I thank You, O Lord, for my worries, insecurities, and stresses.  You promised me that You would work in me and that Your grace would be sufficient for me, and when I have spent time in prayer—in serious, genuine prayer, open to and waiting for You—I am filled with comfort.  I know that You will give me the strength I need for what You want me to do, I know that You will pile up gifts upon the talents You have already granted me, and I know that, in those areas where I am lacking, either You will supplement my shortcomings, either by miraculously empowering me in key moments to do what I could not do naturally, or else You will use my mistakes to Your greater glory and to advance Your kingdom, perhaps by exposing to myself something in my character that needs to be addressed and that I would otherwise have been unaware of, or as a testimony to others: God can even use this clumsy and broken vessel; or perhaps my mistakes and failings serve some other purpose too subtle for me to ever comprehend, but I trust You to wisely use them all the same.

When I prayerfully consider these things, I am filled with joy; but when I forget them, when I feel like I have to better myself or else I’ll be “bad at my job”, I begin to try to stuff my mind with as much information as I hope I can retain, until my head aches and my heart is filled with despair.  Thank You for these headaches, these frustrations, these instances where my mind seems to be leaking and I can’t remember anything, can’t find the right word, can’t seem to clearly express myself or a concept I like to tell myself I’ve assimilated; thank You for the times You close off any avenue for me to impress anybody by my own efforts, for they remind me that I can’t do this without Your grace, and that spending time in Your Presence is far more profitable to me than accumulating stray data.  I am most happpy when my mind is receptive, and I am vexed when my mind is fiercely trying to build a fortress for itself.  Even in contemplation I am more like Martha than like Mary.  But give me an hour of Your company, Lord, and when I return to my books, may I approach them with a gentle openness to finding You in them rather than an imperial attitude whereby I set out to master everything.  Conversely, You know that I am prone to sloth, so I thank You for the mild anxiety I feel when I catch myself wasting time.  May this rod of correction always be also a staff to lovingly draw me back to You, a cattle prod that causes me to leap backwards into Your arms, rather than a bed of nails I choose to lie on to punish myself.  Draw my eyes ever back to the Holy Cross.

Thank You for the slight ache in my temples when I try to read with my glasses on and the blurry dimness You plunge me into when my glasses are off.  Thank You for the cramp in my hand and the pain in my back when I write for an extended period of time and for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.  It also reminds me of my desperate need for Your grace, and it causes me to long all the more ardently for the Parousia and for the Transfiguration of my flesh.  It also makes me more grateful for and appreciative of the Incarnation, when Your Son voluntarily chose to submit to the flood of small but aggravating irritations and itches and stubbed toes and twisted ankles, all of it culminating in the supreme suffering of His Passion, all of which He endured for my sake.  Thank You for all the little homilies You have sprinkled throughout Nature to remind me of my Redemption; thank You that I live next to a valley full of trees, every one of which reminds me of the Cross and every leaf of which reminds me of the Resurrection.  Keep me always alert to the sermons You inscribed into the universe itself.

I pray that I would be so overflowingly thankful for Your love and forgiveness that I will love and forgive everyone and everything else, from the brother who gets on my nerves to the cold wind that bites my skin.  Fill my heart with intercessory prayer and clear it of the darkness of my own cowardly and arrogant diversions so that I may make a good and worthy confession to my spiritual director.

Lord, I may be personally resolved to do many things, but my will is too weak to either desire these things unceasingly or to implement them consistently; and, moreover, You know what I need better than I do.  Thus I address these to You as prayers, so that Your Spirit will purify them into better and more fitting requests for You to grant as You see fit in Your mercy.

Lord, we want to sub-creators; graciously send us words and gratefully we will say them.

Amen.

eusinelaughingalonewithsuicune:

:: Madonna and Child :: by ~ninebreaker

Presumably, if the Blessed Virgin is going to crush Satan, she’s not only gentle, but also tough—like most saints.  She is, in other words, probably a bit more like this than we tend to realize.

“My political opinions lean more and more to  Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.  I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the innate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights, nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remain obstinate!  If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.  Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people.  If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way into clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.

Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men.  Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.  And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is.  The medieval were all too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop.  Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers.  And so on down the line.  But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—after all the only fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way.  The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance.  We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch—and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals.  The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysius, and died of drink.  The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards.  Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs.  There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit!  But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 52

“Generally speaking, anarchists believe in a modified version of the view that the natural world that was celebrated in the Renaissance, and especially in the eighteenth century, as the Great Chain of Being.  In its most familiar form the Great Chain of Being was seen as a continuity proceeding from the humblest form of life to the Godhead, usually deistically conceived.  Alexander Pope expressed the concept admirably in the Essay on Man:

Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beasts, birds, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing…

Everything, in other words, had its place in the order of being, and if it followed its own nature, all would be well.  But let any species break the chain by departing from its nature, and disaster would ensue.  It was a doctrine that would appeal to a modern ecologist.  The concept derived ultimately from the Greek idea, most clearly developed by the Stoic philosophers, that man belonged to nature, responded to its primal laws, and that in nature he might find the model for his own societies.  It had its analogues in the philosophies of ancient China, and thirty years ago, as I remember, anarchists were fond of quoting some remarks the Taoist sage Lao Tse is said to have made in reproaching Confucius for devising means to make people behave morally.

‘When the actions of the people are controlled by prohibitive laws, the country becomes more and more impoverished.  Therefore the wise man says: ‘I will design nothing, and the people will shape themselves.  I will keep quiet and the people will find their rest.  I will not assert myself, and the people will come forth.  I will discountenance ambition, and the people will return to their natural simplicity.’

But Chinese wisdom was a late discovery so far as European anarchists were concerned.  For them the concept of the unity of the natural law came by a devious route from the world of classical antiquity, through the neo-Platonists of Hellenic Alexandria, and thence by way of the rediscovery of ancient wisdom during the Renaissance and the consequent erosion of the hierarchical cosmogony of the Middle Ages.  By the time the essential idea of the Great Chain of Being had reached the anarchists, God had been displaced from its head or had been rationalized into a principle of harmony, and probably the most influential individual in carrying out the transmission was the Swiss writer, author of the famous Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau….

The political order of the Middle Ages had been organic in form, a balance of Church and king, of baronies and free cities, whose haphazard nature was illustrated most vividly by the fact that the kings had no permanent capitals, but travelled from royal castle to royal castle followed by vast trains of wagons bearing the royal property.  At the same time there was—in theory at least—a tightly graded social order in which every man knew his place, which compensated for the lack of an elaborate political system; there were also cracks in the medieval order in which men might enjoy freedom and good community life, as happened in some of the cities of Italy and Germany.

The medieval social order, never so stable as its later defenders have argued, disintegrated between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, a development that coincided with the revival of humanist learning, which is one way of defining the Renaissance.  Man now became important for his qualities as an individual rather than for the position he held in a graded society, but whether this was a net gain for freedom must be judged in the light of the fact that at the same time the organic order of the medieval world was replaced by a faith in rationally devised political patterns…

The other aspect of Renaissance lay in its emphasis on order.  This was reflected in the many rationally planned cities built at that time, and in the search for political order which led to the concepts of ruthless political action developed by men like Machiavelli, and to the plans of ideal social orders devised by Thomas Moore [sic] in Utopia and Tomasso Campanella in The City of the Sun.  Many such utopian writers, even when they advocated common property, portrayed essentially authoritarian societies, as rigidly controlled as the new cities.  Such an attitude was in keeping with the rise of the modern national state, which began in Cromwell’s England, was developed in the France of Louis XIV, and, ironically, was completed during the French Revolution when conscription was introduced and gave Napoleon the means to extend nationalism into imperialism…

Thus, far from advocating the breakdown of society at the same time as they seek the destruction of authority, the anarchists are in fact hoping to strengthen social bonds and social virtues by reinforcing community relationships at the most basic grassroots level.  What they envisage is a reversal of the pyramid of power which the State exemplifies.  Instead of authority descending from some political heaven by a ladder of bureaucracy, they see responsibility beginning among individuals and small groups given dignity by freedom.  The most important unit of society, in their view, is that in which people co-operate directly to fulfill their immediate needs.  Nobody can assess these needs better than those who experience them.  This basic nuclear unit appears in various forms among the anarchist writers.  Godwin called it the parish; Proudhon called it the commune; the syndicalists called it the workshop.  The name matters very little; the fact of direct collaboration and consultation between the people most intimately involved in a phase of living is the most important thing.”

—George Woodcock, The Anarchist Reader

dixienormas86:

Set of Halloween 5: Donald Pleasence and Danielle Harris

“What Dom Prosper did know was that sometime in the ninth century, a thousand years before the abbot lived, a brother monk had also contemplated the mystery of the chants.  According to Church lore, this anonymous monk was visited by an inspired idea.  He would make a written record of the chants.  So that they’d be preserved.  Too many of his numbskull novices made too many mistakes when trying to learn the plainchants.  If the words and music really were Divine, as he believed with all his heart, then they needed to be safer than stored in such faulty human heads.

Dom Prosper, in his own stone cell in his own abbey, could see that monk sitting in a room exactly like his.  As the abbot imagined it, the monk pulled a piece of lambskin, vellum, toward him then dipped his sharpened quill in ink.  He wrote the words, the text, in Latin, of course.  The psalms.  And once that was done he went back to the beginning.  To the first word.

His quill hovered over it.

Now what?

How to write music?  How could he possibly communicate something that sublime?  He tried writing out instructions, but that was far too cumbersome.  Words alone could never describe how this music transcended the normal human state, and lifted man to the Divine.

The monk was stumped.  For days and weeks he went about his monastic life.  Joining the others in prayer and work.  And prayer.  Chanting the Office.  Teaching the young and easily distracted novices.

And then one day he noticed that they focused on his right hand, as he guided their voices.  Up, down.  Faster, slower.  Quietly, quietly.  They’d memorized the words, but depended upon his hand signals for the music itself.

That night, after Vespers, this nameless monk sat by precious candlelight, staring at the psalms written so carefully on the vellum.  Then he dipped his quill in ink and drew the very first musical note.  

It was a wave above word.  A single, short, squiggly line.  Then another.  And another.  He drew his hand.  Stylized.  Guiding some unseen monk to raise his voice.  Higher.  Then holding.  Then higher again.  Hanging there for just a moment, then swooping and sweeping downward in a giddy musical descent.

He hummed as he wrote.  His simple hand signals on the page fluttered, so that the words came alive and lifted off.  Became airborne.  Joyous.  He heard the voices of monks not yet born joining him.  Singing exactly the same chants that freed him and lifted his heart to Heaven.

In trying to capture the beautiful mystery, this monk had invented written music.  Not yet notes, what he’d written became known as neumes.  

Over the centuries this plain chant evolved into complex chant.  Instruments were added, harmonies were added, which led to chords and staffs and finally musical notes.  Do-re-mi.  Modern music was born.  The Beatles, Mozart, rap.  Disco, Annie Get Your Gun, Lady Gaga.  All sprang from the same ancient seed.  A monk, drawing his hand.  Humming and conducting and straining for the Divine.”

—The Beautiful Mystery, pages 2-3

“And in the west, the ever-setting sun consumed itself, surrounded by its circling sisters, rushing with the speed of light toward the point systems and cosmoi and galaxies had been fleeing from the beginning, toward darkness and the primordial Fiat.  And across the cold ocean of space, audible as the music of the spheres, the defining  cry of creation comes.  Maranatha!  Come, Lord Jesus.

Feast of St. Catherine of Siena
Agrigento, 1997”

—Ralph McInerny, The Red Hat, page 581

thisiswhiteculture:

fuckyeahriotgrrrlsofcolor:

I got dressed in my traditional Indian regalia, but there was a man, he was the producer of the whole show. He took that speech away from me and he warned me very sternly. “I’ll give you 60 seconds or less. And if you go over that 60 seconds, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you put in handcuffs.”

- Sacheen Littlefeather in Reel Injun (2009), dir. Neil Diamond.

You can watch the original speech here. 

p.s. white people, hearing a moving speech and applauding doesn’t count. you have to be actively combating racism for you to be considered a good person.

“Apparently, during his stays in the hospital, he would pray a lot. One of his favorite devotions was the Stations of the Cross. At the end, without the strength to reach the chapel, he would shuffle down the corridor of the hospital, dragging his IV and oxygen, and stop at fourteen different hospital rooms, designating each of them one of the stations, recognizing in each cancer patient the suffering, bleeding Savior on the via crucis.”
—Timothy Cardinal Dolan describing Father Gene Hamilton, Priests for the Third Millennium, page 130

“Faith will tell us Christ is present
When our human senses fail.”
—St. Thomas Aquinas, Tantum Ergo



***

There’s a famous Kierkegaard quote where the Danish philosopher accuses Bible scholarship of putting the readers of the New Testament at a safe distance from its clear injunctions. Its claims and demands are shocking, but fortunately, he says, we have academics who can explain it all away. Thank God, too; it is a fearful thing to be left alone with the New Testament.

For example, we all know the admonition of the Beatitudes to pluck out your eyes and chop off your hands if they cause you to sin. These warnings are usually exegeted as being hyperbole meant to stress how passionately we should root out the causes of sin in our lives. Perhaps that is so. But the legend tells us that Simon the Tanner took these verses completely literally, and acted them out. We may smirk at his naiveté—if only he’d understood proper hermeneutical practice! On the other hand, we are also told that he literally moved a mountain on command, which the Lord says that only who has even the slightest modicum of faith could easily accomplish. Why can’t we, who claim to have faith, move mountains, too? Fortunately for us, we have footnotes explaining that this, too, was just hyperbole on Christ’s part, so this story need not rebuke us too harshly.

But I think the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our scholastic stars, but in our selves. None of us needs, and only a few of us use, theories about non-Apostolic origins of the Gospels to escape the disturbing implications of the words of Christ. All we need is a calloused familiarity with them, and we can skim over the most startling of utterances without so much as a flutter of the eyelashes, let alone of the heart. 

More to the point: Catholics pride ourselves on taking Jesus more literally than most Protestants when we take Him at His word regarding the Eucharist. “This is my Body”; “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood possesses eternal life.” We are humble enough to assume He meant precisely what He took such pains to say, over against those who squeamishly invent more harmless (and contrived) explanations to dull the edge of these perplexing words. But how many of us—and I speak here of, and to, all individual Christians—are just as straightforward in our reading of Matthew 25: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

I should make the disclaimer here that I’m not going to talk about social justice in this note. Not really, anyway. The only thing I’m going to say about that is that Christ is not talking about those who tried to solve this abstract thing called “the problem of poverty”. He speaks of those who have taken care of and have loved poor and suffering persons. Early on in The Brothers Karamazov, a woman from the village confesses to Father Zosima that she has trouble loving people. Not humanity, mind you—she loves mankind in general. She just can’t love individual persons. Father Zosima counsels her that this is exactly her problem: The more you love humanity in the abstract, the less you’ll love the material human in front of you.

Catholicism has always been wary of any vast and all-encompassing plan to solve temporal problems, not only because they attempt to immanentize the eschaton but because they tend to sacrifice humans on the altar of humanity. The future Pope John Paul II wrote a play, My God’s Brother, in which a monk and a Communist for a walk to discuss how to solve this nebulous “problem of poverty”. At one point they pass by a beggar on the side of the road. The Marxist carries on chattering about how to help the poor, apparently oblivious to this concrete opportunity right in front of him. Only then does the monk realize that his companion is a devil in disguise.

The beggar, on the other hand, would have been Jesus in what Mother Theresa often called the “distressing disguise” of the homeless and disenfranchised. This is what I am writing about here: How to be more open to encountering Christ and His grace. I have nothing to say about how to change social and economic structures that inscribe injustice onto our collective DNA. These must be dealt with, but I confess that I have no counsel for that here. This is simply a quick devotional thought that would be more appropriate coming from a country preacher than an urban rights activist.

So let’s consider God’s grace. I wrote a note a while ago about how intellectually oriented Christians can be pretty snobby towards less theologically informed brethren they encounter. God, I pointed out, is inside those believers, too. In that piece I stole a page from Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In it, two frivolous Catholic girls go out with some good-natured but somewhat simple Protestant boys, who earnestly sing low church hymns to the girls. They, in turn, mockingly sing the hymn of Eucharistic Adoration, “Tantum Ergo.” Unfamiliar with the song and unable to distinguish Latin from Hebrew, one of the boys ignorantly asks whether it’s some sort of “Jew song.” (There’s a hidden but clever irony here, since the lyrics explicitly mention how the Mass has transcended the liturgy of Judaism.) 

At this point, the teenaged protagonist, a thinly veiled Author Surrogate, loses her composure and snaps at the boy that he’s nothing but a “big dumb Church of God ox.” But that boy, of course, is a vessel of God’s presence, albeit concealed under a humble appearance, just as Jesus is present under the unassuming forms of bread and wine at Mass; and our heroine had perhaps forgotten that the author of “Tantum Ergo”, St. Thomas Aquinas, was also once thought to be rather slow-witted, even to the point of being nicknamed “the dumb ox.” 

Now, many people who commented on that note mentioned that they liked its content except that they disagreed with its references to transubstantiation. I respectfully have to reply that I don’t think any insights it may have had can survive apart from the dogma of transubstantiation. O’Connor’s story does not merely rely on Eucharistic imagery but on Eucharistic theology, and when C.S. Lewis says that “next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses,” this tribute is only meaningful if you accepted that the Blessed Sacrament contains the Real Presence of the Lord.

But I have to admit that this goes both ways. I am not convinced that we can fully appreciate and worship the Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament unless we can respond to His Presence in the least of these His brethren. In 1 Corinthians 11, St. Paul chastises his audience for the divisions within their congregation, which even manifest themselves when they gather at the Lord’s Table, supposedly the ultimate symbol of Christian unity. The wealthy, in fact, are hogging the bread and wine for themselves, even to the point of getting drunk, and leaving the poor to go hungry. “You have homes in which to eat and drink, don’t you?” the Apostle angrily demands. “Or do you despise God’s church and humiliate those who have nothing?” (verse 21) He goes on to remind the Corinthians that whoever eats and drinks without “discerning the Lord’s body” eats and drinks damnation to himself. For this reason, the Church withholds communion from non-Catholics, who may not assent to the teaching of transubstantiation, and from small children, who may not understand the teaching of transubstantiation, so as to protect them from condemning themselves. But St. Paul’s main point seems to be that they are failing to perceive Christ’s body in the poor members of the Church, and it’s the failure to see Jesus in them that turns the Lord’s Supper from a means of grace into a blasphemy. 

If we should acknowledge Jesus in the poor in a similar way to how we acknowledge Him in the Host, then the obvious question is just how we do acknowledge Him in the Host. The first and most obvious example is that we consume Him at Mass after at least an hour of fasting and often after observing a Grand Silence the night before to prepare our hearts and minds for His arrival. We bow before the altar where He is offered and kneel before the tabernacle or monstrance where He is housed. When we pass a Catholic church we cross ourselves. No one need be mystified by the Sign of the Cross; it’s simply a way of praying with our bodies as well as our hearts. In these various and sundry ways we pay homage to our Redeemer.

What does this translate into if we assume that Christ is also present in the least of these that we encounter on the street? At the very least, it should stop us from merely feeling a twang of patronizing compassion or awkwardly trying to avoid them—or, worse still, looking down on them with disgust and passing judgment on what we assume must have been the poor personal choices (or government policies) that landed them here. Pope Benedict XVI quotes St. Gregory of Nyssa’s words about the poor: “Do not despise them, those who lie idly, as if for this reason they were worth nothing. Consider who they are and you will discover wherein lies their dignity: they represent the Person of the Savior. And this is how it is: for in his goodness the Lord gives them his own Person so that through it, those who are hard of heart and enemies of the poor may be moved to compassion.”

Instead of despising them, we should love them. But what does this tangibly mean? Here is a story you may find horrifying but will hopefully find challenging, in the vein of the legend of Simon the Tanner. St. Catherine of Siena was once caring for a woman named Andrea, who, it seems, embodied all the traits about the poor and suffering we find most difficult to get used to. She was rude and obstinate, even spreading malicious rumours about this patient nun who was tending to her, and had breast cancer which had so decayed her body and caused it to smell so awful that most people couldn’t be around her. One day, St. Catherine experienced a strong revulsion to this woman against her will, and she immediately became angry at herself for reacting this way to a child of God. In that moment she bent her head and drank up the puss from the Andrea’s putrefying wound, which she later proclaimed to possess a sweetness and delight exceeding all other food she had ever tasted. Indeed, St. Catherine got to a point where she refused all food other than the Eucharist, a spoonful of herbs a day, and the puss from the sickly. She is not the only saint this has been reported about; St. Catherine of Genoa and Blessed Angela of Foligno are also known to have abstained from all food other than the Host and the lice and scabs of the ill and the dying, which the latter declared to be as “sweet as the Eucharist.” And it must be said that there is an uncompromising logic to this: Jesus said that He was found in the least of these, and tells us to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to gain eternal life. Why would anyone who truly believed these words have need for any other food besides the Body of the Lord, wherever it is found?

Most of us are probably not called to anything so dramatic, though this probably has more to do with our own lack of faith than anything else. But stories like this should, at the very least, give us serious pause. Perhaps, at the very least, we should discreetly cross ourselves when we pass a panhandler, whether or not we feel compelled to give them anything more concrete than a silent prayer. Maybe we should start bowing our heads to them in reverence rather than in an attempt to avoid meeting their eyes.

There is another old practice, that of making the Sign of the Cross whenever you hear a siren, whether from a police car, a fire truck, or an ambulance. Not only is this to pray for those involved, but I think it also reminds us that God is present wherever there is suffering, and thus we venerate Him in it. Speaking only for myself, I can honestly say that I didn’t realize how effectively I had tuned out the fact that the world around me was filled with suffering until I started this practice. Perhaps we’d all have a similar epiphany if we started doing this whenever we encountered one of these streetside Incarnations.

What you do with that epiphany is for you to work out in the silence of your prayer closet.

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky… question all these realities. All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful.’ Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?”

—St. Augustine

The trees, they like to clap
Their hands, the hills all love
To skip; but now they’ve donned
Their fun’ral suits and watched
The earth’s head dip.

They’re clad in bronze and blood
And gold, adorned with crisp,
Fresh wind.  But shorn of green,
This day, though old,
‘s yet ready to begin.

Unending youth is found
In change, and to this quiet
Earth, each passing of a
Full-grown age is yet
Another birth.

The burnished season speaks
To me of turtles and
Of wheels.  What fulcrum turns
The flux, yet firm, which
Twirls and rocks and keels?

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

—G.K. Chesterton