The Cloister Walk

"In a monastery, the Easter Triduum-which literally means 'the three days,' Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday--is a total surrender to worship. Time feels suspended, allowing for focus on the events commemorated: Jesus gathering with friends the night before his death, to share a last meal; Jesus' arrest and execution; and his resurrection. If you've become acclimated to the normal rhythms of the monastery, the daily round of prayer, meals, and work, the liturgies of the Triduum are guaranteed to throw you off."

"...The Triduum begins with the singing of the 'Ubi Caritas' in the monastic refectory; the words of the great medieval poem--'Where charity and love are found, there is God'--set the tone for our meal and the liturgy that follows."

"...At morning prayer on Good Friday, a monk sings one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and it hurts; it feels like a blow to the solar plexus."

"On Holy Saturday, I walk up the hill to the cemetery and I meet old Fr. Gall walking stiffly toward me, dressed in a black suit, a narrow, European cut decades out of fashion. He twirls his walking stick and says, brightly, 'Ah, you have come to visit those who are in heaven? You have come to seek the living among the dead!'"

SUNDAY

"...The great week of singing, the Octave of Easter with its incessant 'Alleluias,' begins....Someone finds an old Methodist hymnal , and I teach these Catholics 'I Love to Tell the Story,' and 'Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling.'

"...'Ponder on your bed and be still,' Psalm reminds us, 'make justice your sacrifice and trust in the Lord.'"

Space Cowgirl Salvages NASA Photographs

Five Lunar Orbiter missions were launched in 1966 through 1967 with the purpose of mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo landings. All five missions were successful, and 99% of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60 m or better.

Restoring the moon

NASA was so preoccupied with getting an astronaut to the moon ahead of the Soviets that little attention was paid to the mountains of scientific data that flowed back to Earth from its early space missions. The data, stored on miles of fragile tapes, grew into mountains that were packed up and sent to a government warehouse with crates of other stuff.

And so they eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense woman with flaming red hair that fit her sometimes-impatient nature. She had been trained as a biologist, but within the sprawling space agency she had found her niche as an archivist.

Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage. {excerpt from John Johnson Jr. article}

"What do you usually do with things like that?" she asked.
"We usually destroy them," he replied.

_________________________________

There Once Was a Congressman from Texas

ECKHARDT

There Once Was a Congressman from Texas

by Gary A. Keith

"In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono wrote that we too often miss the alleyways and detours of life. Bob Eckhardt explored those alleyways. He was always more than just politics. He was a keen observer of his world, detouring off into antique shops, into cathedrals, into books, into new relationships. He reveled in his world through his imagination and storytelling, his cartoons, his writing, and his traveling."

Robert Christian "Bob" Eckhardt

What is Easter?

HAPPY EASTER!

Why?

Why I blog . . . and who cares?

"You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before. "

[Why I Blog by Andrew Sullivan, November 2008 Atlantic]

God bless

Waiting for Easter
by Raymond A. Foss


Unlike the first twelve,
the eleven disciples alive
after the crucifixion
the disciples unnamed.

We know the rest of his story
of our story, the future of the faithful
his rising, he is risen,
we will be with him in paradise
our faith will make it so.

But today, we are low,
with the disciples waiting
for the morning.