Roomin' House Blues

My rosary meditations may sometimes lead  me down strange paths.  My meditations one the nativity has led me deeper into the relationship between Jesus and Mary.  In Rosary meditations my practice, as that of many others is to imaginatively model the behavior and thoughts of a character in the rosary mystery.  For those who don't know, the prayers of the rosary are organized into decades of ten Hail Mary's and an Our Father, each with a "mystery" of biblical origin, such as the "Nativity of Jesus" to meditate on while praying.  For me, meditating on the nativity leads naturally to the closeness of Mary and Jesus. There is no closer moment between a mother and child than the moment of breast feeding  Since the Virgin became the subject of painting, the depiction of Mary nursing Jesus has been the way to show there intimacy and union. In the Gospel of Luke the good doctor records that Mary remembered and contemplated all the moment of the nativity and...

Diatessorn?  Don't bother running to your Oxford Dictionary for the meaning.  I have borrowed it from the title of a mid-second attempt to harmonize the four Gospel--causing deletions, confusion and lack of consistency, and missing the unique purpose of each Gospel--but in the positive creating an easy reference for the essentials of the story.  The Diatessorn (made of four ingredients) was composed by Tiatin, a Christian apologist and an Assyrian.  Inevitably, to harmonize the four, important parts of the Gospels were excluded,  and while consistent within itself, the consistency to the separate accounts is lost. The unique emphasis of each Gospel is muddled. As someone who has worked with religious films series and viewed many biblical films, I view the fact that most Gospel films draw on more than one Gospel account and sometimes non-biblical sources as a problem for the artistic and religious value of these films.  The harmonization of the Jesus stor...

Friday, the second Friday in Lent, I again went to Stations of the Cross.  The prolonged period of worship and church community on Lenten Fridays --Mass, soup supper, Stations, Benediction is a means of turning us inward, in reflection, for the purpose of repentance. As we came up stairs from soup supper in the parish hall to assemble for Stations of the Cross, Jesson Mata, the Blessed Sacrament parish liturgist, was disbanding a rehearsal for a Saturday wedding.  As we took our seats,  in  a typically teasing Jesson comment, our liturgist instructed us not to spill the wax from the little candles we would use to read the stations booklets onto the pews.  I sought out Jesson to assure him that if I spilled any of the wax on the pews, I would let him know where so he could polish it off the next day.  (Such a response is typical of this blogger.) And in typical Jesson fashion, he let me know whom he would be polishing it with. Catholicism is fu...