A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
Liturgical: Saturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Brothers and sisters:
Through Jesus, let us continually offer God a sacrifice of praise,
that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.
Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have;
God is pleased by sacrifices of that kind.
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: St. Jerome Emiliani (1481-1537) was born in Venice in 1486. He converted to Christianity after a rather dissolute youth, and dedicated himself to the service of the poor, the sick, and abandoned children. He founded a congregation (Somaschi) which looked after the education of children, especially orphans. He died of the plague while serving the afflicted.
Saint Josephine Bakhita (1868-1947) was a young Sudanese girl sold into slavery and brought to Italy where, while serving as a nanny, she was sent to live with the Canossian Sisters of the Institute of the Catechumens in Venice. There she was baptized, and, having reached majority age, was granted her freedom by Italian law. In 1896 she joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity where she served humbly for the next twenty five years. She died after a long and painful illness, during which she would cry out to the Lord: "Please loosen the chains...they are so heavy!" Her dying words were "Our Lady! Our Lady!"
Human: It was on this day in 1910 that the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated as a youth organization in the United States. The idea for the Boy Scouts came from a British Army Officer named Robert Baden-Powell who returned from a war in South Africa to find that the young people in his country had grown soft and undisciplined in his absence. He said, "[Young people today are] without individuality or strength of character, utterly without resourcefulness, initiative or guts for adventure." He created the Boy Scouts as an organization and wrote a book called Scouting for Boys that became the Boy Scout manual.
An American man named William Boyce was visiting London, England, when he got lost in a heavy fog. A young Boy Scout offered to help him, and the experience inspired him to bring Boy Scouting to America. The Boy Scout program had been popular in England, but it became a sensation in the United States after it was incorporated here. Within four years, there were more than 100,000 American Boy Scouts, and by the outbreak of World War II, there were more than a million.
Among the many Americans who joined the Boy Scouts were Gerald Ford, Neil Armstrong, Alfred Kinsey, John F. Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Moore.
The Boy Scout Handbook says, "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent."
It's the birthday of the man known as the father of science fiction, Jules Verne, born in Nantes, France (1828). In his adventure novels, Paris in the 20th Century (written 1863, not published until 1994), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Verne described inventions that were similar to modern airplanes and automobiles, and tall skyscrapers where people use electricity to listen to the radio and send faxes, and yet he wrote his stories by candlelight.
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Italian: 12 Ways to Say “Rascal” in Italian
Quote: Nothing is Lost
by Noel Coward
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.
Comments