Tea at Trianon: Dreaming of Trains

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Dreaming of Trains

A superb piece by Scott Richert.

Advent is about waiting. It is about longing. It is about dying to self, in the expectation of living life more fully. It is perhaps the one time of the year in which we can truly come to understand that the final object of all of our desires is He who humbled Himself to take on our humanity. It is a precious gift of the Church that we, busy with our Christmas shopping and our final push to wrap up the year's work, too often squander or observe perfunctorily.

And then, when Christmas comes, we have a nagging sense that something is missing. And we're right, because our expectations cannot be fulfilled if they are not first cultivated. And they will never be cultivated unless we turn toward Bethlehem, toward the true object of our hearts' desire.