Praying for a Nun
GUEST COLUMN
Dame Consolation stands beside my desk. Her arms are crossed under her white scapular, and she has an understanding smile.
Although Boethius’s Dame is a personification of philosophy and its solaces, she is also a feminine form with human features, one I had met many years before I ever read The Consolation of Philosophy, which contains many of the old verities of the Church Fathers, found also in Plato, especially his Phaedo, an early source of the precepts of service to others, sacrifice, the suffering and purification of the soul, the soul’s immortality, the dignity of the human person, and the pursuit of the Good — the bedrock of Christian eschatology.
They were also evident in the daily life of Sr. Martin de Porres, O.P. (formerly Corinne Recker, 1928-1979).
Sister Martin, who taught everything a second-grader needed to know, or at least everything in the second-grade curriculum, had been standing behind me for several minutes with her arms folded under her scapular. Sister was young and tall and pleasant.
I was gazing out of a large classroom window at the leafy street below, daydreaming of the Flats.
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As we bury our parents and watch our circle of family diminish, will we finally humble ourselves before God and ask forgiveness for rejecting the gifts He had to give us?
Only the love of the High Priest can cause a man to pursue Him with such ardor that he abandons his own life. He will learn to love what and how Christ loves.
Karol Wojtyla cofounded a theater in which scenery, costumes, technical and visual effects, even acting, were kept to a minimum: a “theater of the word.”