Welcome to Jasper, Magdalen College’s online Catholic magazine for families. Subscribe to receive three issues per week of engaging reflections by Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence. We hope the magazine will be a blessing to your family as you seek to build Christ’s kingdom through the domestic church.
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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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