In today’s Wordle, I thought John Henry Newman and our daughter thought digestion. I got it in 4 and she in 2. Feed the stomach before feeding the soul?
John Jay and Elizabeth Chapman in Hell's Kitchen
For two years there was a difficult experiment in New York. The Chapmans took a store on Tenth Avenue below Forty-Ninth Street, in a district known as ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ furnished it as a club-room for young people, provided teachers of basket-making, sewing, and chair-caning, and bade the boys and girls of the neighborhood welcome. They flocked in, chiefly Irish and Roman Catholic, of ages from about seven to twelve. They were not an easy lot to handle. Mrs. Chapman recalls the whole experience as ‘like heavy surf-bathing with a bad undertow.’ Another such club had adopted the motto, ‘No praying and no cursing in this building.” Chapman, on the contrary, began the evenings with the Lord’s Prayer and a few verses from a Psalm — which may have accounted for a surrounding hostility to what seemed too Protestant an enterprise.
One episode must be recounted. Two unruly boys were ejected on a certain evening and forbidden to return. Chapman expected them back the next night, and back they came. He was awaiting them outside the door, prepared for the scuffle which ensued, but not for this piece of deviltry: the boys filled their mouths with kerosene, sprayed it on his beard, beneath which they lighted matches. He did not take fire, but when the boys’ eyes and mouths became so inflamed that they could blow no more, he said in a friendly way, ‘Now rub your hands on your coats and get them as clean as possible, then take this pocket-handkerchief and wipe your eyes.’ They obeyed quietly and walked away.
When he reported the matter the next day to Mrs. Chapman, then in a hospital, he was much discouraged — unscathed, but in sorrow for Tenth Avenue. His wife asked him if he had not felt as he stood there that his patience was doing some good to the boys. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I felt that I could be of no use to them, but’ — this as if to himself — ‘that I might possibly be doing good to somebody in China.’ The next winter the venture was discontinued, on the orders of Mrs. Chapman’s physician that she should not resume her part in it. The enterprise was not one which Chapman could conduct alone.
—M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters, pp, 209–211
Of all his talents, painting is the least.—General Ambrogio Spinola on Rubens, quoted in Charles Scribner III, Rubens, p. 124.
We tell God what we want. The how we leave to Him.
You know the 1st commandment. You know the 2nd also. Sc. 78, Matthew 22:37–39, Mark 12:30–31, Luke 10:27, Deuteronomy 6:5. Leviticus 19:18
The Jews knew the 2 Great Commandments. They didn’t yet know Jesus' New Commandment Scene 82, John 13:34, which made their yoke easy & their burden light.
He will divide each nation, putting the sheep on his right side and the goats on his left. Sc. 78, Matthew 25:32
There will be no self-identification when Adam’s son comes in glory.
He knows what you need before you ask him. Sc. 31, Matthew 6:8
Sometimes our prayer is already answered.
Astilbe and Spiral
Blind mouths, you vomit the ant and swallow the camel. Sc. 78, Matthew 23:24
And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Today’s Gospel
Yet not one falls to the ground without your Father’s knowing it. Sc. 43, Today’s Gospel
Political flags should not appear on government buildings.