A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
If you are lucky to live long enough, you may find an opportunity to observe how life can come full circle when returning to places first known during previous seasons of life. One such observation came this morning when saying goodbye to Maya as she begins her second year at Thomas More College. I attended summer camp here at the tender age of fifteen and loved the introduction to the Great Books and the cozy, charming campus, which is a traditional New England farmstead dating back to the 1600s! Although I ultimately chose a relatively larger, international scene at the University of St. Andrews, and then the much larger international scene in Rome, the Caput Mundi, I am still a proponent of the "small is beautiful" philosophy. As city dwellers know, the only way to avoid the dehumanizing effects of urban anonymity is by creating a village within the city. In Rome, that village is the villa where we live with 30 other humans, as well as the via delle Fornaci, the street we walk down daily to the Vatican. In Merrimack, it is the campus of 100 humans. In Mecosta, it is the community surrounding Piety Hill and the Coffee and Cream Cafe. Maya was born in Rome and raised between our "village" there and our actual village in Michigan. Now she is a "villager" in Merrimack, but returning to her roots in Rome in the New Year. I suppose one might say we have become members of a type of "global village" (with an appreciative nod to the prophetic Marshal McLuhan).
Liturgical: Friday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time
"For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: Sts. Felix and Adauctus, Rome marytys, +305
Jeanne Jugan, France +1879
Human: 430 AD– during the siege of Hippo by the Vandals, Saint Augustine died, after a long-term illness.
It's the birthday of Giorgio Vasari, born in Arezzo, Italy (1511). He was trained as a painter, but is remembered now for his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects, more commonly known as Lives of the Painters. Vasari's work is still regarded as the best contemporary source of information about Renaissance art. He was asked to compile the biographies by Cardinal Farnese, a great patron of the arts. Vasari invented facts when he could not find them, and he often got his stories wrong, but he was one of the first to claim that the artists of Italy had recovered the glories of classical art destroyed by the Goths, and to describe how they had done it.
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Natural: Vicki Keith became the first person to swim across all five Great Lakes– 1988. Yet another inspiring Canadian female athlete!
Italian: Decorazione (decoration)
Quote: "Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul."
--St. Teresa of Avila. Yesterday, her body was found to still be incorrupt after nearly 5 centuries.
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