Browsing, as one does, through Mass Cards, Christmas Cards, Get Well cards, I offer you three queries.
(1) From a Farnborough Abbey Mass Card: "He Episkepsis". I am not ignorant of what Episkepsis might mean. But on the accompanying pictorial rendering, does this refer to the Lord looking at the Theotokos ... or our Lady looking out of the ikon at me ... or what?
(2) I have quite often noticed conies ("rabbits") in late medueval art: on carved wood; in manuscript illumination. But in an engraving sent by a brother priest, "Holy Family in a garden" by Albrecht Duerer, there are some of the little fellows playing around the feet of the Holy Family. Does anybody have any illuminating observation ...
(3) From the Bible Reading Fellowship: a roundel of nineteenth century stained glass portraying the Adoration of the Magi, with a small inscription reading "Offert par le quatrieme pelerinage de penitence France 1885". Can anybody gloss this?
I am grateful for kind wishes and ... all the more ... prayers and assurance of prayer. I am, you will oberve, well enough to read cards and to think and to write this! I can say Mass nearly every day, which is a tremendous joy although sometimes a bit tiring. I seem to have lost most of my capacity to read emails; I crave your forgiveness.
Please do accord me as much of your intercessory prayer as you can spare!
And very best wishes to all readers for 2024. May God bless you all.
7 comments:
The Wikimedia entry for The Holy Family with Three Hares - Albrecht Dürer c.1496 offers the amusing comment: "The three rabbits have been interpreted variously as symbols of fertility, the Trinity, and the followers of Christ."
(You are in my memento each day at Mass. For "reading" emails, texts, web pages and everything else on my desktop computer, I have the excellent NVDA screen reader which reads text out loud.)
In connection with an exhibition in 2014, the Getty Museum blog published an article about a mosaic icon of “The Virgin of Shelter” brought to Greece in the 1920s by refugees from Bithnya:
“Written above the Virgin’s left shoulder, the red inscription “Mother of God the Episkepsis” refers to Mary’s role as the Virgin of Shelter, a holy protector known for her miraculous intervention in times of need. Similar inscriptions are found on lead seals used to authenticate correspondence in Byzantium”
https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/seeking-shelter-a-story-of-greek-refugees-and-the-virgin-episkepsis/
The article has good photographs of the icon
Are rabbits possibly an figure of the resurrection? They do come out of holes in the ground at spring time. Perhaps the Easter Bunny is Christian after all?
Are rabbits possibly a figure of the resurrection? They do come out of holes in the ground at spring time. Perhaps the Easter Bunny is Christian after all?
Dear Father, I have heard that you are very unwell and I should like to offer my prayers and a Holy Mass for you. St Charbel pray for us.
The first Penitential Pilgrimage to the Holy Land was held in 1882. It was offered by a group of Assumptionists who had been organizing pilgrimages to Lourdes, LaSalette and Rome and now wanted to make travel to Jerusalem accessible to large groups of people at low cost.
“Cet emballement d’une partie du monde catholique est couronné par l’intervention papale de Léon XIII à Rome le 6 mars 1882 :
« C’est une grande joie d’apprendre par vos lettres, qu’on prépare […] ce pèlerinage de pénitence aux Lieux Saints de la Palestine, dont nous avons, sur votre rapport, approuvé le projet d’organisation et qui doit reproduire le caractère et la piété des anciens pèlerinages. […] Nous vous félicitons aussi de ce que la direction de tout le pèlerinage vous a été confiée, d’un commun accord avec vous, qui avez tant de fois, d’une façon qui mérite louanges, dirigé les pèlerinages à Rome. […] Nous accordons aux pèlerins l’INDULGENCE PLENIERE36 pour le jour du départ, celui du retour ou le lendemain, et pour un jour quelconque, au choix de chacun, pendant le pèlerinage37. »
Ainsi, au printemps 1882 se concrétise un projet de croisade pénitente, que de nombreux catholiques des deux côtés de la Méditerranée espèrent depuis longtemps, et que le Conseil Général des pèlerinages, fort de dix ans d’expérience, va s’efforcer de mener à bien.
Le 5 mai 1882, 1013 pèlerins de la Guadeloupe et de la Picardie débarquent à Caïffa, premier contact avec la Terre Sainte, pour les croisés pacifiques
https://journals.openedition.org/bcrfj/118?lang=en
The article goes into quite a lot of detail about what the pilgrims did once they arrived
The problem is that Easter bunnies in Germany were an Easter hare, Oesterhasse (IIRC).
Hiding Easter eggs and blaming the theft on the Easter Hare was coming in as a joke game with kiddies, right about then.
Sadly, giving colored eggs at Easter as a sort of Valentine was slowly going out, but it was still around in some places in the early twentieth century.
The rabbits might just be there to show that it is springtime, and that Jesus is the lord of animals as the new Adam. It sounds very Edenic.
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