Tagged: death

Friends

Jill’s Place

Every neighborhood has one: the Kool-Aid house. The one place where all the kids hang out, play, and laugh. Schools have them too, Kool-Aid classrooms, where kids congregate before or after school to chat with the teacher; the place to which graduates return. Jill’s classroom was the Kool-Aid house of our school. Day after day, students stopped in to chat, surrounding her desk as she sat in her motorized scooter. Whenever I saw an All Saints graduate return for a visit, I knew exactly where they were heading:...

Thornton Wilder

Books and Reading / Spirituality / Theology

Is Purgatory Like a Novel?

What makes fiction so powerful and so poignant? Thornton Wilder sums it up in one of the most moving quotes I have ever read: If Queen Elizabeth or Frederick the Great or Ernest Hemingway were to read their biographies, they would exclaim, “Ah, my secret is still safe.” But if Natasha Rostov were to read War and Peace she would cry out as she covered her face with her hands: “How did he know, how did he know?” Is this what the pain of Purgatory might be like:...

Deacons and Diaconate / Spirituality

A Grief Observed

About ten days ago I wrote about a former student who had been ordained a deacon. Yesterday I saw him again, but the circumstance were far from joyful. He was the assisting deacon at a funeral mass I attended. The funeral was for my friend’s husband, who passed away at the age of 49 from cancer. He found out he had cancer about ten months ago, shortly after he found out they were expecting their third child. Their daughter was born a few weeks before he died. C.S....

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Books and Reading / Poetry

In Honor of Lord Byron

On this day in 1824 George Gordon, Lord Byron, passed away. Byron is one of my favorite poets and in his honor I offer you this breathtaking poem of his: So, We’ll Go No More a Roving So, we’ll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears the sheath, And the soul outwears the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And Love itself have rest. Though...

Don Quixote translated by Edith Grossman

Books and Reading

Sancho Panza on Death

I’ve been listening to George Guidall reading Don Quixote, and the other day I was struck by this description of death by Sancho Panza: “By my faith, Señor,” responded Sancho, “you mustn’t trust in the fleshless woman, I mean Death, who devours lamb as well as mutton; I’ve heard our priest say that she tramples the high towers of kings as well as the humble huts of the poor. This lady is more powerful than finicky; nothing disgusts her, she eats everything, and she does everything, and she...