Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Trouble With Autumn


Someone recently asked me which is my favorite season. I was stumped.

I realized I don't have a favorite. Or perhaps the truth is: I have four. I love autumn because of crisp red leaves and soft gray rains and whistling winds. Winter is my favorite when it swaddles the earth in a shushing hush of snow. Yet I am totally enamored of spring, with its peonies and tulips and lilacs. And who doesn't love summer nights, with their fireflies and their cricket lullabies? 

Seasons are not perfect, of course. Summer brings heat and biting bugs along with a soothing cover of green. In winter the long late light of summer nights is missing. Springtime storms can be unnerving. And the trouble with Autumn is - it's not Spring.

'For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.' (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Painting: H.A. Brendekilde, 1902

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Our True Worth

'Our true worth 
does not consist 
in what human
beings think of us. 
What we really 
are consists 
in what God 
knows us to be.'

St. John Berchmans
















Painting: Elizabeth Forbes

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Thank You For The Blogiversary!

Well, what do you know. It is the eve of The Breadbox Letters' blogiversary, and I have YOU to thank for it, you who have come along with me on this journey. It has been four years since I sat down to this computer (brand spanking new then, bought specifically for the purpose of blogging) and plunked out my first-ever post.

Things have changed at this tiny spot on the Internet in these four years. I've learned that blogs are that way.... they change and evolve. Which Breadbox Letters seems to have been doing again lately, hasn't it? More and more, I'm sharing graphics - and I thank you for your patience as I do so. I like to keep things rather brief (after all, there are so many blogs out there with inspiration to offer), so graphics do seem an appropriate thing to share now and then.

Thank you for being here as I learn to put words with pictures, and as I post writings of saints, and as I share a personal story now and then.

If anyone should care to stroll down Memory Bloglane with me, some of our archived 'stories' can be found by clicking here.

And a few adventures of My Excellent Family (who are kept mostly out of the 'bloglight,' but I sneak up on them now and then) can be found by clicking here.  

And our most popular-of-all-time-post can be found by clicking here.  

AND - that first ever blog post, written four years ago tomorrow??  Ta daa.... right here!

Four years spent primarily with words of the saints. It is a privilege for which I thank God.

And I thank you, my friends, for spending moments of your precious time at this little spot on the Internet. I thank you oh, so much.

Painting: Gaetano Bellei



Thursday, September 10, 2015

A Sobering Question


I posted this about an hour ago, and it disappeared. It's drifting in a cybercloud somewhere, I suppose. So I will try again.

I hope this time it stays around...

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Lest We Be Defenseless


'A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. 

'When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.'

            Venerable Fulton J. Sheen



Painting: Philippe de Champaigne, Moses with the Ten Commandments