urbantrappistblogastery

Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. (St. Augustine)
On Easter, my guilt rises. I regret praising only now, now that I’ve been amazed by a love that surpasses righteousness. I hurry to get everything back in order (knead the traditional dough, type the [...]

I like Good Friday. I like the violence, the pain. I like the darkness, the vacuum of beauty, the dearth of imagery. I like the directness of the narrative, the absolute focus. Above all, I like the barbaric justice of someone dying for my (mis)deeds. The atoning execution re-establishes equilibrium [...]

Lent is generally associated with the story of Jesus’s temptations in the desert A fun thought experiment is to muse on what the devil would use to tempt you. I find that I would be a very cheap and simple soul to seduce. , but the parable of the prodigal son is more apt; [...]

Lent, like old man river, keeps rolling along. This is pretty much all it does, in fact, and that’s why we tend not to be very good at it. Anyone who has lived in a city with a river understands that the typical perception of the waterway is very different from Heraclitus’s (i.e. [...]

The best word to characterize the daily Mass readings of Lent is dismal. Even today’s Hebrew Scripture portion, in which Moses discusses how God kicked some Egyptian tail and why that deserves some dap and some grub, emphasizes words like “suffer” and “toil” and “harsh” and “oppression” and I have no shortage of further [...]

I think most of us know what Catholic schoolboys give up for Lent.  (You don’t?  Well, it rhymes with fornication and has other similarities).  And thus, most of us know what Catholic schoolboys are doing at 11:55 p.m. on Fat Tuesday.  (Not that you should be thinking of such things).  The theory, of course, is [...]

(a really, really long look; brevity is not the soul of this post.)
(also, if you’re reading this on facebook, know that it looks better here. my words need all the beautification they can get.)
Once a day I am a golden god. Glistening with the salty glory of a run and stretched to muscular [...]

As you can see, I apparently gave up blogging for Lent. But Christ is risen, and so shall this website. For now, here’s this year’s Easter Email. Drink up!
…upon him was the punishment that made us whole…
Bowed and bleeding, One cried in the garden, “Let this cup pass.” But there was [...]

For those fortunate enough not to be plagued by my holy day emails:
Anyone sitting through an unabridged performance of Messiah probably spends much of the oratorio waiting for the famed “Hallelujah!” chorus. And why not? Its glorious strains resound so magnificently that they were deemed worthy to accompany Clark Griswold’s incomparable Christmas illumination. [...]

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and get on with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
—Billy Graham
I’m not talking about unbelief. I don’t even think that statement is true anymore (the [...]