Ladydale Diary
St. John Of Beverley 2021
A quick word on today’s saint. He was an Englishman, or more precisely a Yorkshireman, who was a contemporary of the Venerable Bede and, in all probability, a contemporary of the Beowulf Poet also. He is, therefore, a jewel in the crown of the Anglo-Saxon golden age of the early eighth century. This particular age has been in my mind recently because I’ve been teaching Beowulf in the weekly online course for Red Cultural in Chile. We finished today (Friday) and then commenced on our discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which we’re reading in Tolkien’s translation.
But let’s go back to the beginning of the week.
On Saturday, as I believe I mentioned in last week’s Diary, we visited our friends who live on Lake Greenwood for a party for May Day. That, at least, was the excuse; it’s as good an excuse as any, and better than most!
The festivities had little to do with the traditional English celebration of May Day. There was no maypole dancing. No crowning of the Queen of the May. The theme was not so much Merrie England as “nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina”. We shucked oysters merrily and feasted on a Low Country boil, cooked on the deck, which consisted of shrimp (or prawns as we’d day in England), sausage, corn, potatoes, spices and other good things. Hearty fare! And then there was cheesecake, key lime pie and a chocolate pie for dessert. And a plenteous supply of craft ale – and even a vodka and tonic for the road. Susannah was the designated driver! The only explicitly Marian aspect of the day was the suspension of the convivium to say the Angelus at 6pm. We all faced east, as seemed appropriate, especially as facing east from South Carolina is facing Nazareth, the two places being on a very similar latitude.
Unusually, only three of the family were present at the lakeside May Day festivities because Evangeline was at an overnight retreat with Fidelis in the mountains of North Carolina. It was her first ever night away from the family. She loved it and is now filled with the spirit of adventure. She’s asked me if I can take her with me on some of my future speaking engagements!
On Monday, I had to get up obscenely early to catch a 5:45am flight to Kansas City. I guest-taught a class at the University of Kansas on Monday afternoon and then gave a talk at a local parish in the evening, returning home on Tuesday.
Two days on the road has meant a truncated week in the home-office. It’s been mostly a case of “keep-up” and “catch-up”.
We recorded the weekly FORMED Book Club on Wednesday afternoon, instead of the customary Monday, to accommodate my travel schedule, concluding our discussion of Cardinal Zen’s book on the Church in China. Next week, we commence several weeks focusing on the best of Chesterton’s essays. Earlier in the afternoon I had joined some friends in a local bar to watch Chelsea play Real Madrid in the European Champions League semi-final. I had to drag myself away after only an hour’s play to get home in time for the Book Club. To my great delight Chelsea triumphed and will play another English team, Manchester City, in the final later this month.
The only writing I’ve managed this week is the latest essay for Crisis Magazine in the “Great Books in a Nutshell” series. This week’s “great book” was Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles.
This morning, I gave my weekly Friday interview for the Son Rise Morning Show on Sacred Heart Radio. We began a new series in which we’ll be working our way through Poems Every Catholic Should Know, an anthology of a thousand years of Christian verse that I compiled originally for a UK publisher, but which has been published in a splendid new edition by TAN Books. We began with a discussion of St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun”.
Then, later that morning, it was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the online class that I’ve already mentioned.
This afternoon has been spent recording this week’s podcasts for the Inner Sanctum, and here I am, just after 5pm, finishing up for the week and ready for the weekend!
Wishing all my friends in the Inner Sanctum a spiritually fruitful week.
