Essays in Idleness

I had better stop following the news from Rome, before I have an aneurysm. May I recommend the same to gentle reader: that we ignore the Synod, including the “backstories” now emerging about the Thirteen Cardinals, &c, Blase Cupich, &c, the “Shadow Synod,” &c, &c, and rather invest the time more worthily in telling our beads. To which end I have just deleted my draught of today’s Idlepost; because, frankly, it couldn’t do nobody no good. Those accustomed to a daily dose of David Warren Thought will find that two other essays of my composition are posted at other websites, today. (Here, and also, here.) Surely that will do.

Verily, I have just decided that, in future, I will take Sundays off. There will be no Idleposts on that day. I need to clear more space for prayer; and book-reading.

Too, my most obsequious apologies to the many correspondents awaiting replies from me. I have fallen several weeks behind the front edge of incoming mail, and cannot seem to catch up. God willing, I will find a way, soon.

Now, while this anti-blogue is not really designed as a medium for prayer and donation requests, I should like to make an exception for these friends in Chicago (see here), whose church has burned. Of course, churches are burning across the Dar al-Islam, and we can do little about it. But let us at least start rebuilding in Chicagoland.

Meanwhile, if thou canst still spare an Ave, say it for my elder son’s fiancée, struck down with a serious pulmonary embolism after they were mountain climbing in the Andes; currently recovering in a Greater Parkdale ICU. Nice Catholic girl; and indomitably cheerful.

Finally, a belated request to Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast I failed to acknowledge yesterday. My favourite, even among the beloved Teresas. May she pray for us where her spirit must still reside, in the rugged outback of Castile; from that mystical interior bastion of hers; in Las Moradas:

— I saw an angel beside me toward the left side, in bodily form. He was not very large, but small, very beautiful, his face so blazing with light that he seemed to be one of the very highest angels, who appear all on fire. They must be those they call Cherubim. I saw in his hands a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron there seemed to me to be a little fire. This I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails. As he withdrew it, I thought it brought them with it, and left me all burning with a great love of God. So great was the pain, that it made me give those moans; and so utter the sweetness that this sharpest of pains gave me, that there was no wanting it to stop, nor is there any contenting of the soul with less than God.

How beautifully Spanish, and immortal.