The Annunciation

It's the Feast of the Annunciation today and you can imagine Mary's conversation with Joseph, several months after her meeting with the angel.

"Mary, you're pregnant."

"Don't worry, the Holy Spirit did it."

What a brave young woman. She ran the risk of being stoned to death or, at the very least, being outcast from the community with no means of support. Fortunately an angel intervened again in the affairs of men, and put Joseph straight. Here's a prayer, taken from the concluding Collect of the Angelus:

WE beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought into the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

God bless,

LSP

Merry Christmas!

Eternal God,

who made this most holy night

to shine with the brightness of your one true light:

bring us, who have known the revelation

of that light on earth,

to see the radiance of your heavenly glory;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Merry Christmas and God bless,

LSP

Advent Poetry, Innit

One of the Team took time off from cleaning his FNFAL to send this in; pay attention, heathen:

Coming with the shepherds to this mystical crèche, joining Mary and Joseph in holy meditation, and seeing this child in the straw – what do we see? St. Maximus the Confessor said that we see the holy child playing at the boundary of earth and heaven, of infinity and finitude. Standing at the crèche, seeing “this thing that has happened”, we see God’s victory, and our salvation, what the devil and the rulers of this world’s present darkness could never have expected – the infinite having become a finite fact – the foolishness and weakness of the eternal God, dwelling beyond the limit of grammar but having become intelligible; dwelling beyond the building blocks of logic, language, and math, but now having become a discreet reality, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.

In his great poem Ash Wednesday, T.S. Eliot wrote:

"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
the world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

And the speaker in the poem asks “Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound?” And he concludes: “Not here, there is not enough silence…” and adds, “No place of grace for those who avoid the face / No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny / the voice.”

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CS Lewis hated TSE. Whatever, I like everything about that.

God bless,

LSP

Magnificat

Mary exults in the Magnificat, which we heard in today's Gospel. Here it is:

MY soul doth magnify the Lord, * and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded * the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth * all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me; * and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him * throughout all generations.
He hath showed strength with his arm; * he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, * and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; * and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel; * as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.

I'd say that was as relevant now as it's ever been.

God bless,

LSP

The Feast of the Annunciation

Today's the Feast of the Annunciation, and we rejoice with Mary over the message of an angel, Gabriel, which leads to the Incarnation of the Word and the salvation of mankind.

With that thought in mind, I drove North on the Dallas Tollway to visit Front Sight Firearms. They have a good-looking online presence and I was hoping to pick up an Aero Precision, 7.62 lower receiver. Buy it there and then, I thought, and save yourself FFL transfer fees and hassle. I also like to see what I buy before I buy it; old fashioned, I know, but that's me.

It was weird, driving out to far, far North Dallas, and it's something I rarely do. Miles upon miles of corporate headquarters, nestled between behemoth malls, big box stores and endless subdivisions. All bisected by highways; tomorrow's world today.

But  not my world, so it was strange to see. Not necessarily bad, but alien. McKinney was more of the same, neat little strip-malls with frozen yogurt franchises, and roads that aren't potholed. Look right or left, and you can see the subdivisions. Do the houses have plastic siding? I didn't investigate.

However, I did check out the gun shop. Word to the wise, Front Sight isn't what it appears online. They didn't have my lower, in fact they scorned it, which is odd, and the bored, dismissive, gun nerd behind the counter couldn't even be bothered to engage in right-wing gun shop banter, much less sell me anything. So I bought a Magpul flip-up front sight and left the store.

Is there anything good about Front Sight's shopfront? There is. Their prices are alright, (unlike Ray's) and what they have on offer seems good quality. But there isn't much of it. Don't waste your time going there, unless you're in the area and want to see the suburban metrosprawl. That's my advice. But hey, check them out, maybe they have what you want.

A few hours later I was back in the country. That seemed more normal to me, and I liked it.

Have a blessed Feast of the Annunciation, and ask the Blessed Virgin Mary for her powerful intercession.

God bless,

LSP