TV Quote of the Day (‘The Simpsons,’ As Lisa Sees a World Turned Upside Down)

[To everyone’s astonishment, after attending a football game with the next-door neighbor he once scorned, Homer Simpson has become pals with kind, generous Ned Flanders.]

Lisa Simpson [voice of Yeardley Smith]: “Dad and Flanders friends? What’s next—A’s on Bart’s report card?”— The Simpsons, Season 5, Episode 16, “Homer Loves Flanders,” original air date Mar. 17, 1994, teleplay by David Richardson, directed by Wes Archer

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karl Rahner, on Easter, ‘Our True and Eternal Life’)

“The Holy Saturday of our life must be the preparation for Easter, the persistent hope for the final glory of God. If we live the Holy Saturday of our existence properly, this will not be a merely ideological addition to this common life as the mean between its contraries. It is realized in what makes our everyday life specifically human: in the patience that can wait, in the sense of humor which does not take things too seriously, in being prepared to let others be first, in the courage which always seeks for a way out of the difficulties. The virtue of our daily life is the hope which does what is possible and expects God to do the impossible. To express it somewhat paradoxically, but nevertheless seriously: the worst has actually already happened; we exist, and even death cannot deprive us of this. Now is the Holy Saturday of our ordinary life, but there will also be Easter, our true and eternal life.”—German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), Grace in Freedom (1969)

The image accompanying this post, The Resurrection, was painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) around 1490.

Quote of the Day (Francis Petrarch, on How ‘Books Give Utter Delight’)

“I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another.”—Italian Renaissance poet and humanities scholar Francesco di Petracco, aka Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), Selected Letters, Volume 1, translated by Elaine Fantham (2017)

Photo of the Day: Stations of the Cross, St. Cecilia R.C. Church, Englewood NJ

This Good Friday, my longtime parish, St. Cecilia, conducted a bilingual “Living Stations of the Cross.”

A couple of hundred people followed the solemn procession through the streets surrounding the church.

I took this picture on the steps of the church, where this recent tradition of the Passion narrative began with Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus and the scourging of this man of peace at the hands of Roman soldiers.

It took much preparation involving multiple people for this devotional practice of pageantry and pathos to occur. Congratulations to all the organizers.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Barry Hannah, on Jesus, Who ‘Forgives Our Wretchedness’)

“[A]t the center of all my faith, as at the center of the sadly unvisited Good Book, is a man who also forgives our wretchedness. He was not always strong himself. In the garden of Gethsemane he asked his father to let this cup, the crucifixion, be passed from him. His stumbling under the cross up the Via Dolorosa reminds me always of our own stumbling and crawling, over a mighty rough pathway of words left to us by long-dead writers, toward the good mountain of our deliverance.”— American novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah (1942-2010), “The Maddening Protagonist,” Paste Magazine, Issue 19 (December 2005-January 2006)

The image accompanying this post, Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary (ca. 1514-16), was created by the Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael (1483-1520).

Photo of the Day: Donut-Hole Snow Mound, Englewood NJ

We’re almost two weeks into spring, but the mountain of snow and silt from the late February blizzard that my hometown deposited in the greenery of Veterans Park has only dwindled without entirely disappearing. The “mountain” had become a hill, and, at last, just a mound.

Then yesterday, I saw something unusual, which I tried to capture in this photo. At that point early in the day, a large round hole had opened beneath a thin arch of snow overhead.

I peered more closely. I could see drops falling from the arch. Higher temperatures (they reached the high 70s later in the day) would, before long, eliminate that thin white veneer overhead.

And so it proved. This morning, the hole was gone and the snow pile was even more noticeably lower.

Continued above-freezing temperatures, along with rain over the next few days, should eliminate the white stuff at last, leaving only a memory of a storm that for a while left streets impassable and frustrated those of us who had to shovel.

Song Lyric of the Day (‘Eve of Destruction,’ on Returning From ‘Four Days in Space’)

“Ah, you may leave here for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”—American rock ‘n’ roll songwriter P.F. Sloan (1945-2015), “Eve of Destruction” (1965), performed by Barry McGuire from the album of the same name

NASA’s successful launch of the Artemis II space program—marking America’s return to the moon for the first time in a half century—was rightly celebrated as a resumption of a scientific and technological marvel. 

But I was also struck by the conjunction of events in the above lyrics from Barry McGuire’s compelling protest song of the mid-Sixties, as well as a repetition of that today.

Even as the Gemini missions were taking the space program to another level six decades ago, tensions were rising in the Mideast, as Israel and its Arab neighbors confronted each other over control of water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin—or, as McGuire sang, “You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?/And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'.”

Now, even as so many eyes are lifted to the skies, the focus of so much of the world remains on the Mideast, only this time shifting from the Jordan River to the Strait of Hormuz, where America’s current President is unabashedly engaging in “the poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”

Some may wonder if the current war actually represents “the Eve of Destruction.” But how else to interpret the current Oval Office occupant’s threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”?