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A lot of old hymnals used to have sections marked off with songs especially meant for children to sing. In The Hymnal 1940 that section included the Christmas carol, Once in Royal David’s City, written in 1848 by Cecil Frances Alexander. Think of a Victorian lady in a big frilly dress and hat, walking to an Anglican church with seven or eight children in tow. Mrs. Alexander didn’t have the children, but she was that lady, and she spent her life writing poetry, much of it for children, and working for the poor in England, especially children and “fallen women,” that is, women who bore children out of wedlock.
Mrs. Alexander sees the child Jesus as a model not only for British children but for all people. Jesus came down from heaven as a mere child, and that fits well with his coming down in so humble a way, so that none of the important people would notice. “Once in royal David’s city,” the carol begins, “stood a lowly cattle shed.” That’s a surprise right there. Jesus is the Son of David. In Jesus God fulfills His promise to David, that his kingdom shall endure forever. Yet Jesus, in the same city of the royal David, is laid in a manger in a cattle shed. “With the poor and meek and lowly,” we sing in the second stanza, “lived on earth our Savior holy.”
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One of the finest men I’ve learned about in recent years was a Quaker who became a Roman Catholic, but who changed the world before he converted. His name was Horatio Storer, and if you are an American citizen reading this, and your family was on this soil by the middle of the nineteenth century, you may be alive today because of him.
I said he grew up as a Quaker, and he was a deeply pious one at that, but all boy, all the time. When he was eight years old his mother and father sent him off to a boarding school for boys, on Cape Cod. So he wrote letters home, asking for treats, thanking his uncle for a hunting rifle, telling stories about school and everything. One day the teacher was sick, so the boys had the day off after they finished their chores. They decided they would build a log cabin, and that meant cutting down the trees, making the trunks into logs, fitting them together, and even flying a flag from the top of it when they were done. The boys would go out combing the beaches, or they’d take a boat for fishing, or they’d tramp through the woods looking for berries and nuts and wild fruit. One time they hiked ten miles to Barnstable with the other boys to live it up in town, paying a visit to the mayor’s house, stopping at all the shops, eating a big hearty dinner, and getting written up in the local newspaper.
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When I browse through the terrific Hymnal 1940 of the Episcopal Church, I count around fifty hymns that have to do with fighting for Christ. I doubt that anybody of the time, if asked to draw a picture of the essential warrior, would have thought of an Episcopalian choir director. Yet at least in this regard those churchmen paid attention to the fighting words of the gospels and the New Testament. It was not Mohammed but Saint Paul who wrote to the church at Ephesus, urging his brothers to “put on the full armor of God,” because we are in a battle the like of which the world does not recognize. We fight against principalities and powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
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My wife and I have sometimes noticed that you can guess how long a marriage is going to last by how expensive the wedding reception has been. The more it costs, the shorter the marriage: knock off a year for every bridesmaid’s gown that costs more than a thousand dollars. That’s because the couple will think that the wedding is all about themselves. They may invite God to the ceremony, but only if He keeps his place in a corner of the chapel. As for the reception itself, he isn’t even on the guest list.
It would strike them as strange if I said that a wedding must be about the whole of a human society, its years long past and to come, the history of God’s grace toward man, the natural world all around us, the spiritual realities we cannot see – angels and archangels and all the host of heaven, and God, who said in the beginning, “Let us make man in our image,” and male and female He made them, and “for this reason a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.” They might say I was being sentimental. But they are the ones who are sentimental. I am describing the reality. It is the mere fact. Our pagan forefathers would have seen the natural part of it, even if they missed the supernatural.
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It’s one of the moments that changed the world, and you are there.
The year is 1983, and the Solidarity movement has gripped Poland, whose people no longer want to live as puppets of the Soviet Union. The Polish pope, John Paul II, has come to Warsaw as he had promised his countrymen he would do. He has brought professional diplomats from the Vatican with him. They insisted on coming. He doesn’t want them, though. They are standing on the outside of closed doors, cringing and clenching their teeth. That is because the two men on the other side, Pope John Paul II and a Polish general named Wojciec Jaruzelski (VOY-check yar-u-SHEL-skee), are in the middle of a shouting match.
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One of the things I tell my students at Magdalen College is that there’s a quick way to tell if a painting was not executed in the Middle Ages. That’s if the colors are dark. For the people of the Middle Ages loved light and color and song, and even when they painted devils they did it with a boyish gusto that made those enemies of ours look lumpy and ridiculous, like a cross between a dumb animal and a grinning politician.
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How would you imagine a grown man in the prime of his youth, sinless and innocent?
Dear reader, you may have heard people in our time complain about “toxic masculinity,” a silly phrase if there ever was one. Call it “manliness” instead. Can there be anything poisonous about manliness? About a man who is strong of body and will, courageous, far-seeing, gentle with those he loves, firm in upholding what is good and right, fair to others even at his own expense, a plain dealer, not burdening other people with his feelings, ready to give his sweat and blood for his neighbor in need, and to lay down his life for the woman he loves, and his children?
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G. K. Chesterton once said in his bluff way that the Catholic faith was a thick steak, a bottle of stout, and a good cigar. It was a eucharistic sentiment, just as when his friend Hillaire Belloc wrote these jaunty and immortal words:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so –
Benedicamus Domino!
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“The Lord is my shepherd,” says David in the sweetest of his psalms, “I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green PASTURES.” Not many of us these days will ever do that. I never have. I’ve never said, “These sheep of mine might like those peaceful green fields over there,” where the clover is thick, and the shoots are dark and rich with moisture and the thick sugars and starches that are the wondrous gift of the sunlight…Read the full issue.
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The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil died before she was baptized into the Catholic faith she had come to accept with her mind and heart. It was during World War II, and she was in exile in England from her native land, France, and in exile with her people by flesh and blood, the Jews. She didn’t believe that she should enjoy the fruits of conversion while her people were being persecuted and slaughtered in the concentration camps. Instead she fasted to show that she was still one with them. She died young, and her death was probably hastened by the discipline she made herself suffer…Read the full issue.
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Whenever Jesus went from the heights in Jerusalem where the Temple stood, to the Mount of Olives, or whenever he went from Jerusalem to the house of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, his friends who lived in Bethany, he had to cross a deep ravine, a cut in the land that went twenty miles from Jerusalem south to the Dead Sea, and that descended 4,000 feet over that course. It was a rugged country! Now you may ask, “How did that cut in the land get there to begin with?”…Read the full issue.
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A crowd surrounded Jesus as he was walking toward the village. They were excited.
“You should do this for him,” they said. “He has been good to our people.”
“He built a synagogue for us.”
“He has kept the tax collectors honest.”
“He believes in the Lord God…Read the full issue.
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If you look at a map of the world, you will see an island called Ireland, separated from the larger island of Britain, with the Irish Sea between them. You probably know that pretty much everyone in Ireland speaks English, and that is because the island had long been under the rule of the English crown. It was not to the liking of the Irish. Most of the Irish people were Roman Catholic, and for several hundred years they owned very little property and had no say in making and enforcing the laws that governed them. The English owned the rich farms. The Irish scrabbled about the marshes. The English had warm houses and plenty of cattle. The Irish hoed in the bogs for potatoes…Read the full issue.
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When Jesus was about to be born, Joseph and Mary had to go on a journey from Galilee in the north, to a place called Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. That was because the Romans were counting up everyone in the land, to register them for taxes, and so everyone was required to go to the place where their families had come from. Joseph was a “son of David,” meaning that King David was his ancestor, and so he went to the city of David, the village called Bethlehem. That was why Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not in Nazareth, where Joseph and Mary were living…Read the full issue.
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The old man, his shepherd’s staff in hand, stood in the great palace, glaring at the king upon his throne. He knew where he was, because long ago, when he was a boy, he had been brought up in this place.
“Thus says the Lord,” said the shepherd. “Let my people go into the wilderness, to worship me.” The people, the Hebrews, were slaves in that nation. They had been set to work making bricks for magnificent buildings which they would not be permitted to enter. They were groaning under the labor and the oppression…Read the full issue.
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How would it be if there were a big vacuum cleaner in space, sucking up all the big flying rocks that would batter the earth and leave it as scarred and barren as the moon?
Well, there is such a thing. It is called the planet Jupiter.
Everyone has, I guess, seen television programs that take for granted that the universe is filled with intelligent life. All those billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, must house countless planets, and surely some of them are like ours, and people live on them. Maybe the creatures have three eyes in their heads, or they have four legs and instead of walking they do cartwheels, or their skin is green because of all the copper in it, or they can calculate 357 times 491 by thinking about it (I can do that one). But surely there must be such creatures, somewhere…Read the full issue.
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The twin brothers had begun not to like one another at all. Each one was trying to become the sole ruler of the new settlement they were building. So they decided to call upon the gods to decide the issue. They went with their soldiers to the top of one of the seven hills in and around the city, and they had one of the priests beg the gods for a sign. Which of the men shall govern? Which shall give his name to the place? Shall it be Romulus, or Remus?…Read the full issue.
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The old man sat in his cave, cross-legged, with a broken loaf of bread on a platter in front of him, and a jar of wine. That was his usual fare for the day. But this time, for the sake of the company, he ate one of the figs that his visitor had brought him. He remembered that Jesus was once thirsty, and came upon a fig tree that bore no fruit.
His visitor was hardly more than a boy, and he had that boy’s curious look about him, full of youth and eagerness and some humor. The old man suspected that the boy had traveled all the way from the city to see – a show, something he could talk about to his friends. Yet maybe he was serious, too…Read the full issue.
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“I know what Cincinnati is!” you say. “It’s a city in Ohio, on the big Ohio River.”
That’s true enough. But do you know why they called it Cincinnati, and not Losantiville, which is what the first settlers called it?
We have to go back fifteen hundred years, to the year 458 B. C. The scene is a very small farm near the city of Rome. An old man is strapped to a plow. In those days, a farmer would harness himself to a team of two oxen in front of him, and to a plow which he gripped and directed with his hands. The plow was not a big machine. It was a long wooden pole with a hooked iron plowshare at the bottom. When the oxen rumbled forward, they would drag the pole along, which the man would have to keep steady, forcing it down into the earth to plow up the dirt, in a straight furrow. It was extremely hard work…Read the full issue.
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“Wise guy, eh?” shouts Moe, and gets Curly’s nose in the clamp of a pipe wrench, to give it a good hard twist – rrrrnk!
What’s the difference between being WISE, and being SMART?
When I was three years old, I taught myself how to read and write. I was reading the Bible, and I memorized the names of all the books, in order. I don’t know why I did it. I was just fascinated with the Bible. That was SMART. Of course I was not WISE. How can you be WISE, at three years old? I didn’t know anything about people, or the big world around me. I could trace words in the sand in the ditch in the front of our house. But if somebody told me a lie, I wouldn’t have known it. I didn’t know what made people happy or sad. I didn’t know what could make them come together to build a house, or clear a field, or worship God…Read the full issue.
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“Colonel,” said the aide, “your commands are clear. We have to shell the cathedral.”
The scene was fifty miles away from Paris, the great capital of France. The countryside far and near showed all the signs of war: burnt fields, buildings falling apart, great craters in the earth where the bombs hit, scrawny cattle wandering here and there. In the distance, towering high above the land, stood the great cathedral of Chartres. Some people say that it is the most beautiful cathedral in the world. I say more: I think it is the most beautiful building in the world, of any kind…Read the full issue.
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“Joey,” says your mother, who has in her hands a big platter full of cinnamon rolls she has just taken from the oven, “could you fetch me a big sheet of aluminum FOIL, please?”
“Sure, Mom,” you say, and you get the tube from the cupboard, you tug on the end of the roll, unwrap a sheet, and then use the saw-teeth attached to the cardboard to cut the sheet…Read the full issue.
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“When I consider the work of your fingers,” says the psalm, “the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man, that you should care for him?” And yet God has made us in his image, a little less than the angels, and given us dominion over the whole of his creation, to tend it and love it, and to wonder at its beauty and grandeur.
Do you know, if you were a creature on the planet Venus – well, you couldn’t be a creature on the planet Venus. The atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide, which would suffocate you. And the temperature is more than 800 degrees. And it never gets cool at night, because Venus is blanketed in clouds so thick, none of the heat escapes, and besides, a day on Venus is 224 earth-days long. We never experience anything like that. Sometimes a day in school seems 224 days long, but that’s a different story…Read the full issue.
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Thousands of people are standing in the square outside of the church. It’s a breezy day at the end of September, but warm and sunny, and everyone is in a holiday mood. Old women are murmuring prayers. Little children try to get loose from their mamas and run about, but the older children are hushed, waiting. You are waiting too.
Suddenly, at a sign from an altar boy stationed at the great door to the Church of Saint Michael, everyone falls to his knees. It is the consecration of the Mass. The priest inside the church, packed with worshipers on this great feast day, is calling upon the Holy Spirit, to bless the bread and wine. You start to count, in your mind. It won’t be long now…Read the full issue.
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Mrs. Jackson sat on what used to be a part of a wall, around what used to be a garden. She had a notebook and a pen, and a keen memory. A green lizard darted out from a hole in the crumbling brick, caught a mosquito, and darted back in.
A very old Indian woman was squatting on the ground, with a clay pot between her knees. Some kernels of corn were in the pot, which she pounded and crushed with a stone. It wasn’t much, but it would do for a little corn-mush, for her dinner.
“It was better when the fathers were here,” said the old woman. “It was so much better.”…Read the full issue.
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The doctor in the big city hospital wiped his brow, which was dripping with sweat. They were ten stories up from the ground, and all the heat of the city street below came up in waves. Sometimes he thought that the walls were shimmering, it was so hot. More than a hundred degrees outside, and at least a hundred and ten inside. The fans on the ceiling didn’t help; all they did was move the hot air around. The sweat just stayed on your skin, in beads.
And however much the heat made him suffer, it was twice as bad for his patients, who were lying on their beds, with nothing but a sheet to cover them. The beds were soaked with sweat, too. It was like lying on a warm wet blanket. It was awful. Some of them had fevers, and there was no way to keep their temperature down. Those people might not live through the day…Read the full issue.
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Christ Jesus was God Himself, says Saint Paul, but he came to us as a man, even as a slave, to dwell among us, to preach the truth to us, and to die for our sins: “He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father.”…Read the full issue.
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The old men were gathered together, high up in the citadel overlooking the walls of the city. Outside of the walls they could see the smoke of campfires rising from the ground. Around every fire there were men. They were soldiers – enemy soldiers. Somewhere in all those fields was the tent of the king who was leading the attack.
“Quirinius,” said one of the old men to his friends near him, “the food is running short. What shall we do?” In one direction all the hills and plains were black, not green. The enemy had set fire to the grain and the grasses for pasture. The enemy could afford to wait. Whatever food there was, they were devouring. The people huddled inside the city walls could starve, for all they cared…Read the full issue.
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When God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden, he said to the man that the very ground would be cursed because of his sin. It would bring forth thorns and thistles. He would have to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, tilling the earth, caring for the wheat, reaping the ears of ripe grain, threshing the kernels from the stalks, winnowing them from the dust and chaff and other parts that you cannot digest, and finally crushing the kernels under stone, crushing them to powder, so that they could be mixed with water and yeast and made into dough for bread…Read the full issue.
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“Now the serpent was the subtlest beast of all the field,” says the sacred author in Genesis, just as Satan, who evidently has taken over the body of the serpent and is using it like a puppet, is about to tempt Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. It had to be a serpent, you see, because if it had been a camel or a sheep or a cow, Eve would have said, “Why is this camel,” or sheep or cow, “talking to me?” And it is hard to imagine anything intelligent coming out of a camel…Read the full issue.
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Put on your Bible antennae, and tune them up, because I have a question for you. Is there a family dog in the Bible?
If I were asking the question about the ancient Romans, it would be easy to answer. The Romans were fond of dogs, and the bigger the better. If you go to the ruins of Pompeii, you can see the remains of a porch in front of one of the houses, inlaid with black and white tiles, and some red for the tongue, to show a fierce watchdog all ready to protect his family. CAVE CANEM, reads the inscription: Beware of the Dog! If you read the Odyssey, set in ancient Greece, you will come upon the scene where Odysseus, back home after twenty years, but in disguise so that the wicked suitors for his wife’s hand in marriage will not know who he is, is walking to his own house, alongside a faithful herder of pigs. And he sees, lying on a heap of refuse, a very old dog, twenty years old, a white hound dog he trained himself, and named Argos – Flash, we might say. Poor Flash is half devoured with fleas. Nobody takes care of him anymore. And even though the man next to Odysseus doesn’t recognize his master, Flash does, and he flattens his ears a little, and tries to wag his tail, and he whimpers for joy. But he is too weak to move…Read the full issue.
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Suppose you have a strange cousin named Dexter, with a laboratory in his basement. You go down there and it’s as if you had taken an elevator into hell. The smoke is so thick you have to gulp to breathe, and the place stinks like rotten eggs from the sulfuric acid that Dexter is heating up in glass beakers. He wears thick glasses because he’s nearsighted, and since they are always getting fogged up from the steam, he often trips on the fuses, comic books, coke cans, bottles of nitro-glycerin, stray socks, and dead cats he has left lying on the floor. For Dexter is a bit messy. He’s fitted his glasses out with battery-operated windshield wipers, but he’s forgotten to change the batteries, so the wipers are stuck out cockeyed, making him look like a strange kind of bug with drooping antennas…Read the full issue.
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When Jesus was stripped and nailed to the cross, the gospels tell us, some of the Roman soldiers took his cloak, but when they saw that it had no seams, but was woven in one piece, they decided not to tear it, but to throw dice to see who would get the whole thing. You see, that was how executioners made a little extra profit on the side. They would literally strip the man of everything he had, and a fine cloak was nothing to sneer at…Read the full issue.
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Suppose you could board a time machine and dial it up to the year 3000. You come back to your home town and meet your own great-great-great-great-twenty times great grandson.
You say to him, “Son, I’d like to shake your hand. I’m your great-great-great-great-twenty times great grandfather.” You don’t look like it, because you have been in a time machine, and you have only aged a few minutes. You look as if you could be his kid brother, except that so many generations have come between you, you hardly resemble him at all.
…Read the full issue.
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Even if you have never been to New York harbor, you have probably seen pictures of the famous Statue of Liberty, rising up in green splendor over the waters, and holding forth her torch, lighting the way for freedom for man, because man was made by God for liberty and not for slavery.
Lady Liberty wasn’t built in the United States. It came here in 1884 as a gift from our friends, the French. But it wasn’t made in 1884, either. The sculptor Auguste Bartholdi began to construct it nineteen years earlier, in 1865. He was doing so to commemorate one year after President Lincoln had declared that all slaves in the Confederate States were to be free – the so-called Emancipation Proclamation…Read the full issue.
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Did you know that George Washington is listed as having two birthdays? One was February 22, 1731, and the other was February 11, 1732. What happened was this. Baby George was ready to be born in 1731, but when he took a peek outside of his mother’s womb and saw icicles on the windows and felt how cold it was in the drafty house, he decided to go right back in and snuggle there for another whole year, till finally his mother had had enough of it, because he was getting as heavy as a cannonball. So she said, “George, this just won’t do! You come out right now.” And he did, because he was a good boy after all. I’d say that you might try what George did if you want someday to become president of the United States, but if you are reading this now it’s probably too late…Read the full issue.
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Back when my father was a little boy growing up in Pennsylvania, there were two major league baseball teams in Philadelphia. One of them was the Phillies, in the National League. They’re still there. The other was the Athletics, in the American League. They have since moved to Kansas City and then to Oakland, where they still are now.
You must not think that Philadelphia was a BOOM town for baseball at that time. The teams were terrible. Sometimes they’d be lucky if they could get for their crowd three old men, a boy peeking between a hole in the outfield fence, two stray cats, and a raccoon. But the Athletics did have a player whom the fans gave a nickname to. He was BOOM BOOM Beck…Read the full issue.
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The old man paced back and forth, thinking and praying, thinking and praying. His steps echoed down the long halls of the castle. It was winter, and snow lay deep on the ground outside. He could hear sounds from the high window. They were not the sounds of birds twittering as they hunted for the stray seed or early bud on a tree. It was like the wind, but not the wind. You will probably never have heard this sound. It was the mutter of a thousand men, half a mile away, just beyond the moat of the castle. The men were armed with iron mail and helmets, shields and swords. They were cold, and impatient, and sullen. They would have liked to storm the castle, but they were ordered not to, and besides, the castle had defenders of its own…Read the full issue.
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Have you ever seen a butterfly crawling on the top of a leaf, munching away at the edges? “Butterflies don’t crawl!” you tell me. “Butterflies FLY!” Yes, they do, but not all the time. In the early stages of its life, the butterfly, as you probably know, doesn’t look much like a butterfly. It is a caterpillar, a squishy, crawling, very hungry caterpillar…Read the full issue.
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A long time ago I read some pages in a book by a woman who didn’t like men and boys very much. She said there was reason to believe that boys are taught to make their voices deep when they are around thirteen years old. If only people would teach girls to do that too, then the world would be a Better Place. But I thought that the world would be a Better Place if people like her were put in a special home with rubber walls and lots of toys, so that they could be as silly as they pleased, without bothering anybody else…Read the full issue.
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“Come on, boy, come on, Stickeen!” cried the man. The wind was blowing hard and it was starting to snow. It had rained most of the day, and now it was a dark twilight, and the man was soaked all through. That didn’t bother him so much, because he was used to it. He had lived his whole life outdoors, in all kinds of weather, exploring deserts and climbing mountains and tracking rivers to their source. He was standing on a flat stretch of a glacier in Alaska, on the Wrangel icefield.
Stickeen was a little black dog that had followed him that day.
Between him and Stickeen was a crevasse, a crack in the glacier…Read the full issue.
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“That’s just WRONG,” said the boy, as he watched his friend put ketchup on his ice cream.
“Don’t you like ketchup on your ice cream?”
“It’s WRONG. Now if it was mustard, that would be different.”
Did you ever wonder why in English we have words like WRONG, that begin with WR, but you don’t say the W? Was that the idea of some evil teacher a thousand years ago, who wanted his schoolboys to WRITE WRONG RONG, which would be WRONG, so that he could smack them on the WRIST with his WRENCH? Because, as you know, teachers used to carry WRENCHES around with them, to twist boys’ noses with…Read the full issue.
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Nobody in America was ever better at painting a story than was Norman Rockwell.
How can you paint a story? A story goes from one day to the next, while a painting can show you only one moment. You’d need hundreds of pictures to tell a story, wouldn’t you? But some painters do it – you can see the past and the present and the future, all in one painting. That is what Norman Rockwell has done in the painting you are looking at now. He is painting the passage of time – human time, which is a lot different from the motion of the hands on a clock. The hands on a clock don’t have wrinkles on them. There isn’t a wedding ring on one of the fingers. There aren’t the scars of years of hard work. They don’t have a personality. They don’t go from being baby hands to an old man’s hands. They don’t really even tell time. We do….Read the full issue.
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Other children liked having birthdays, but I never looked forward to them. And now I know for certain that I have seen far more birthdays than I will ever see again.
My dog Jasper grows old, but he doesn’t know that he does. The time passes, he changes, but that’s natural for him. He’s like a fish in water or a bird in the air. He doesn’t notice it. But I’m not that way, and you are probably not that way, either. I count the time. I do more than remember. Jasper remembers a lot of things. I remember on purpose – I recall. It’s as if I have a thousand thousand scrapbooks in my mind, and I decide to open this one or that, and look at a picture. I bring scenes from the past back to life. See, there is the time I had my First Communion. Here I am with my father when I was a freshman at college, on a sunny and windy day in the fall. That was my sister’s wedding – and see how small my little girl was!…Read the full issue.
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You are in school one day, when a creature from Mars walks into your room.
He turns his antennas toward the teacher and they start to vibrate and hum. That is how creatures from Mars talk, as you know.
“Are – all – these – chil-a-der-en yours?” he asks.
The teacher laughs, because she is used to creatures from Mars not knowing the simplest things in the world.
“They aren’t my children,” she says. “They are my students.”
“Your se-tu-dens?”…Read the full issue.
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Jesus warns us that unless we become like little children, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Our salvation comes from a child, because Jesus was that child whom prophets and seers foretold. He was the son whose mysterious name is Immanuel, which means “God is among us.”
I wonder about married people who don’t want children. It is like not wanting to be alive. Or more dreadful still: it is like saying to the living God, “Please, don’t save me. I don’t want the trouble.” If you knew that the little baby would grow up and make you ten million dollars, you wouldn’t mind changing his diapers. But the salvation of your eternal soul? “Don’t bother me,” people say, as they change the channel on the television…Read the full issue.
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How would you like to have as your friend a big gray dog who looks like a shaggy wolf, who seems to appear out of nowhere when you’re in trouble, and when you look around after the bad men have run away, he’s gone? A kid’s best friend, that’s what he’d be. John Bosco had that dog, or the dog had him. It’s hard to tell which.
Now, there are two kinds of people who should never teach boys: people who don’t like boys or know what they are, and people who do not like men or know what they are. Saint John Bosco was the greatest teacher of boys the modern world has seen, and that was partly because he remained a boy all his life long…Read the full issue.
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I told my students once that if they ever saw me walking down the street singing a war song in Welsh, at the top of my lungs – Ni chaiff gelyn ladd ac ymlid, Harlech! Harlech! Cwyd iw herlid – they should remember that I know a little bit of Welsh, so they shouldn’t think anything of it. But if they ever saw me walk into a modern art museum, they’d better call for an ambulance right away. It would be a sign that I had lost my mind.
Modern art … I had a close friend named Rodney who was a boy genius at music. When Rodney was an old man he could sit at the piano and I’d tell him, “Play ‘Stardust,’” and his fingers would run over those keys all ten at a time as fast as the wings of a hummingbird. “Play ‘I’ll Take Manhattan,’” and it was the same, and if it was a couple of notes too high for me and my wife to sing, we’d ask him to move it all down a notch or two, and whoosh, he’d play it, without any sheet music in front of him. He could do that with hundreds and hundreds of songs, big-band and swing melodies on the piano or accordion…Read the full issue.
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There once was a jealous king who had an old friend, and his friend came to visit. He stayed for nine months, and in the end the jealous king tried to poison him. Remember that, next time you are at your friend’s house and he starts looking at the clock.
That doesn’t sound happy, does it? The jealous man’s name is Leontes, and he is the king of Sicily. His friend is named Polixenes, and he is the king of Bohemia. There is no such country now, but if you find the Czech Republic on a map, you will be close. So you see that Sicily is pretty far away, and since this was a time before airplanes, you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t seen each other since they were boys, growing up together…Read the full issue.
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“The kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus, “may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son.” He doesn’t say it was a birthday party, or a feast to celebrate his son’s first triumph in battle. It’s a wedding feast. That may be the most important image in the whole New Testament, and it’s more than an image. What is heaven, after all? It’s the wedding feast of the Lamb, because Christ is in fact wedded to his bride the Church. It’s a great mystery, says Saint Paul. So was the first miracle of our Lord.
Picture the scene. You have a lot of happy people, eating and drinking. But the wine has run out. That’s it. The people will start going home. Who wants to drink a lot of stale lukewarm water? But Mary came to Jesus and said, “They have no more wine.” So Jesus did what his mother wanted him to do, to keep the feast going, so that the bride and groom wouldn’t be embarrassed. He turned the water in six large clay jars into wine. That was at the village called Cana. In heaven it will be like that too: the Lord will turn the water of our lives into the wine of heaven, in the wedding feast that has no end…Read the full issue.
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Language can reveal to us a lot about human nature, everywhere in the world. A friend of mine once asked people to imagine a very strange sign on the side of a road. It’s one of those signs with a picture on it and no words. So, imagine a female figure – you can tell that it’s female by the skirt – dropping a wrapper. Imagine the usual red circle around it with a diagonal red slash, the signal for, “Don’t do this!”
We scratch our heads and say, “Gosh, why does the sign read No Littering by WOMEN? Can MEN throw garbage around? That’s not fair!”…Read the full issue.
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Charles Dickens was in love with goodness.
If you have never read one of his books, you are in for a great treat. You’ll meet characters that will stay with you all your life long: Mr. Quilp, the evil dwarf who lies on a table and kicks his legs with glee; Ebenezer Scrooge, the grouchy old miser who is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve; Mr. Micawber, the lovable family man who spends too much money and never can find a job and is always hoping that “something will turn up”; Esther Summerson, who brings goodness and light wherever she goes, and is loved by everyone, though she herself doesn’t seem to notice it. You will meet the Artful Dodger, a clever orphan boy who walks around London in a top hat and picks people’s pockets. You will meet rascals and saints, fools and wise men, gentle women and witches and many things in between…Read the full issue.
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A long time ago, I saw a professional company in Providence put on Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. That was a mistake.
Shakespeare was a Christian playwright, and Macbeth is a deeply Christian play. Who do you think Macbeth most resembles, in the Christian faith? Let me set the stage for you. At the beginning of the play Macbeth has been fighting with tremendous courage for his lord Duncan, the king of Scotland. The king has been attacked by one of his men, the Thane of Cawdor, who got in cahoots with the king of Norway to try to steal Duncan’s crown. But the Scots win, against the odds, and King Duncan is so delighted and grateful, he makes Macbeth the Thane of Cawdor in place of the traitor, and he promises more. “I have begun to plant thee, and will labor / To make thee full of growing,” says King Duncan to Macbeth…Read the full issue.
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Come with me to Rome, in 1859. Why not? Everybody went to Italy then. You could hear plenty of English on the streets of Rome. It didn’t mean that they were Roman Catholics from England. They were writers, artists, scholars, travelers, and a few rich people with time on their hands. They wanted to go to a city that was more than two thousand years old, where you could still see temples and columns and baths and roads built when Jesus walked the earth, and even before that. They wanted to drink from the wellsprings of western civilization – right from the wells, and not from bottles coming out of a modern factory.
So we are in a villa where an American couple and their children live. There was a time when every American knew the father. His name is Nathanael Hawthorne, and his wife is Sophia. You should read The House of the Seven Gables, a tale of mystery and wickedness, but also of goodness and the grace of God…Read the full issue.
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I’m an Italian American, and happy to be so. If you go to Italy and turn to spit, you’ll hit some great work of art – that is how common the works of art in Italy are. But we Italians sometimes forget that there was art in other countries too, with magnificent painters, sculptors, poets, and composers.
I’ve grown very fond of the works of the Spanish painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), who worked with bold contrasts of light and dark, imitating the style of the Italian master, Caravaggio. That contrast is called CHIAROSCURO (say it: kyah-ro-SKOO-ro). Like him, Murillo could and did paint everything, often with great sympathy, as his portraits of the poor, the elderly, and the suffering show. But he also often painted with a good-hearted humor that you don’t usually find in the more soul-troubled Caravaggio. Urchins on the street eating fruit, grinning boys playing dice, teenage girls looking out of the window as if they would eagerly take on any boy who dared to court them, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary….Read the full issue.
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“What are you doing, you crazy Indian!” yelled the shortstop. “Pull me up!”
“Ain’t nothing to worry about,” says his teammate. “You’re so skinny, I could hold you with two fingers.”
“Don’t you try it, Jim. Just get me back up in the room. Hey, you down there,” the shortstop cried out, “what are you all looking at? Ain’t you never seen a guy hanging from the twentieth floor of a hotel before?”
The shortstop’s name was Rabbit Maranville, and the big Indian was Jim Thorpe, holding him by one ankle and dangling him headfirst out of the window of their hotel.
That was baseball, in the old days. It was the national pastime. Every boy played it. You didn’t even need a field. City boys played it right out in the streets. But the players were sometimes not the most decent people in the world…Read the full issue.
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Have you ever seen an old picture of men working on the Brooklyn Bridge, eating their lunch while they sit on a girder hanging in mid-air, two hundred feet off the ground? How were they able to do that? They had VIRTUE. I’ll explain, but first let me say something about people who think that that’s an easy thing to get, this virtue.
Whenever somebody says to you, “I don’t need religion to be a good man,” you better feel your pocket to make sure your wallet is still there. Mostly he means he doesn’t need to go to church to be a half decent fellow. It doesn’t take much to be half decent…. Read the full issue.
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Once upon a time there was a rich kid who mouthed off too often.
We’re on a schooner off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, far into the Atlantic Ocean. There are two teenage boys, Dan and Harvey. Harvey is lying against the side of the boat. He’s not looking very good. Dan is trying to console him, but he’s also telling him that he deserved that sock in the jaw he just got… Read the full issue.
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When Jesus took Peter, James, and John to the top of the mountain, he was transfigured before their eyes, and his robe and his face were suddenly as bright as the sun. And they saw beside him the two great prophets of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah. Jesus was speaking with them, and Peter must have caught some of that conversation, because, though he didn’t really know what he was saying, he did get the persons right. “Lord,” he said, “it is good for us to be here!” And he said they should knock together three huts to spend the night in, one for the Lord, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
You should know who Moses was. But who was Elijah?… Read the full issue.
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Do you kneel to receive the Lord in Communion?
That’s what we did when I was a small boy. There was a marble rail that went from one end of the sanctuary to the other, with an open space in the middle so the priest and the altar boys didn’t have to hop over it to get out. You walked in line, as people do now, but when you got to the front you waited until a place along the rail was clear, and then you knelt.
You folded your hands in prayer. But have you ever noticed that when a lot of different people are doing the same thing, they don’t all do it in the same way? That’s why we watch them… Read the full issue.
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