Monday, November 10, 2025
Memorial of Saint Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The eve of something
God is the witness of the wise man’s inmost self,
and the sure observer of his heart,
and the listener to his tongue.
For the Spirit of the Lord fills the world,
She is all-embracing, and knows what man says.
G. K. Chesterton loved the sound of laughter, and he did his best to elicit it in, for example, the twenty essays included in Heretics (1905). For many years our local Austin Chesterton Society, which meets monthly in the back room of a local pub called the Pour House, reads and then discusses his books.
In “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity,” Mr. Chesterton goes so far as to say that without humor, or “frivolity,” we just aren’t really human.
I should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of view, a defective mind … unless a man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a man … frivolity is a part of the nature of man.
Each Monday I receive a poem or poetic thought from Joe Zarantonello, the retreat master at Loose Leaf Hollow just a few miles north of the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Thomas Merton spent twenty-seven years. Joe and I are the same age. I loved what he wrote last week about breathing and prayer, happy as a man can be.
NO WORRY & NO HURRY
(with nine bows to Blaise Pascal & Thomas Merton)
As I enter my seventy-sixth year—it’s true, I’ve got aboutÂ
225,000 miles on this jalopy, and all the aches and painsÂ
that come with that, but I am so grateful toÂ
be alive, and loving the life I’m livin’ & livin’ the life I love
that I’m aspiring to live a life of “no worry & no hurry”
from here on out, and even though this old vehicleÂ
will run outa gas at some point, I trust that Wisdom,Â
Compassion, Love, Peace, Joy, Surprise & Life itself is
Eternal and Infinite: and if it ain’t, well, all bets are off.
Still, I’m gonna live my life with no worry & in no hurry.
And when I do catch myself either worrying or hurrying—
I’m gonna breathe—for, as Thomas Merton once wrote,
“What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.”
Chesterton began his professional education and career as a painter in late 19th century London, and as he branched out into the written word his eye for beauty began to bless his sentences as well. He was looking up as he ended his essay about Mr. McCabe:
About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.
Thinking my own thoughts in the quiet of our Austin night I remember how precious David’s words were to me twenty-five years ago on the day after our son Marc left a note late at night and then disappeared for a week. We had no idea how long it would be, and we were afraid for him. In church the next day I read Psalm 139, and relaxed a little.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
   Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
   if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
   if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
   your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
   and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
   the night will shine like the day,
   for darkness is as light to you.
I read the same psalm now and weep with joy. God knew exactly where Marc was at every moment then and He knows every moment now. We will never know the future and it doesn’t matter, because God knows. We’re all his kids, and we can just breathe, and laugh, and pray, and laugh again.
(Romans 13, Psalm 112, 1 Peter 4, Luke 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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