The greatest trappist

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 12/15/2018

Thomas Merton has a three-part poem, entitled, “St. John Baptist.” The first part speaks of John’s leaving the desert and entering the area of the River Jordan, and how the scribes find his language hard to understand…

December

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 12/08/2018

December — how quickly we have moved into the month, and so imperceptibly that it makes no sense now to say, from there to here. We saw no thresholds, we made no entrances. In accordance with liturgical…

Falling stars

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 12/01/2018

The wife and I have decided to stay home today. Both of us feel under the weather, and we attribute this to our age, as well as to changes in the atmosphere — the usual heat interspersed…

The best defense

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 11/25/2018

I know precious little about royalty. The closest I ever got to a monarch happened years ago in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, during a conference for judges. Word spread that the king of a certain country…

Come, O Glorious summer

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 11/18/2018

I just turned twelve when this happened and in first year high school. I read an item in a newspaper about the end of the world, which fixed it at a certain date in July of that…

The widow’s story

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 11/10/2018

In the Brooklyn Museum hangs a watercolor painting by James Joseph Jacques Tissot, a French artist who lived towards the end of the twentieth century. It depicts a scene that Mark writes about in his Gospel, in…

Love is in the details

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 11/03/2018

The world of the senses gives body to the world of the spirit. For this reason I have learned to pay attention to such as the shine of paper clips lying on the tabletop, the meandering of…

On blindness

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 10/27/2018

In our English Lit in high school, we were required to learn John Milton’s sonnet, “On His Blindness,” by heart. I had no trouble memorizing it, being short and simple. And the sonnet’s famous last line has…

How to be truly happy

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 10/21/2018

How a person behaves in a queue is an index of his character. If he cuts in he is probably someone who does not respect the rights of others. I’ve seen people do this shrewdly. Taking advantage…

Passing through the needle’s eye

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 10/13/2018

As a child I associated camels with Christmas, in particular with the Three Kings, whom they transported across vast deserts to offer their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Infant Jesus. Depictions of the Three…

True love

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 10/07/2018

Among William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, which he published in 1609, I particularly like Sonnet 116. It describes genuine love as “the marriage of true minds,” unaffected by changing tastes and resistant to temptations. Let me not to…

Fed by wounded hands

Simeon Dumdum Jr. 08/04/2018

I was strapped for cash one day and hanging out in a mall, waiting for the wife who I hoped would have brought some funds, when a friend came and asked me to join him for coffee.…

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