Priest Birthday Quotes

It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. "But Don Paolo, are you not happy?" she asked him. "Of course I am happy," he assured the little girl. "Why, then, aren't you crying?

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life.... What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?

The priest and the Marquis spent many pleasant afternoons in the courtyard discussing whether the universe was a mindless machine or the creation of a loving God. The priest argued in terms of philosophy and metaphysics, but the Marquis was temperamentally an empiricist and argued always in terms of what the world was actually like. "Look at the smallpox," he would say. "Kills a few hundred thousand every month all over Europe. What kind of Benevolent Intelligence decided to give us that as a birthday present? Did He have constipation that day, to put him in a foul enough mood to perpetuate such a fiendish joke at our expense?

Epigraphs from Ballroom Dancing: An Erotic Romance of Dominance and Submission "He’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married, needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you." —Jacqueline Bouvier, July, 1952, making an observation about her future husband in a letter to her priest “Father L,” the Reverend Joseph Leonard of Dublin, Ireland. "Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, Mr. President..." —Norma Jeane Mortenson, May 19, 1962, Madison Square Garden, New York City.

I suppose what's similar about being on actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; trying to live accordingly. The Kingdom of God is here, now. That's what that's all about.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

Take this story from the southwest of Ireland. One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. “For every bone you find up there in that attic,” she said to him, “you can add a year of my life.” Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

However, as Tata got older, he even tolerated some religious rituals around him to please his friends and admirers. On Tata's ninetieth birthday, I saw an amusing instance of this tolerance. Tata's good friend Mattur Krishnamurthy, a devout Brahminical theist and Sanskrit scholar, who had headed the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London, had come to Saligrama to greet him. He brought along two tall, plump Brahmin priests from his village near Shivamogga. In that hamlet steeped in Vedic traditions, many reportedly speak Sanskrit as a matter of routine. The priests had brought jagates (musical instruments) and some vibhuti (sacred ashes). Krishnamurthy first sought Tata's permission. Thereafter, the priests smeared some vibhuti on Tata, and, loudly clanging the jagates, they bellowed Sanskrit slokas. While Krishnamurthy was beaming with happiness, the bored-looking priests performed by rote. Tata stood still with a bemused look on his face. At the end of it all, Tata said he was pleased that his friend was happy.

I don’t have any memories from before my fifth birthday. What I know about my past is only what I was told: that I was found by a priest at the temple and eventually adopted by Roark and his wife.