A visit to Turner Classic Movies last night, just in time to see One Foot in Heaven, an enjoyable story of the ministry and tribulations of a Methodist minister in the first half of the last century. Fredric March is very fine as Rev. William Spence and Martha Scott brings subtlety and strength to the part of his wife.



Fredric March is far better known, of course, but Martha Scott also had a long and interesting career and at various times played the wife and the sister of Charlton Heston and, both in The Ten Commandments and in Ben-Hur, his mother. Only nine years Heston's senior, Miss Scott seems not to have known vanity when a good part was offered.



One of the interesting things about the film last night was the strong presence of the hymn The Church's One Foundation, as a motif woven repeatedly into the score and as the concluding anthem, rendered with full chorus and carillon. A wonderful hymn, rich in instruction and beauty, a standard in most Christian churches, words and music lingering long in the mind. The music is Aurelia, composed by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the natural son of Charles Wesley's son Samuel.



The movie is based on a memoir of his father by the writer Hartzell Spence, named by his parents in honor of Joseph Crane Hartzell, missionary bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hartzell Spence, founder and executive editor of Yank magazine during World War II, died at 93 in 2001.



One Foot in Heaven was among the ten films nominated for Best Picture in 1941, a year of stiff competition. The award that year went to How Green Was My Valley.



There is no fence or hedge around time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough. --- Richard Llewellyn

I'm off to Ocean City, New Jersey for a few days. Sand, surf, bike. Food, family, fun.



... and all creation rightly gives Thee praise.

William Luse, who's always worth a visit, commented on the entry on Rev. John Keble below that The story of that movement, and the great light that came of it (Cardinal Newman, among others) is dear to me.



I'm glad to say that it's one of many opinions on which we're in agreement, and that most visitors here share the devotion. A good occasion, then, to recommend a rich and perceptive little book, re-issued last year by the Saint Austin Press.



T.S. Eliot thought Christopher Dawson perhaps the most influential man in all of Britain. Dom David Knowles wrote that in his field [he] was the most distinguished Catholic thinker of the century. Frank Sheed said that Dawson may not have known everything, but there was nothing that you could count on his not knowing.



There was certainly no subject that Christopher Dawson didn't illuminate in his writing, and The Spirit of the Oxford Movement is one of the many gems among his works. Here's a review of the re-issued volume by Robert Royal in Crisis.

In New York Monday evening and Tuesday. I've always felt comfortable there, and easy, and always with a thrill at first sight of the skyline. I wrote here last fall: No matter how many times seen, there are few sights like the Manhattan skyline, but the sense now of what's missing still catches you and leaves the vista suddenly tinged with ache and sadness and loss.



A working trip this time, but not onerous in any sense, and lodged with a group from work at the Ritz at Battery Park. Walking distance, then, from Ground Zero, and we all were drawn there, some for the first time. Excavated and largely cleared now, of course, and vast in its desolation, murmuring sorrow as you look. But girders there fused in the shape of the Cross of our salvation, and of lordship over death. Lifted above the loam and the debris in the first weeks after the cataclysm, lifted for solace by men fulfilling their vocation of rescue and protection.



There was a sculpture that stood in the plaza fountain between the World Trade Center towers. The Sphere by Fritz Koenig. Bronze and steel. A monument fostering world peace. It was found in the rubble, gashed and torn but structurally intact. It's now installed, with an eternal flame burning before it, in Battery Park. One of our group led us over there after dinner in Tribeca. Quiet there under the trees in the park, somber there in the darkness, memories stirring there in the light breeze.



Fritz Koenig said his sculpture now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life - different from the one I gave to it.

We observe the memorial today of that remarkable young woman Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, known as The Lily of the Mohawks.



Many thanks to Norm Leveillee, who continues his wonderful website tribute.

After all, the surest way to uphold or restore our endangered Church, will be for each of her anxious children, in his own place and station, to resign himself more thoroughly to his God and Saviour in those duties, public and private, which are not immediately affected by the emergencies of the moment: the daily and hourly duties, I mean, of piety, purity, charity, justice. It will be a consolation understood by every thoughtful Churchman, that let his occupation be, apparently, never so remote from such great interests, it is in his power, by doing all as a Christian, to credit and advance the cause he has most at heart; and what is more, to draw down God's blessing upon it.



Rev. John Keble, theologian, teacher and poet, priest of the Church of England, preached the Assize Sermon at St. Mary's Church, Oxford, on 14 July 1833. His sermon on the text of 1 Samuel 12:23, National Apostasy, is reckoned as the start of the Oxford Movement, of which Keble remained a central figure.



Lord, In Thy Name Thy Servants Plead

It's scarcely a new insight , but it hit me with particular force yesterday: how good it can be to see the familiar from a new perspective. Visiting Naked Wayne at Case Western Reserve and catching up with his posts -- almost always interesting and engaging -- I came across this:



By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us--set us right with him, make us fit for him--we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand--out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise!



Strong words, and a powerful reminder, but unfamiliar to me. Not a new message, but a new path of hearing, a fresh way of seeing. It's the rendering of the first verses of Romans 5 in Eugene Peterson's The Message.

Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.



Leviticus 25:10

The passage below is from The Quickening of John the Baptist, one of Thomas Merton's great Marian poems.



You have trusted no town

With the news behind your eyes.

You have drowned Gabriel's word in thoughts like seas

And turned toward the stone mountain

To the treeless places.

Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?



The day Our Lady, full of Christ,

Entered the dooryard of her relative

Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves

like gold?

Did not her eyes as grey as doves

Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon

miraculous Elizabeth?





The Roman, Anglican, and Lutheran calendars now observe the Feast of the Visitation on 31 May, but 2 July was the traditional date of the feast on the Roman calendar, commemorating the events described in the first chapter of Luke. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, greeting her young kinswoman Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb and Mary, in response and in full acceptance of her role in the history of our salvation, proclaiming the noble words of the Magnificat.

Ganns Deen has moved from Mere Madness to his new home at Superblessed.net



Ganns and Cathy learned today that their child, who has 11 more weeks left to live in the womb, is a boy. His name is Nathan Joshua Midel Deen.



Ganns earned his baccalaureate degree at Ateneo de Manila University, which takes its motto from Ephesians 5:8.



Lux in Domino.

I think I've listened almost as frequently this year to spoken word recordings as to music CDs. In part because of the suspension last winter of daily broadcasts of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice on The Bible Study Hour, I've bought a number of recordings of sermons and exegesis and have been enriched by listening to the words of, among others, Bishop Fulton Sheen and Rev. George Rutler.



There's been instruction, too, in the BBC recordings of the wartime speeches of Sir Winston Churchill, and I've tried without success to find a CD recording of the state funeral of that great man, a recording that I once had on LP.



Today is the 140th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg and on Sunday I listened for the first time to a new spoken word CD, and one that I strongly recommend. James McPherson recently published Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg and also made available a CD on which he reads the work. The story of the battle, of the officers and soldiers, of the stakes involved, of heroism and suffering, of mistakes of great consequence and of plans gone awry and, later, of President Lincoln's great address on the site, is rich in meaning, lesson, and drama. McPherson says perhaps no word in the American language has greater historical resonance than Gettysburg. And the story of that epochal battle in southern Pennsylvania is compelling, heart-breaking, ennobling.