Ladydale Diary
St. Theophanes the Chronicler 2021
Spring has sprung. Or so it seems. It’s 80 degrees. The window is open and I can hear a chorus of birds. A pair of bluebirds, male and female, perched under my window, have just flown off. The chickens are pecking away at the grass contentedly, not huddling as close as possible to the southside of the house, which is what they tend to do during cold weather.
As for the past week, the big news is not the best of news. Susannah was doing yardwork last weekend, clearing an area for a table and chairs to the east of the house, beside the flowering camellia bush between fern wood and fairy wood, to employ Evangeline’s names for the wooded areas surrounding our home. Little did Susannah know that the roots she was digging up were poison ivy. For the next few days a horrible rash spread the length of her arms. Today, almost a week later, it is finally looking better. It’s been a miserable week for her. Truly Lenten!
Last Saturday, prior to the advent of the rash, Susannah and Evangeline went to see a stage adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian at the Logos Theatre, a local Christian theatre company. They were greatly impressed, as we all had been after seeing the same company’s adaptation of The Horse and His Boy last year. Tomorrow (Saturday), it’s my turn to take Evangeline to see it.
This week on the FORMED Book Club, we concluded our discussion of Father McTeigue’s Real Philosophy for Real People. This coming Monday we will have Father McTeigue as our guest. On Wednesday evening I taught a class on the Romantic Poets for Memoria College as part of the seminar course on “Poems Everyone Should Know”. One of the poems we discussed was “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, which is also known simply as “Daffodils”. By way of illustrating both the poem and this week’s Ladydale Diary, and as a heralding of the arrival of spring, I asked Susannah to photograph the daffodils in the garden.
In terms of writing, I’ve written three separate essays for three separate online journals: a Lenten themed meditation for the Imaginative Conservative, an essay on St. Patrick’s Day from a philosophical perspective (the mind boggles!) for Catholic World Report, and the first of a new series of articles on the great works of literature for Crisis Magazine.
This morning, the weekly interview for the Son Rise Morning Show focused on the unlikely connection between the English convert novelist Maurice Baring and the great Russian Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitysn. And then, after a brief break, I connected online to my friends in Chile for the final lecture in the four-part lecture series I’ve been doing on The Odyssey.
As for the observance of Lent, I am continuing my fast from fermented and distilled beverages. I’ve just taken a sip from the glass of water on my desk whereas I would normally be sipping bourbon on the rocks or gin and tonic during the writing of the Diary. Any lack of “sparkle” in the writing can be blamed, therefore, on my abstemiousness.
I’m still taking two Lenten retreats, bibliophilically speaking. I’m reading two books by Fr. Vincent McNabb, the holy Dominican and friend of G. K. Chesterton, and a book by Father Pearson of the Toronto Oratory, which is essentially a spiritual retreat ascending Mount Purgatory with Dante. The latter book is a great way of increasing one’s knowledge of the Divine Comedy while simultaneously increasing one’s self-knowledge through Father Pearson’s leading of the Dante-themed retreat.
I’ve also taken on additional prayers, including the penitential psalms, which I’ve read annually in the Douay-Rheims translation for more years than I can remember. I am so in love with these psalms in this translation that I’m planning on writing an essay nest week entitled “Beauty in Sackcloth and Ashes”. Should I do so, I expect its publication by the Imaginative Conservative before Holy Week (God willing).
Due to difficulties surrounding taking Leo out in the evenings, we cannot go as a family to church for Stations of the Cross on Fridays in Lent. One of us needs to stay at home with Leo while the other half of the family goes to church. Alternatively, which is the option we might be opting for this evening, we can say them together at home.
On a lighter note, though hardly in terms of the gravity of its subject matter, we sat down to watch The Scarlet and the Black last Sunday evening. Gregory Peck, as an Irish priest in the Vatican, returned to Rome after his sojourn several years earlier with Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. His adversary, Christopher Plummer, plays the SS officer who becomes obsessed with capturing the priest, a very different role from the one that made him famous in The Sound of Music a year or two later. The “scarlet” in the film refers to the colours that the priest wears as a monsignor but it could be equally a reference to the priest’s role as a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. It all made for an enjoyable couple of hours of entertainment, suitable for the season, and it was the first time that Evangeline had seen it. Oh, for being young enough to enjoy classic films for the first time!
On that melancholy note, I’ll bid my friends in the Inner Sanctum a fond adieu and a hope of every blessing of the season.
