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.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (First Letter of St. Peter, on the ‘Living Hope’ of Easter)

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By His great mercy He has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” —1 Peter 1:3-5

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

Spiritual Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on the Resurrection)

“Arise, sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,
    Christ's resurrection thine may be;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
    Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee:
                                            Arise, Arise;
    And with His burial linen drie thine eyes.
Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief.”—English poet and Anglican minister George Herbert (1593-1633), “The Dawning,” in The Poems of George Herbert, edited by Ernest Rhys (1885)

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

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Henry Newman, on Christ’s Rising—and Ours)

“He rose in the night, when no one saw Him; and we, too, rise we know not when nor how. Nor does anyone know anything of our religion’s history, of our turnings to God, of our growing in grace, of our successes, but God Himself who secretly is the cause of them.”—English theologian, historian, poet, educator, and memoirist St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), "Rising with Christ,” originally delivered Aug. 13, 1837, later Sermon 15 in The Newman Reader, Vol. 6: Parochial and Plain Sermons

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

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Cindy Perazzo, on Mary, ‘First and Perfect Disciple to Jesus Christ’)

“When we look to Mary as mother and sister we can easily imagine her as the first and perfect disciple to Jesus Christ. We see the faith that led her throughout her life from that first announcement of her impending pregnancy to the foot of the cross. Our Lady shows us how to be completely open to God’s transforming power. She shows us how to listen to the Word. She shows us what it means to wait in faithfulness.” —Cindy Perazzo, coordinator of Lay Carmelites, “Hail Mary!”, Carmelite Review, Fall 2013-Winter 2014 issue

The image accompanying this post is The Annunciation (ca. 1485-92), by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi) (c.1445–1510).  The painting now hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fr. John Welch, on the Catholic Imagination and the ‘Stuff’ of Life)

“To speak of the Catholic imagination is to talk about an ability to use the ‘stuff’ of life to express matters of the spirit. For example, the praise of God becomes palpable when incense rises in liturgy. Belief that Mary, Mother of God, accompanies us on our pilgrimages is anchored by a scapular around the neck. We ask angels to watch over us because they speak of God’s presence and power. Calling on particular saints for help in personal matters says God cares about the details of our lives.”—Fr. John Welch, O.Carm, “Catholic Imagination,” Carmelite Review, Fall 2013-Winter 2014 issue

The image accompanying this post is an example of the “Catholic imagination”—Madonna of the Book, painted in 1480 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510).

Quote of the Day (Dante, on Opportunists in Hell)

“Here sighs and cries and wails coiled and recoiled
On the starless air, spilling my soul to tears.
A confusion of tongues and monstrous accents toiled
 
In pain and anger, voices hoarse and shrill
And sounds of blows, all intermingled, raised
Tumult and pandemonium that still
 
Whirls on the air forever dirty with it
As if a whirlwind sucked at sand. And I,
Holding my head in horror, cried: ‘Sweet Spirit,
 
What souls are these who run through this black haze?’
And he to me: ‘These are the nearly soulless
Whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.
 
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
Of angels who were neither for God nor Satan,
But only for themselves. The High Creator
 
Scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty,
And Hell will not receive them since the wicked
Might feel some glory over them.’”—Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321), “The Inferno” (Part I of The Divine Comedy), Canto 3, translated by American poet John Ciardi (1977)
 
This week marks the 700^th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. I almost forgot to mark the event on this blog until I found a link on the Website for BBC Radio mentioning it.
 
As I wrote this post, I listened to Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony to put me in the appropriate mood. But so extraordinary was the poet’s imagination and style that I had little need to call to mind favorite passages of his Divine Comedy, which English biographer, translator and literary critic Ian Thomson, in a 2018 article for The Irish Times, termed “the most original and audacious treatment of the afterlife in Western literature.”
 
Many translators have tackled this epic (notably, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and—more surprisingly, to fans of her detective fiction—Dorothy L. Sayers). 

But John Ciardi’s appeals to me the most. It’s the one I first encountered as a high school senior, then used again while in college, and its use of terza rima stanzas (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme) gives the best sense of how Dante could compress so much into so few words.
 
Canto 3 became a particular favorite of three of the most charismatic 20^th-century Presidents:
 
*Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1911 a well-received essay for The Outlook on “Dante and the Bowery,” and used much of the imagery from the canto in his 1910 address, “The Man in the Arena”;
 
*Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party renomination for President in 1936 in his “Rendezvous With Destiny” address, which defended his administration by warning of indifference in the field of the Depression’s suffering: “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales”; and
 
*John F. Kennedy misattributed these words to the poet while being correct about the message that Dante wished to impart: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
 
The neutrality that Dante is criticizing (those “whose lives concluded neither praise nor blame”) springs not from a plague-on-both-your houses disgust with two opponents, but rather from a cold calculation of advantage amid tumult. Its great fictional epitome is Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, who tells the careful, secretive counselor Varys that “Chaos is a ladder.”
 
Here in Hell, Dante warns, such men have all the chaos and tumult they can want, but they reap no advantage from it.
 
Contemporary cynics can’t be faulted for thinking that countless current officeholders are unwittingly clamoring for a chance to join this suffering infernal throng. It just goes to show that technology may change human culture, but not human nature.
 
The image accompanying this post, by the way, is Mappa dell' Inferno (“The Abyss of Hell”), by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Michael Gerson, on Advent’s ‘Fullest Expression of Hope’)

“This is the fullest expression of the hope of Advent — that all wrongs will finally be righted, that all the scales will eventually balance, and that no one will be exploited or afraid. But this hope is not yet fulfilled. Poets and theologians have strained for ways to describe this sense of anticipation. It is like a seed in the cold earth. Like the first, barely detectable signs of a thaw. Like a child growing in a womb.”—Syndicated columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, “A Season for Hope, Not Fear,” The Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2019

The image accompanying this post is The Annunciation, a painting in tempura on panel created in 1489 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

Quote of the Day (Psalm 98, on ‘Joy to the Lord’)

“Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth,

   burst into jubilant song with music.”—Psalm 98:4 (New International Version)

(The image accompanying this post is Adoration of the Magi, one of at least seven renderings of this scene by Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli. The original, dating from 1475 or 1476, is in Florence, Italy.)