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 [...]

In the Hebrew day, all the cool kids quoted Scripture. By cool, I mean smart, but those were more or less equivalent back then: intelligence was the path to priesthood, power. Aspiring rabbis (and everyone wanted to be a rabbi) progressed by passing tests of scriptural knowledge (i.e. knowing the whole thing by [...]

The etymology of Lent: Old English, lencten, which means exactly what it sounds like. Although that root refers to the vernal happening — the lengthening of days — it speaks also to Lent’s significant length. By this point, we are tired of ourselves, tired of the sad season — Just die already, Jesus, [...]

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 [...]