Never say to God: "Enough!" Simply say: "I am ready."

Every illness and every trial is permitted by God as the means whereby we can best ensure our salvation and as the material most fitted for our sanctification. Take your illness as a penance given you by God, who knows the extant of your debts to him as well as the best way in which you can discharge them. You should be content to do as he wishes, for he is satisfied with far less than you owe him.

Read into everything God's explicit will. Suffer with our Lord, uniting your sufferings to his. Don't look for sufferings, but do not refuse them. Value them as precious marks of favor that he bestows on you. Don't desire to exchange them for others, but don't torment yourself by adding to them. Don't fix your eyes on the lash that scourges you, but kiss and adore the loving hand and heart wielding it.

God is not content to see you merely suffering with patience. He wants you to be grateful and to approve of what he does. ...

Feel a more lively gratitude towards those who brace you up and invigorate you in your pain than towards those who merely commiserate you. An unpitied pain wins greater merit before God. Never say to God: "Enough!" Simply say: "I am ready."

St. Sebastian Valfre

This is a controversial take on suffering these days. But my own experience makes it seem sound. Not that I am able to be grateful but, without understanding the big picture, I can accept that what God sends is meant for my own good. Especially difficult is the advice that we have a lively gratitude to those who "invigorate" us in our pain. I still resent those people. But remembering that advice helps lessen my resentment some.

Bookplate of Charles P Searle

Bookplate of Charles P. Searle (1904). Sidney Lawton Smith, 1845-1929, engraver.
Etching with engraving. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

We all want this bookplate, don't we? I know I want that library. I also love that the reader's book is engraved with a large CPS. Click on the image to see the details better.

Habemus Papam! Leo XIV.

 Like most people I know next to nothing about this new pope except that he is American! That stunned me and my friends because, like many American Catholics, we figured that it wouldn't happen in our lifetimes!

I am praying for him as he shepherds the Church.

Offering what will cost you something

Virginity is an ideal which the pagans had no right to misunderstand. For, in theory, they too, honoured it; and it should have commended itself to their heathen instinct for sacrifice. For the point os a sacrifice is that the victim should be spotless, the best of its kind. You must not offer what you can well afford to spare, but what will cost you something. ... In order to give up something to God, we forego not the sinful pleasures whch we have no right to in any case, but the lawful pleasures which he has given us to enjoy if we will.

Ronald Knox, Captive Flames

Talk about setting modern ideas on their ear with an argument that is completely logical.

Katz Bookplate

Louis Katz
Punning bookplate dated 1922 , artist's initials EK

The only thing better than a classic bookplate is one that contains a pun on the book owner's name! This is from Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie where you will find many more cat bookplates on display.

Let There Be Light - At My Price Per Gallon

Bookplate of John D. Rockefeller. Artist: GETZ. Pratt Institute.
via Books and Art

Yikes! This strikes me as the definition of hubris.

Mary: As Marvelous as a Day in May

May is Mary's month and what better way to celebrate it than getting a better understanding of Our Blessed Mother? This excerpt from chapter 6 of Adventures in Orthodoxy discusses the common idea of "virgin" versus the real meaning as applied to "Virgin Mary." As a bonus, this explains something I always wondered: why didn't Mary and Jesus (and possibly Joseph) stand out as unusual? The comments in brackets are my own for clarification of points the author discussed earlier in the chapter.

"... born of the Virgin Mary"

...Mary, the mother of Jesus, is an icon of beauty and purity because she is a virgin. But I'm aware that this term, too, [like the term "purity"] has been misunderstood and maligned. We think of a virgin simply as a person who hasn't had sexual intercourse. This is the shallowest of definitions. Defining a "virgin" as someone who hasn't had sexual intercourse is like defining a person from Idaho as "a person who has never been to Paris." It may be true that most Idahoans haven't been to Paris, but to define an untraveled Idahoan by that simple negative definition is too small. Even the most stay-at-home fellow from Idaho is bigger than a negative definition.

What were the early Christians thinking when they honored the Virgin Mary? Was it simply their form of goddess worship? [as some nonbelievers would say] If so, why the emphasis on virginity? When you look at what they believed about Mary, it turns out that they were honoring her for far more than the biological fact that a maiden remained intact. For them the Virgin wasn't just an untouched woman. Her physical virginity was a sign of something far more. It was an indication of her whole character. In her they sensed a kind of virginity that was a positive and powerful virtue. Mary represented all that was natural, abundant, positive, and free. Mary was a virgin in the same way that we call a forest "virgin": she was fresh and natural, majestic and mysterious. Mary's virginity wasn't simply the natural beauty and innocence of a teenage girl. It held the primeval purity of Eden and the awesome innocence of Eve...

You might imagine that such total innocence and goodness would make Mary a sort of Galilean wonderwoman. It's true that her innocence was extraordinary, but it was also very ordinary. That is to say that while it was momentous, it didn't seem remarkable at the same time. There is a curious twist to real goodness. It's summed up by the observation that what is natural isn't unusual. If a person is really good, he is humble; and if he is humble, he is simply who he should be. There is nothing bizarre or egotistical or eccentric about him. There is therefore nothing about him that calls attention to him. Truly good people blend in. They are at home with themselves, and no one is out of place when they are at home. In the same way, Mary wasn't noticed in Nazareth. Because she was natural, she didn't stand out. Mary fit in because she was simply and wholly who she was created to be. Because she was perfectly natural, she was perfectly ordinary. Therefore, she was both as marvelous and as unremarkable as a morning in May.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), The Madonna of the Roses
via Wikipedia

Julie and Scott try to interrogate the bad guy. Julie comes out with a permanent hand injury, and Scott endures a very long story and a headlock.

 In Episode 355 of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast, Scott and I discuss the Tamil action thriller Vikram Vedha (2017)

Japanese Bookplates

Via Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

These are adorable.

Heresies - past, present, and future

The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future.

G.K. Chesterton

That's what divine planning will get you — total coverage.

Automobile Bookplate

Automobile Bookplate from the Antioch Company
via Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie
where you may find a 2-part series on car bookplates

Edward Penfield, His Book

Bookplate of Edward Penfield

I really love bookplates. I don't use them myself (so many books, so few bookplates) but I love the feeling they communicate that people have for their books.

Remembering

Is not remembering precisely the retaining of corporeal things in an incorporeal manner?

Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Augustine

Wow. Blew my mind and yet it is such a simple idea. Body and soul working together.

An Unwelcome Guest

Vittorio Reggianini, An Unwelcome Guest

A Movie You Might Have Missed #103 — One Life

Based on the true story of British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, the film alternates between following 79-year old Winton reminiscing on his past, and Winton at 29 who makes it his mission to help predominantly Jewish children in Czechoslovakia to flee in 1938–39, just before Hitler invades.

A really well done movie about an incident in WWII which should be known better. It really emphasized for me the cost of war to the innocent. As Nicky says, "That bloody Hitler."

Most of all, we realize the power of good to make a difference. And that's the point we should live by.

May is Mary's Month

William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
L'innocence [Innocence]

The May Magnificat

May is Mary's month, and I

Muse at that and wonder why:

Her feasts follow reason, Dated due to season --

Candlemas, Lady Day;

But the Lady Month, May,

Why fasten that upon her, With a feasting in her honour

Is it only its being brighter

Than the most are must delight her?

Is it opportunest And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother;

Her reply puts this other

Question: What is Spring? -- Growth in everything --

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather

Grass and green world all together;

Star-eyed strawberry breasted Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin

Forms and warms the life within;

And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing

Mary sees, sympathising

With that world of good Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind

With delight calls to mind

How she did in her stored Magnify the Lord

Well but there was more than this:

Spring's universal bliss

Much, had much to say To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard-apple

And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surféd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes

Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

And magic cuckoo call Caps, clears, and clinches all --

This ecstasy all through mothering earth

Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth

To remember and exultation In God who was her salvation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Feast of St. Joseph the Worker

St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus, Guido Reni
via WikiPaintings

We celebrate two feast days for Joseph: March 19 for Joseph the Husband of Mary and May 1 for Joseph the Worker.

There is much we wish we could know about Joseph -- where and when he was born, how he spent his days, when and how he died. But Scripture has left us with the most important knowledge: who he was -- "a righteous man" (Matthew 1:18).

Catholic Online

I love St. Joseph. He was the quiet man of action. Those are my kind of guys.