Ladydale Diary
Saint Anselm, 2021
Today is our twentieth wedding anniversary. The photo shows St. John Paul II blessing our marriage. It was taken on our honeymoon. There can have been no better way of starting our married life together than by having our marriage blessed by a bona fide saint!
A decade ago, as a gift to Susannah for our tenth anniversary, I wrote her a sonnet entitled “First Decade”:
FIRST DECADE
For Susannah
On Walsingham’s wings Love alights,
Announcing at Our Lady’s shrine
His blessing on the troth He plights
That makes thee mine, and makes me thine.
Agony’s garden crowns with thorn,
In passion’s sweat and labour’s pain,
The child of ours to His arms born,
Burying death with grace’s grain.
In easter’d splendour from the tomb
He rises from the death that died,
Blesses the unborn in your womb,
The scars of loss, the eyes that cried.
And so, my love, His love is thine,
And, through His love, I know thee mine.
The first stanza refers to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, which is where I proposed, as we knelt together before the Blessed Sacrament in the historic Slipper Chapel.
The second stanza refers to the stillbirth of our daughter, Giovanna Pauolina, who was named after both John Paul II and St. Gianna Beretta Molla. Our little daughter was nestling in the womb when Susannah and I returned to Rome for the canonization of St. Gianna by John Paul II. She was, therefore, present at the canonization of one saint by another, a great blessing in her all too brief life, which ended after eight months in utero.
The third stanza alludes to the birth of our second daughter, Evangeline, in 2008, who is so named because her birth was good and unexpected news.
The imagery of the first stanza relates to the first decade of the joyful mysteries of the rosary, i.e. the Annunciation; the second relates to the first decade of the sorrowful mysteries, i.e. the Agony in the Garden; and the third stanza relates to the first decade of the glorious mysteries, i.e. the Resurrection. Hence the sonnet’s title connects the first decade of our marriage with the first decades of the rosary.
Unfortunately I have not been able to write another sonnet with respect to the conclusion of the second decade of our marriage. The Muse has failed to visit me as we celebrate this latest significant milestone on our journey together, till death do us part. This year, I’ve only managed a bouquet of roses and dinner at our favourite restaurant this evening, which sounds prosaic by comparison.
Clearly the anniversary has eclipsed everything else this week, appropriately enough. In brief, however, we had friends stay with us at the weekend, those who live on Lake Greenwood. They helped us with some yardwork, especially the clearing of an area by the Fairy Wood with the use of a rototiller, which was hard work but rewarding. I have the scars to show for it, in terms of the poison ivy rash which I did my best to avoid, evidently unsuccessfully.
On Monday, Father Fessio, Vivian Dudro and I commenced the discussion for the FORMED Book Club of Cardinal Zen’s book, For Love of My People I Will Not Remain Silent, which focuses on the persecution of the Church in China.
Yesterday evening (Tuesday) was the monthly Tuesdays with the Troubadours in which I get together online with my friends and confreres, Dale Ahlquist, Christopher Check, William Fahey and Daniel Kerr, to discuss whatever happens to be the topic of the month. This month it was “books that changed my life”. I selected The Well and the Shallows by Chesterton, The Four Men by Hilaire Belloc, Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and 1984 by George Orwell.
This morning I was interviewed on Archangel Radio on Imagination and the Image of God.
I’ve written only one essay this week, “Tolkien: The Deep Roots of Genius”, which has already been published by The Imaginative Conservative.
That’s about it. Until next time, I wish all my friends in the Inner Sanctum the continued blessings of Eastertide.
