Our Morning Offering – 27 August – “The Month of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” and Feast of Our Lady Health of the Sick and Mary’s Day Virgin Full of Goodness,Mother of MercyBy St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)Doctor angelicusDoctor communis Virgin full of goodness,Mother of mercy,I entrust to you my body and my soul,my thoughts and […]
Our Morning Offering – 27 August – Virgin Full of Goodness, Mother of Mercy By St Thomas Aquinas — AnaStpaul
Our Father lives in the charged ether,
above and all around us
in splendid symmetry,
the source of life and love and healing.
The fabulous towers, the spires
and flowering tracery of organic design,
were all conceived and built by better men than us
in an age of gold.
These, the natural avenues of life
in which our ancestors sat, goodness drawn down
into those cleansing naves
where the deep organ soothed,
where we took the true medicine, giving thanks,
not to some mystery or intangible presence,
but the reality of His environment, His conduit,
His soft conversation with us
which we have – nearly all of us –
forgotten, our memory blighted, expunged,
erased, while we plod obliviously
around the stark bare stones and ruined choirs
in awe of a shell, without ever seeing the whole,
the rich truth of the past
and future’s promise
in this penurious present.
Copyright Francis 2022
A world in tatters
We are beginning right here
Remember this day
Copyright Francis Barker 2022
Bluebells are ringing
while the trees hum silently
Grasses are singing
Copyright Francis 2022
Born with a stellium of luminaries in an Aries 5th house, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a powerful, outspoken, creative and prolific individual.
His Mercury closely conjunct Mars, Pluto and Moon in Aries gave him the energy and compulsion to write, to communicate and express himself. He had an ultra sharp, critical mentality, with imagination (Neptune 3rd house sextile Sun 5th) which made him a fine journalist as well as novelist and playwright. This conjunction’s close trine to the 1st house Saturn provides an important resolve and determination to keep going, forged through earlier disappointments.
His powerful and incise Mercury is ruler of the 7th and 10th houses of relationships and career, energising both areas. His relationship with the painter Cezanne was important to him, but they fell out over Zola’s portrayal of the bohemian tendencies of artists.
He also courted controversy later in his reaction to the Dreyfus affair. Venus, always a significator of relationships, is conjunct disruptive Uranus in the 4th house; relationships in general seem to have been unusual and something of a challenge, a difficulty, although he remained close to his mother and cared for her (Jupiter trine Venus/Uranus 4th house).
His Saturn is not really at home in his Sagittarian first house; he could be quite reticent with people, at first. His chart ruler, Jupiter is equally awkwardly placed in the Scorpio 12th house; despite his many natural creative talents, loneliness and disappointment were often visitors, though periods of deep introspection could be beneficial. A writer must essentially work alone, so such experiences would have been formative in the long run.
Copyright Francis 2022
Ciscography 