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guardini

What, you say, I referenced Romano Guardini yesterday but then wrote nothing about him, instead dedicating the day's primary post to Dostoyevsky? What am I, some sort of Serbian Orthodox with an anti-Catholic chip on my shoulder?

No, not at all, but yesterday's post had already reached my preferred size so I stopped.

Yes, there's something about Dostoyevsky that particularly draws me, but long-time TDE readers know I also greatly admire Guardini. His description about what happened Jesus died is the best stuff I've ever read on the topic and it was his description that drives my reflection that I run most here most Holy Saturdays. Guardini quotes from his masterful The Lord also appear regularly during Holy Week in general, as well as at Christmas: "T]he infinite stillness that hovered over Christ's birth. For the greatest things are accomplished in silence”“not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice. . . . The silent forces are the strong forces.”

If you want a little tome by Guardini, get The Rosary of Our Lady. The Rosary is the illiterate's substitution for The Liturgy of the Hours? Perhaps at one time, but when you see the respect paid to it in this little book by a man of Guardini's intellectual and spiritual girth, you realize those who dismiss at such are remarkably short-sighted. My favorite passage from the book:

The Rosary is a prayer of lingering. One must take one's time for it . . . One who wants to pray it rightly must put away those things that press upon him and become for a time purposeless and quiet. This is necessary; whether he has thirty or ten minutes at his disposal. Neither should he attempt too much. It is not necessary to ramble through the whole Rosary; it is better to say only one or two decades, and to say them right.

[Humorous aside: The above Holy Saturday quote is an excerpt from an article that I published in, I believe, the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. I had originally submitted it to a different publication, but the editor rejected it, explaining that it seemed too negative by emphasizing the devil's reaction. I'm sure he didn't mean it this way, but the rejection letter sounded like he was castigating me for being too hard on Satan. It was just one of many WTH moments I experienced as a Catholic writer.]

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