Tag Archives: Easter

Good Friday

This column seems appropriate for the day and the Easter weekend – Douglas Murray on forgiveness. He talks about it largely in relation to our current culture of nastiness but he also includes this passage, which, given my experience with my ex-priest, I found relevant:

Our church leaders spend much of their time talking about current shibboleths instead of preaching the actual gospel, let alone presenting perhaps the most extraordinary and truly revolutionary aspect of the Christian message – the commandment to not just forgive but also to love your enemies.

Read the whole piece.

Easter

This is magnificent. I have been lucky enough to see it in person – in the Magdalena Chapel of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. Detail from Giotto’s Scenes from the Life of Mary Magdalene: Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ.
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Seven Stanzas at Easter

Really lovely – and yes, late for Easter – by John Updike.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Good Friday

Piero della Francesca’s restored ‘Resurrection’ is ready for public consumption, to our great benefit and in time for Easter.

The fresco described by Giorgio Vasari, the father of modern art history, as the Renaissance pioneer’s “most beautiful” artwork and hailed by British novelist Aldous Huxley in 1925 in the essay “The most beautiful painting in the world”, is a symbol of Sansepolcro. Indeed gunnery officer Anthony Clarke in 1944 famously decided at the last minute not to bombard the town because he remembered about the masterpiece he would otherwise have risked destroying.
The long restoration work was carried out by Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure, one of Italy’s most well-known restoration laboratories, and the art superintendency of Arezzo and Siena, with a 100,000 euro donation from Buitoni manager Aldo Osti.

This is worth another trip to Italy.

Good Friday

Better late than never, I suppose! I always enjoy attending a Good Friday procession, wherever I am in the world. Last year, I was in Italy; this year in little Italy. I took a heap of pics, but I will only share three today.

I love the different footwear here — especially socks-with-sandals guy and high-heeled lady. Not sure they’re really dressed as sheep-herders may have been in days of yore, but what the heck.

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I get a kick out of these young ones holding up the sign. I rarely extol the multi-cult aspects of Toronto, because I find such carrying on tiresome, but this image is indeed sweet.

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And this, because I have just always loved the story of Saint Veronica.

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