A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
Liturgical: Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.
Mark 2:18-22
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: St. Fabian (d. 250) was Pope from 236 to 250 AD. He promoted the consolidation and development of the Church. He divided Rome into seven diaconates for the purpose of extending aid to the poor. He was one of the first victims of the persecution of Decius, who considered him as a rival and personal enemy.
St. Sebastian (d. 288), a native of Milan, was an officer in Diocletian's imperial guard. He became a Christian and suffered martyrdom upon orders of the emperor around 288. He is the patron of athletes.
The Roman Martyrology also commemorates St. Henrik or Henry (died c. 1156), an Englishman, and preached the faith in the North with his countryman, Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear, the apostle of Norway, and legate of the holy see, afterward Pope Adrian IV by whom he was raised to this see, in 1148. Saint Eric, or Henry, (for it is the same name) was then the holy king of Sweden. Our saint, after having converted several provinces, went to preach in Finland, which that king had lately conquered. He deserved to be styled the apostle of that country, but fell a martyr in it, being stoned to death at the instigation of a barbarous murderer, whom he endeavored to reclaim by censures, in 1151. His tomb was in great veneration at Upsal, until his ashes were scattered on the change of religion, in the sixteenth century.
Human: Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In 1983, after years of petitions, conferences, and advocacy on behalf of the holiday, Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that made Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.
It's the birthday of Italian film director Federico Fellini, born in Rimini, Italy (1920). As a young man, he enrolled in the University of Rome Law School to avoid military service, but he never attended classes. He worked instead as a cartoonist for a satirical magazine and as a gag writer for a vaudeville troupe. In 1943, he was ordered to undergo a medical examination for the army, but his medical records were destroyed in a bombing. He spent the next two years in the slums of Rome eluding the German Occupation troops, who searched the city for men to replenish the armed forces and to work in slave labor camps. After the war, Fellini turned to filmmaking and made a string of films about beggars, gypsies, swindlers, and prostitutes. He became famous for his film La Dolce Vita (1960). He was a charming man, who always wore a wide-brimmed black hat and gestured with both hands, even while driving one of his favorite motorcars. He overdubbed all his actors' voices because he believed that most people didn't have voices that matched their appearance. He said, "All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."
It was on this day in 1961, Inauguration Day in Washington, poet Robert Frost was invited, at the age of 86, to recite a poem for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. He was going to recite a poem he had written for the occasion, but his eyes were weak and he had typed the poem on a typewriter with a faint ribbon, and the day was bright with a lot of glare from snow that had fallen the previous day. He was unable to read the poem he had written, so he recited his poem "The Gift Outright" by memory.
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Natural: The coldest days
The temperature at Boca, California, hit -45 degrees F – 1937
Rogers Pass, Montana, set the record lowest temperature for the continental United States of -69.7F. – 1954
Two feet of snow fell in New Hampshire in what became known as the “Kennedy Inaugural Storm,” which hit the East Coast – 1961
Italian: Sgranocchiare (to munch / to crunch)
Quote: The Gift Outright
By Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
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