable Benjamin:

“What’s Fourth of July about, Benjamin?” “On Fourth of July we remember how Jesus died on the cross.”

At naptime: “Benjamin, I asked you not to come into Lucy’s room when I’m putting her in her crib because she sees you and gets excited and can’t fall asleep.” “Yeah! She’s so excited with all her love for me!”

“Daddy, what do hawks like to eat?”

“They like mice and rats, and sometimes birds and lizards.”

“They eat WIZARDS?!”

Embarrassing Moment of the Week: When my brother was using my laptop and saw that “What kind of animal is Molly Weasley’s patronus?” was the last thing I googled. Oh well.

Pictures Worth Sharing:

Little duckling. I usually have an aversion to animal prints. but these leg warmers just slay me.

Breakfast date.

Me and my sweet boy (who referred to himself tonight as “Ol’ Benjamin” because “I’m old and my name is Benjamin”). If my eyes look weird, it’s because they had just been dilated at the eye doctor’s office. Could. Not. See. A. Thing.

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway sponsored by Catholic Family Gifts for a copy of the Vision series book: St. Anthony and the Christ Child!