Today is the first of three Ember Days for this season of the year. Today is the Optional Memorial of Saint Rita of Cascia, Religious (died 1457). And today is the International Day for Biological Diversity and National Maritime Day.
Today is the first of three Ember Days for this season of the year. Ember days (a corruption from the Latin Quatuor Tempora, four times) are the days at the beginning of the seasons ordered by the Church as days of fast and abstinence. They were definitely arranged and prescribed for the entire Church by Pope Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) for the consecutive Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after December 13th (the feast of Saint Lucy), after Ash Wednesday, after Whitsunday (Pentecost), and after September 14th (Exaltation of the Cross). The purpose of their introduction, besides the general one intended by all prayer and fasting, was to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to make use of them in moderation, and to assist the needy. Saint Rita of Cascia, Religious (died 1457) was born as Margherita Lotti in 1386 at Roccaporena, Umbria, Italy, late in her parents’ life, and was soon nicknamed Rita. From her early youth she visited the Augustinian nuns at Cascia and showed interest in a religious life. However, when she was twelve, her parents betrothed her to Paolo Mancini, an ill-tempered, abusive individual who worked as a town watchman and who was dragged into the political disputes of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Disappointed but obedient, Rita married him when she was eighteen, and was the mother of twin sons. She put up with Paolo’s abuses for eighteen years before he was ambushed and stabbed to death. Her sons swore vengeance on the killers of their father; Rita, fearing that her sons would lose their souls, tried to persuade them from retaliating, but to no avail. Accordingly, she petitioned God to take her sons rather than submit them to possible mortal sin and murder. Upon the deaths of her sons of dysentery a year later, Rita again felt the call to religious life. However, some of the sisters at the Augustinian monastery were relatives of her husband’s murderers, and she was denied entry for fear of causing dissension. Asking for the intervention of Saint John the Baptist, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, she managed to bring the warring factions together, not completely, but sufficiently so that there was peace, and she was admitted to the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalen at age thirty-six. She lived forty years in the convent, spending her time in prayer and charity, and working for peace in the region. She was devoted to the Passion, and in response to a prayer to suffer as Christ, she received a chronic head wound that appeared to have been caused by a crown of thorns and which bled for fifteen years. Confined to her bed the last four years of her life, and eating little more than the Eucharist, she spent her time teaching and directing the younger sisters. Near the end of her life in January, 1457, a visitor from her home town asked if she would like anything; Rita’s only request was a rose from her family’s estate. The visitor went to the home, even though he knew that there was no hope of roses in January; there, sprouted on an otherwise bare bush, was a single rose blossom, which he then brought to her. Her body, which has remained incorrupt over the centuries, is venerated today in the shrine at Cascia, which bears her name. She is the Patron Saint of mothers and of lost and impossible causes, and her aid is invoked against sickness, wounds, abuse, and marital problems. (St. Rita is often credited as being the unofficial patron saint of baseball, due to a reference made to her in the 2002 film The Rookie.) The International Day for Biological Diversity falls within the scope of the United Nations Post-2015 Development Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals. In this larger initiative of international cooperation, the topic of biodiversity concerns stakeholders in sustainable agriculture; desertification, land degradation and drought; water and sanitation; health and sustainable development; energy; science, technology and innovation, knowledge-sharing and capacity-building; urban resilience and adaptation; sustainable transport; climate change and disaster risk reduction; oceans and seas; forests; vulnerable groups including indigenous peoples; and food security. From its creation by the Second Committee of the United Nations General Assembly in 1993 until 2000, it was held on December 29th to celebrate the day the Convention on Biological Diversity went into effect. On December 20th, 2000, the date was shifted to commemorate the adoption of the Convention on May 22nd, 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, and partly to avoid the many other holidays that occur in late December. National Maritime Day was created by the United States Congress on May 20th, 1933, as a day to recognize the maritime industry. The date was chosen to commemorate the date in 1819 when the American steamship Savannah set sail from Savannah, Georgia on the first ever transoceanic voyage under steam power.
Last night I finished reading The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook).
I woke up at 7:00 am after a restless night, fed the cats, and showered the front plants, the butterfly garden, and the porch plants. I started my laundry and the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan, posted to Facebook that today was the International Day for Biological Diversity, and posted to Facebook that today was National Maritime Day. I did my Book Review for this weblog and for my Goodreads account for The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook), paid bills, and did my Book Devotional Reading. I ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch, and did my Internet Devotional Reading. I scheduled my next mammograms at the Breast Center of Acadiana for May 20th, 2025, and called the Rectory to let them know my dates I cannot lector in June and July. I finished my laundry and cleaned my bathroom, and ordered soy flour (for my breadmaking) and a remote for our garage door opener that I can keep in my car. (I can use the app on my phone to open and close the garage door, but it’s a pain when I come home and have to get on my phone to do it.) At 11:45 am I went to the lab, where they drew blood and I left off a urine sample. (I need to do a stool sample for them, at my leisure.) At the SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama our LSU Tigers won their SEC College Baseball game with the Kentucky Wildcats (this round will be double elimination) by the score of 11 to 0 in eight innings. I got some cash at the ATM, and went to Walmart. At Regal Nails I called Richard (he was with Stephen, and about to leave to come home), and waited a good hour until I could get my nails done (no manicure). I then got household items and groceries at Walmart. I got home about three seconds after Richard got home from Baton Rouge at 2:30 pm; he had a good visit in Mississippi with his friend Steve. The Weekly Computer Maintenance had finished. I started reading Books: Their history, art, power, glory, infamy and suffering according to their creators, friends and enemies by Gerald Donaldson. After Jeopardy!, I called Liz Ellen, and got updated on her medical stuff with her cataract surgery. We then went to D.C.’s for dinner. We watched the finals of Jeopardy! Masters, and I will now finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed.
We have no Saints to honor tomorrow, but tomorrow is World Turtle Day. My late mother (died in 1985) was born on this date in 1929. The Full Moon will arrive at 8:53 am. I will wash the sheets and mattress cover, and I will run down to Lafayette to return books and pick up books at the library. We should be having crawfish tomorrow evening with Richard’s cousins. At the SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama our LSU Tigers will be playing an SEC College Baseball game (double elimination) with the South Carolina Gamecocks.
Our Parting Quote on this Wednesday evening comes to us from Judith Kerr, German-born British writer and illustrator (died 2019). Born in 1923 in Berlin, her father was Alfred Kerr, a theatre critic, and her mother was a composer who was the daughter of a Prussian politician. Her parents were both from German Jewish families. Early in March 1933, when she was nine years old, the family heard a rumour that, should the Nazis come to power in the forthcoming election, they planned to confiscate their passports and arrest Alfred Kerr for having openly criticised the party. The family fled Germany for Switzerland on the morning of the election and later learned that the Nazis had come to their home in Berlin the following morning to arrest them. Alfred Kerr’s books were burned by the Nazis shortly after he fled Germany. The family later travelled to France, before finally settling in Britain in 1936. During the Second World War, Kerr worked for the Red Cross, helping wounded soldiers, before being awarded a scholarship to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and becoming an artist. She met her future husband, screenwriter Nigel “Tom” Kneale, in the BBC canteen. He wrote the cult TV science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment for which Kerr helped make and operate the special effects. Kneale later prompted her to apply for a job as a BBC television scriptwriter. Kerr was naturalised as a British subject on June 21st, 1947. Kerr and Kneale were married in 1954, and they had two children. Although she dreamed of being a famous writer as a child, she only started writing and drawing books when her own children were learning to read. Her first self-illustrated picture book was The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968). Her next book was Mog the Forgetful Cat (1970), which was the first book of a twenty-seven book series; the character of Mog was based on a real-life tabby who would sit on Kerr’s lap as she worked. As well as young children’s books, Kerr wrote children’s novels such as the semi-autobiographical Out of the Hitler Time trilogy (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971; the story was based on her regret over choosing to take a stuffed dog toy with her when her family fled Germany rather than a beloved pink rabbit toy), Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as The Other Way Round, 1975) and A Small Person Far Away (1978)), which told the story, from a child’s perspective, of the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany and life as a refugee, life in Britain during World War II and life during the post-war years and the Cold War respectively. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1974. Her husband died in 2006. Twinkles, Arthur and Puss was published in 2008, and One Night in the Zoo in 2009. Kerr was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to children’s literature and Holocaust education. In 2013 Britain’s first bilingual state school in English and German, the Judith Kerr Primary School [de] in Herne Hill, south London, was named after her. In May 2019, a week before her death, she was nominated as an illustrator of the year at the British Book Awards. An archive of her illustrations is held at the Seven Stories centre in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Curse of the School Rabbit was published posthumously in 2019, and a cinematic adaptation of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit premiered in December 2019 in Germany, directed by Oscar-winning director Caroline Link (died 2019): “I think of the business of the Holocaust, and the one and a half million children who didn’t get out as I got out, in the nick of time — I think about them almost every day now, because I’ve had such a happy and fulfilled life and they’d have given anything to have had just a few days of it. And I hope I’ve not wasted any of it: I try to get the good of every bit of it because I know they would have done if they’d had the chance.”
From The Recamier 