Benedict musing

Father Z says: Don't worry about those portents and omens: They happen all the time.

then he brings up the Raven at the mass...uh oh....expscept in legend, ravens aren't always bad:

Ravens fed Elijah and (according to legend)... St Benedict of Nusia, befriended and fed a raven who identified poison bread so he knew not to eat it).

Benedict of Nursia was the founder of western monastacism: seeing the Roman world being destroyed, his monasteries kept the books alive in the wilderness. That is why Christians saw taking the name of Benedict was prophetic for the church's future.

Factoid:  there is another St Benedict: The Moor, born of African slaves in Sicily.

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Idle Speculations has a post on John Cardinal Newman.

Alas, his writings are too hard for me to understand (and he was considered "too liberal" for many in those days) but his writings on the conscience and faith's relationship to reason influenced the real Vatican II reforms (as opposed to the pseudoreformers who used the magic words "Vatican II" to destroy beautiful churches and get rid of the poetry in the liturgy).

there is a double link of Newman to the Tolkien family

Tolkien's great nephew did the statue of Newman for the Pope's visit, but he is probably more famous for his Battle of Brittain memorial: photo wikipedia commons.

 more HERE although he seems to be pushing the connections.

I suspect the main connection is the appreciation of beauty and truth in a world where both are discarded for utility and pragmatism, but as I said, I have trouble understanding Newman.

this article points out Newman's love of ordinary Christian life.

In his sermon, Christ Hidden from the World, Newman points out to his congregation that Christ Himself could be living next door to us without our knowing. He did, after all, spend thirty years of his life in obscurity, “living here, as if for the sake of living; not preaching, or collecting disciples, or apparently in any way furthering the cause which brought Him down from heaven.” Those who were with Him “seem to have treated Him as one of their equals” (PS IV, 241). So it is with Christians in our day. They do not look different from the mass of men around them. Christians “look the same to the world” as those with whom they work and live, Newman told his listeners, but  “in their hearts [they] are very different; they make no great show, they go on in the same quiet ordinary way as the others, but really they are training to be saints in Heaven. They do all they can to change themselves, to become like God, to obey God, to discipline themselves, to renounce the world; but they do it in secret, both because God tells them so to do, and because they do not like it to be known” (PS IV, 243).

Newman is building on the letter to Diogenes, which is easy for my little mind to understand.

And it is something most of us ordinary folks know via the "little way" of the "little Flower" i.e. St Theresa of Liseux.  (Another saint pooh poohed by the pseudo Vatican II people, who made voting Democratic and demonstrating for "the poor" the only way to serve god, meaning ordinary folks who merely take care of their families are never shown how to live a Christian life in today's post Vatican II churches: or at least I rarely heard a sermon about it in the last 40 years)...

Both Tolkien and CS Lewis (in That Hideous Strength) have as a theme ordinary people being good and doing their duty.

I was happy that Jackson added a  non Tolkien quote to the Hobbit about Bilbo: LINK

• 1. Galadriel: Mithrandir... Why the hafling?
  2. Gandalf: Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? I don't know. Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.
  – Submitted by Fitri C (57 days ago)

One of the things that makes me despair about the New age types trying to hijack the nuns and churches is that they preach that one can become great and powerful (for the good, of course). But the Jewish carpenter reminded us that the meek will inherit the earth, and an old Jewish belief is that as long as there are ten just men alive in the world, the world will not end.