A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
Angels among us.
A friend and I were having a conversation about angels among us a few weeks ago, and how once we start reflecting on the angels we've had in our lives, they begin appearing all the more (Bishop Barron's homily today touches upon this). And then, once we start noticing the help they have given to us, we are more likely to assume the role of being angels for others in turn. This conversation reminded me also of something the mother of Mr. Rogers used to tell him when he was a boy, to always be on the lookout for the helpers. He clearly internalized this practice, and went on to devote his life to being a helper for others, children in particular. Two of our guests at our October minor feast yesterday, pictured above, have played the role of angels to my children- Grandma Kirk and Sheila Carroll. Today, on this Feast of the Guardian Angels, I am counting the angels in our lives, and encouraged to play that role more in the lives of others, whether they be people we've loved for years or those whom Providence puts in our path only for today.
Liturgical: Readings for the Memorial of the Guardian Angels
R. (3) Let my prayer come before you, Lord.
Daily I call upon you, O LORD;
to you I stretch out my hands.
Will you work wonders for the dead?
Will the shades arise to give you thanks?
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels. Each person on earth has a guardian angel who watches over him and helps him to attain his salvation. It has been a common theological opinion that this angelical guardianship begins at the moment of birth; prior to this, the child would be protected by the mother's guardian angel. But this is not certain, and since we now know that the soul is infused at the moment of conception, it may be that the angelic guardianship also begins at that moment. In any case, this protection continues throughout our whole life and ceases only when our probation on earth ends, namely, at the moment of death. Our guardian angel accompanies our soul to purgatory or heaven, and becomes our coheir in the heavenly kingdom.
Human: It's the birthday of novelist Graham Greene, born in Berkhamsted, England (1904). He came from a well-off family, but he had an unhappy childhood — he was frequently depressed and even went to psychoanalysis when he was 16, a rare thing at the time. He graduated from Oxford, then began his career writing essays and reviews. Greene was an avowed atheist, but he had been questioning his faith since his days at boarding school. He wrote about one particularly miserable episode of bullying: "So faith came to one — shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. I began to believe in heaven because I believed in hell, but for a long while it was only hell I could picture with a certain intimacy." When he was 21 years old, he wrote an essay referring to Catholics as people who "worship" the Virgin Mary. He received an indignant reply from a young woman named Vivien Dayrell-Browning, explaining that Catholics did not worship the Virgin Mary, they venerated her. He wrote her back, they met, and Greene was smitten. Unfortunately, Dayrell-Browning was a very devout Catholic, and she had several more eligible men courting her. But Greene was stubborn. He wrote her no less than 2,000 letters and postcards, sometimes three a day. And he converted to Catholicism. How much of his conversion was influenced by his future wife, and how much by other spiritual motives, no one knows for sure. But he became a Catholic, married Vivien, and went on to write novels about characters struggling to reconcile their faith with the rest of their lives. He published his first novel, The Man Within (1929), when he was just 25 years old, and it was successful enough that he was able to work as a full-time novelist.
The Writer's Almanac today.
Natural: The science of the sudden appearance of foliage color: daylength, temperature, and precipitation.
Italian: Elegante (elegant)
Quote: “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man
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