There is education in beauty. The beauty, and the heights, made me giddy as I neared the top of the Duomo . The view from outside, overlooking Florence, was food for the imagination, but for me the feast was inside, seeing the arches and the art, caused my highest fantasy to fail. I was too feeble to see, let alone capture such overwhelming, gigantic, beauty. Every time I read Dante, moving with him as a guide toward Paradise, I recollect the... Read more
God is love and has built a cosmos that is based on love. As a result, God allows us to consent to serve Him. One aspect of goodness in the cosmos, obvious to all of us, is beauty. Everywhere we look there is beauty. This is a sign not just His existence, but of His nature. There is also ugliness and evil, some of which we can explain by our misuse (my misuse!) of our ability to consent. Plato notwithstanding, we... Read more
Beauty pierces. Beauty creates desire, shows that we want or need something, and so drives us toward the beloved. If the need is strong enough, this absolute romance will drive us to the very face of God. God is beautiful, totally, absolutely beautiful, and even a tiny pang, the slightest longing that sends us Godward, will drive us forever toward His face if we heed desire. A problem with meetings in a pandemic is being forced to stare at one’s... Read more
Christmas is almost a month behind us, but Christmas is coming. The lessons of that sacred feast, and the revealing of Jesus in the Epiphany are still close, and coming closer. One lesson would be very valuable just now to those who do not how to seek justice while having power. The day after Christmas, the Church wisely decided to celebrate the Feast of the first martyr, Stephen. We are reminded that not everyone was happy about the Good News. Sometimes... Read more
God created humankind in His image. He also created a cosmos where we could act as regents compassionately ruling over all things. God declared the creation “good” and so if humanity had not fallen short of His divine plan, all would have been well. We did not do as we ought to have done and so things break. We did the equivalent of spilling water in the keyboard of our laptop and the machine has been breaking down since. Jesus... Read more
We run on the wrong clock. This is one way of understanding the “difficult” passage of Jesus cursing the fig tree in both Mark and Matthew: 18 Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. 19 And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward forever. And presently the fig tree withered away.... Read more
Sincere questions can show a desire for a relationship and a mind still awake to possibilities. We ask, because the beauty, the truth, and the goodness are there and we most often must get consent to go there. One reason we miss objective beauty is that we think beauty is something in us, in the eye of the beholder. If we see beauty, we think that the beauty itself is merely our feelings: beauty is in us. We see a... Read more
As I write the temperature is roughly 30 and heading for 24 Fahrenheit. Many places I have lived would view this as warm for this time of year, but not here in America’s City: Houston, Texas. We are not ready for ice. Once I saw a newscaster marvel when breaking a piece off a car: “this is frozen water.” True. If that makes you laugh, you who live in colder climes, then remember that there are millions of drivers here... Read more
The yardstick always was around, a long whip like piece of wood. In some houses, I am told, this served as a means for corporeal punishment, those were the bad old days. Thankfully in my house, the yardstick just measured things that were around a yard long, bigger than a ruler, smaller than “too big for us to measure.” When I was a boy, the yardstick was mostly a sword, just the right length, and when a yardstick became small,... Read more
We get there quickly, we come back slowly. Nessie, the wonder dog, becomes so excited when she hears “going out” that she scarcely can be walked to the park. She strains, surges, trots to the place where other dogs may be, poops can be made, and balls caught. If there is another dog there, and I have a tennis ball, and she must go poop, she will sometimes leap about in confusion trying to do all three things at once.... Read more
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