Beauty

"Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart."

--Kahlil Gibran

Feast of Saint Edmund Campion

The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God,

it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted; 

so it must be restored.

--Saint Edmund Campion, martyred at Tyburn on December 1, 1581 at age 41.

Saint Edmund Campion, pray for us. 

Feast of Saint Andrew

"Rejoice, O Isaiah, and receive the Word of God.
Prophesy to Mary the Maiden.
She is the Burning Bush unconsumed by the fire of divinity." 
Adorn yourself, O Bethlehem.
Enter, O Magi, and see salvation swaddled in a crib.
Behold the star shining above the cave;
It announces the life-giving Lord who saves the human race.

Tell us, O Joseph, how you led the Virgin
Into the Bethlehem cave.
'After searching the scriptures and hearing the angel', he says,
'I am certain that Mary will wondrously give birth to God
Whom the wise men from the East will worship,
Offering to him their precious gifts'.

[Hymns from Vespers for the Feast of Saint Andrew]

Heavenward

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

First Sunday in Advent

 See! The ruler of the earth shall come,
the Lord who will take from us the heavy burden of our exile.
The Lord will come soon, will not delay.
The Lord will make the darkest places bright.
--from a monastic liturgy

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

"I did not know where I was.  I experienced an almost total change...I tried to find myself and could not...The greatest joy burst from the depths of my soul; I could not speak...I could not account for the faith and awareness that I had acquired.  All that I could say is that in the moment of this phenomenon, the band fell from my eyes; and not one band, but a whole collection of them, and they disappeared rapidly, one after the other, as snow, mud and ice disappear under the influence of the burning sun."
--Alphonse Ratisbonne upon his miraculous conversion.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

November

Not yesterday I learned to know
    The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
    And they are better for her praise.
--from My November Guest by Robert Frost