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reposted from: Costing Not Less Than Everything . The Last Communion of Saint Lucy – Tiepolo A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day –  John Donne ‘TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s, Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;     The sun is spent, and now his flasks     Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;             The world’s whole sap is sunk; The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph. Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring;     For I am every dead thing,     In whom Love wrought new alchemy.             For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin’d ...

  Corpus Christi Procession – Hipolit Lipinski, 1881 This piece is prompted by a couple of posts I saw about a procession being held in Brighton to mark the Feast of the Immaculate Conception .  Such public displays of the Catholic faith are very rare these days and are to be applauded - I think that the more of them that take place, the more people will get used to them. After all, most of us have marched in many a parade or demonstration marking secular or political events – and I have seen large public marches and demonstrations marking other faiths. Not so very long ago, the Salvation Army band used to march up the road I was then living in every Sunday morning.  I do not think that these processions are wholly about witnessing to the faith in public – they are also spiritual occasions and another manifestation of the way in which the Church and the practice of the faith is also material and p...

Reposted from Costing Not Less Than Everything Mary the Mother of Mercy, Chapel of the  Gates of Dawn  in Vilnius, Lithuania The  rizas  (robes), or revetments, of gilded silver, are in three separate pieces. The gown of Our Lady is embellished with flowers, in a reference to Our Lady as a ‘hortus conclusus’ or walled garden.  Many miracles have taken place after veneration of the painting – and about 8,000 votive offerings have been presented to the chapel, including the silver crescent moon at the base of the painting. The painting is believed to be of Polish origin and, unusually, represents Our Lady without the Infant Christ. The statues on either side of the painting are of Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin. The chapel is an important place of pilgrimage in Lithuania and was visited by Blessed John Paul II in 1993. In the third week of November every year – in 2012, from 11th to 18th of November, the Indulgenced ...