Let Your Old Age

Painting: Ernst Karl Georg Zimmermann

When in the Light of Truth

Painting: Jan Lievens, Young Man in a Yellow Robe

Our Restless Hearts

Painting: Howard Pyle, Marooned

Great Expectations

Painting: Georg von Rosen, The Christmas Fair

Not That This Happens, Right?

Painting: Hubert Bellis, Day After Carnival

Not Without Praising

Perilous Honors

Only With Consent

Painting: Clausen, High Mass, in US public domain due to age

Flight Prevention

To Carry Grace

Painting: Hans Thoma

Holy Spirit, Enlighten...

A Timely Trust

So Why Would I Wait?

Painting:Winslow Homer, The Whittling Boy

Uniquely Composed

Painting used: Piero della Francesca, Polyptych of St Augustine

In Wordless Infancy

'He was created of a mother whom He created. 

He was carried by hands that he formed. 

He cried in the manger in wordless infancy. 

He, the Word, without Whom all human eloquence is mute.'

St. Augustine

Painting: Marianne Stokes

Our Seasonal Expectations

'Christmas is fast approaching. And now that Christ has 

aroused our seasonal expectations, He will soon fulfill them all!'

St. Augustine

Painting: Henry Mosler, Christmas Morning, 1916

No Promise of Tomorrow

You, Martha

'You, Martha, if I may say so, are blessed for your good service, and for your labors you seek the reward of peace. Now you are much occupied in nourishing the body, admittedly a holy one. 

'But when you come to the heavenly homeland will you find a traveler to welcome, someone hungry to feed, or thirsty to whom you may give drink, someone ill whom you could visit, or quarreling whom you could reconcile, or dead whom you could bury? No, there will be none of these tasks there. 

'What you will find there is what Mary chose. There we shall not feed others, we ourselves shall be fed. Thus what Mary chose in this life will be realized there in all its fullness; she was gathering fragments from that rich banquet, the Word of God. 

'Do you wish to know what we will have there? The Lord himself tells us when he says of his servants, Amen, I say to you, he will make them recline and passing he will serve them.’ 

St. Augustine, from today's Office of Readings 

 

 Painting: Semiradsky, Christ and Martha and Maria

When We Get Accustomed

'Sins, however great and detestable they may be, are looked upon as trivial, or not as sins at all, when men get accustomed to them. And so far does this go, that such sins are not only not concealed, but are boasted of and published far and wide.'

St. Augustine

Painting: Edouard Manet

Not Without Astonishment

'Even the tiniest insect cannot be considered attentively 

without astonishment and without praising the Creator.'

St. Augustine

Painting: Jan van Kessel