A Lovely Memory of a Past Retreat with a Holy Priest Now Gone to His Reward. Fr. Buckley, Please pray for us.

I wrote this post in 2019 as I prepared to head off for my annual Ignatian retreat. If you've never made a silent, Ignatian retreat I heartily recommend it. Remember, the posts this week were pre-set. I am not on the internet or my phone and will not be moderating comments. Please pray for the happy repose of Fr. James Buckley, FSSP, who died in 2023. A priest once told me that there's no one deader than a dead priest because he has no biological family to remember and pray for him. But a good and holy priest has hundreds, perhaps thousands of spiritual sons and daughters and so I pray daily for Fr. Buckley and all the priests who have touched my life, especially those in danger of hell fire.

Praying for You While I'm on Retreat; In Your Kindness, Please Pray for All the Ladies on the Retreat! 

Silence: wound or healing?

Often when I'm reading, I come across a sentence or phrase that stops me short. What does that mean? How can I process the idea? If it were a signpost on the road, how would it direct me on my journey?

Advent Time Out: Entering the Dark Silence and Searching for the Light

Dear Readers,

How grateful I am for all of you, both those who encourage Susan and me and those who think we are on the road to hell and deserve eternal punishment. 

"All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and serve according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28)

Bishop Athanasius Schneider: A quiet voice of reason in a world of noisy insanity.

One of the most memorable scenes (at least for me) in C.S. Lewis's famous book, The Scewtape Letters, occurs when the senior devil writes this to his apprentice, Wormwood:

My dear Wormwood,

So! Your man is in love — and in the worst kind he could possibly have fallen into — and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me..... I have looked up this girl’s dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not only a Christian but such a Christian — a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss.The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks and scalds through the very pages of the dossier. It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened. We’d have had her to the arena in the old days. That’s what her sort is made for. Not that she’d do much good there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile. A cheat every way. Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical wit. The sort of creature who’d find ME funny! Filthy insipid little prude....the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered?...The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven; “the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence”.

We All Need a Carthusian Spirit in this World of NOISE, NOISE, NOISE!

Today is the feast of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusians. Did you see the film, Into Great Silence? If not, today would be a great day to watch it and to read about the life of St. Bruno. Our world of chaotic, diabolical disorientation needs silence. I will be watching this movie throughout my day as I take breaks from my household duties. I love the winter scenes particularly. They remind me of the silence that descends on the world with the snow. All is blanketed in silence. 

How important is it to enter into silence? 

Consider Screwtape's letter to Wormwood in chapter 22 of the Screwtape Letters. The text on noise is below the video, but I highly recommend listening to the reading by John Cleese. You can hear the venom of Satan who prowls the world seeking whom he can devour.