The story of St Wilgefortis is simple enough. Born noble as a teenager in some part of what is now Portugal, possibly Galicia, she is promised in marriage to a Muslim or some other kind of pagan, king. Having become Christian she has secretly taken a vow of perpetual virginity. To avoid the marriage she prayed to be made repulsive to the king. The answer to her prayer was a luxurious beard that appeared on the... Read more

      According to the old style, today, the 19th of July, in 1754, is marked as Seraphim of Sarov‘s birthday. Current calendars put the date at July 30th. But noticing it and thinking of the saint caused a flood of mind bubbles… Seraphim is perhaps the most famous of the Eastern Christian saints. He was an ascetic and mystic and is frequently compared to St Francis of Assisi. Now I’m no fan of extreme asceticism. And Seraphim is... Read more

    In 1868, Pope Pius IX convened what would come to be called the First Vatican Council. It appears the pope an his closer associates were concerned with the issues of rationalism, materialism, and liberalism in general, as well as the specifics of rising socialism, communism, and anarchism. They did as charged and duly The Council condemned rationalism, secularism, liberalism, naturalism, modernism, materialism and pantheism. But it was today, the 18th of July, in 1870 that they outdid themselves.... Read more

      Today, the 17th of July, in the year of our Lord, 1948, I was born in the city of “no there there,” in the land named for the island home of a tribe of Amazon warriors and their queen. The 17th of July in 1948 was a Saturday. It was a mild day, the temperature never rose above 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The moon was waxing gibbous under the waning sign of Cancer. It appears it was a... Read more

                            Tomorrow I turn seventy-four. According to the psalmist, The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. More contemporary translations say seventy years, and eighty. So. The sands are draining out of the glass for me… Some wise person once observed how anyone without... Read more

      As it happens, today, the 15th of July is the beginning of Obon, also called Bon, in Japan. It derives from a Chinese Buddhist/Taoist Zhongyuan festival, often translated at the Ghost festival. In China the date for it is the 15th (in some places apparently the 14th and others the 16th) day of the 7th month in China’s traditional solar/lunar calendar. So, easily translated into the 15th of July in the Gregorian solar calendar. The festival’s history is... Read more

      “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens Like many people I think this is one of the great sentences in English literature.... Read more

          As I understand it the date we normally assign to mark the birth of Julius Caesar is today, the 13th of July, one hundred years before our common era. A number of ways to go with this tidbit. But, I find myself thinking a little about how we and he probably pronounced Latin. Weene Weede Weeke, anyone? Read more

      Teitaro Suzuki died on this day, the 12th of July, in 1966. In Western traditions one often marks the date of a remarkable person’s death as a festival. For the Christian tradition, it’s a new birth into the heavenly realms. I rather like that. Although I think of it more as a celebration of a full life. He is best known to us as Daisetsu, his dharma name, given to him by his teacher Soen (sometime Soyen)... Read more

    The Stoics emphasized three things. The first was virtue, a way of discerning what to avoid and what to embrace in our lives. The second was wisdom, often called reason in Greek and Latin, which while including rational thought, is mainly about a larger perspective that is found not through the accumulation of knowledge but rather through careful attention to what one thinks and holds in the mind. And the third is a view of the rhythms of... Read more