Spiritual Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Prayer, ‘The Church’s Banquet’)

“Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth.”—English “metaphysical poet” and Anglican minister George Herbert (1593-1633), “Prayer,” in The Complete Poetry, edited by John Drury (2015)

Photo of the Day: Saint Anthony Chapel, Pittsburgh PA

I took the image accompanying this post three weeks ago, on a short visit to Pittsburgh.

While touring the Troy Hill neighborhood on the city’s North Side, a close relative and I had hoped to see the venerable shrine. Unfortunately it was closed when we came around noon on a Friday, and we had to move on. But as I stood outside, even its exterior filled me with an aesthetic and spiritual sense of wonder.

The two-steepled Saint Anthony Chapel is laid out in a cruciform shape (i.e., in the form of a cross), with a pointed Romanesque arch at its center.

You’d never know that this modest house of worship, built to minister to a predominantly German immigrant population towards the end of the 19^th century, contains what is believed to be the greatest collection of relics outside the Vatican.

Although the relic dealing directly with St. Anthony of Padua here is a molar (the only part of the saint outside his hometown in Italy), more than 5,000 relics of other saints are contained inside, arranged in altars and side cases constructed of hand-carved solid walnut. Saints represented include the first martyr, Stephen; Frances of Rome, Philip Neri, Macharius and Stephana.

The dynamic force in collecting all of this was the shrine’s founder, the Belgian-born Father Suitbert G. Mollinger. He was able to secure so many relics because he traveled so widely and used his family’s great wealth for the acquisitions.

After Fr. Mollinger died in 1892, the chapel passed into the hands of the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh, which considered closing it when it couldn’t afford repairs because of hard financial times for the area in the late 1970s. Luckily the crisis was averted and the shrine remains for pilgrims offering prayers.

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Discussing Yourself)

“By publishing and indicting my imperfections I may teach someone to fear them. The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-accusation than from self-commendation. That is why I so often return to self-accusation and linger over it. Yet, when all is said and done, you never talk about yourself without loss. Self-accusations are always believed, self-praise never is.” —French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Essays, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Art of Discussion,” translated by New Zealand-born philosopher and historian Jonathan Bennett (1930–2024)

Quote of the Day (Noah Baumbach, Imagining Keith Richards’ Desert Island Disks and Dinner)

“DAY ONE. Rigged a distress flag with me gypsy scarf, but it droops like Mick's jowls. While waiting for it to fly, played all ten disks. Ate a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich that the missus packed for me dinner and washed it down with me new poison of choice: Stoli and Sunkist. Smoked a Marlboro Red and watched the sun go down. Was lulled into me forty winks by the island's own music, the flop flop of the waves and the caw caw of the parrots.”—American screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach, “Shouts and Murmurs: Keith Richards’ Desert-Island Disks,” The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1999

Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on Error and Human Nature)

“The laws of nature will defend themselves;⁠—but error⁠…error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.” —Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

And these days, with all the attempts to make human labor obsolete, error creeps into AI, too. 

Song Lyric of the Day (Classics IV, With an Appropriate Tune for Recent Turbulent Weather)

“You were the sunshine, baby, whenever you smiled
But I call you 'Stormy' today.”—James Cobb and Buddy Buie, “Stormy,” performed by Classics IV on their Mamas and Papas/Soul Train LP (1968)
 
The image accompanying this post, The Storm (1881), was created by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and hangs in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.

Photo of the Day: A Prized Pirate’s Locker, PNC Park, Pittsburgh

With this past weekend’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction of Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltran, and Andruw Jones, it seemed like an appropriate point to reflect on a place with reminders of its own Cooperstown members: Legacy Hall in PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As I mentioned in this post from the other day, a thunderstorm cut short my plans to watch the Bucs for the first time while I was on vacation earlier this month. 

But before finding my seat and waiting impatiently for the “Play Ball” call that never came, I spent a few minutes in Legacy Hall, a multi-use space filled with some great team memorabilia, with much of it not previously displayed at the ballpark.

Several Hall of Fame players are commemorated here, including Willie Stargell, Ralph Kiner, Honus Wagner, and Bill Mazerowski. But I’ll focus on one in this post: an original locker from the club’s prior home in Three Rivers Stadium, occupied by Roberto Clemente. Elsewhere in the city, a museum honors the life and legacy of this great ballplayer and humanitarian.

But fans will still want to look and linger at what is on display honoring him at Legacy Hall: his uniform, jacket, cap, cleats, photos, and a bat—emblematic of a consistent and superb hitter who won four batting titles and collected 3,000 hits.

These days, Latinos and Hispanics make up anywhere from a quarter to a third of players in major league baseball. But Clemente was the first superstar of the group. What this proud and sensitive man had to endure from the media then was shameful and would not be tolerated today.

It took a while for Clemente’s skills to be noticed in a bumper crop among a bumper crop of contemporary outfielders that included Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Frank Robinson, but eventually his performance at the plate and on the field in the 1971 World Series exposed to a nationwide audience the greatness that so many in baseball had recognized since his debut in 1955.

His statistics and leadership had already made Clemente a basement legend. 

But his death on board a plane carrying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua during the Christmas season of 1972 lifted him to the status of role model and icon, much like the New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig—the only other player that Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame board explicitly waived its five-year rule for consideration to major league baseball’s Valhalla.