Feast of Saint Polycarp

"...on the feeble bestow strength to bear you witness..."

                                                                 --Preface of Holy Martyrs

..."the lowly you adorn with victory..."

                                           --Psalm 149

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Feast of the Holy Innocents

"The mystery of the innocents is that they are the victims. The divine eagle gathered them as booty to himself. The blow aimed by the tyrant at our Lord fell on them instead. They serve as a kind of guard of honor to the divine Child--and the militant dialogue between God and anti-God in which they are caught up earns them heaven. But we have lost our awareness of that ceaseless duel...we ignore it completely. Yet no one can escape responsibility and at any moment God, exercising his sovereign power, may draw us into the thick of it."

--Alfred Delp,  S.J., The Prison Meditations

Psalm 20

Give victory to the king, O Lord;

 answer us when we call. (Psalm 20:9)

"Psalm 20 teaches us to pray for the earthly men and women that God gives to us as kings and queens and rulers all the while trusting ultimately in God and in His will, over and above the abilities, talents or charisma of politicians or princes. By praying such prayers we, in turn, learn to pray for the return of our true King, the One Who saves, and does not fail, Who comes to us alive out of the jaws of death and will give us eternal life: The only One who saves us all."

-- Sermon of Rev. Ted A. Griese, May, 2013.

Psalm 19

The heavens proclaim the glory of God,

and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands. (Psalm 19:1)

"Creation had been given to man as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into men's souls. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, the sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these things were transparent. They spoke to man not of themselves only but of Him who made them....Although we tend to look on the Old Testament as a chronicle of fear in which men were far from God, we forget how many of the patriarchs and prophets seem to have walked with God with intimate simplicity. As age succeeded age the memory of this revelation of God seems to have withered away, but its leaf is still green in the Psalter."

--Thomas Merton, Bread in the Wilderness

All Souls' Day

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

and no torment shall touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,

and their departure was thought to be an affliction,

and their going forth from us to be their destruction;

but they are at peace. (Wisdom 3:1-3)

Psalm 18

He mounted a cherub and flew, and he soared on the wings of the wind (Psalm 18:10)

"The cherub is a fierce winged beast, the charger ridden by the sky god in Canaanite mythology, not the dimpled darling of Renaissance painting." (Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary)

Dr. D. Pochin Mould (Angels of God, 1963) says cherub is derived from the Babylonian karibu, those winged guardian gods with human heads and the bodies of lions. She goes on to say, however, "It is not true that the development of Jewish teaching on angels is a taking over of pagan mythologies; rather, Jewish thought tends to throw the one transcendent God into even greater relief."

St. Michael, above, not fierce but quite majestic.

Vacation Week

Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy (Psalm 43:4)