. . . and can hurt a lot, say some surprising sources.

[The French poet Charles] Péguy [1873-1914] was always a curious Catholic, anticlerical and unconvinced of the value of the sacraments. His marriage remained sacrosanct, even after his return to faith caused severe tensions with his wife and children (they only joined the Church after his death).

The reviewer analyzes his poems and his belief as contained in them.

The climactic vision [of his poem “Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu,”] is of God finding his hands . . .  tied by Christ’s disclosure of his mercy. No soul . . .  can ultimately withstand the power of God’s love [he believed]. Eternal damnation had always appalled Péguy as an idea . . . . This poem ends by celebrating its impossibility.

Through [it] resounds the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Referring to the same parable in…

Verycarefully.

Before Mass:  I prepare myself for the most important encounter of my life: a banquet with Our Lord.

I try to get to Confession the day before Mass, and if I don’t, I spend time meditating on my sins and begging God’s mercy.

I honor the fast which, contrary to widespread belief, has never been eliminated from Church teaching. I do not eat for at least one hour before the Mass. If I have the strength, I honor God by fasting from midnight before.

When I dress, I remember that I am going to meet Someone more important than any king, queen, or president. So I do not dress as if I am going to the beach or a picnic; if others do, I do not follow them. I wear clothes that reflect my belief that Mass is important and deserving of respect. If I’m male, this…

It has been done, in this case by a master.

In his introduction to the 1946 Scribner’s edition of Henry James’s The American Scene, W.H. Auden observes that while travel is the “easiest subject for the journalist” who requires only “a flair for being on the spot where interesting events happen,” it is the most difficult for the artist, “who is deprived of the freedom to invent, free only to select and never to modify or add, which calls for imagination of a very high order.”

Except that, as Auden goes on to show, James found ways to invent, modify, or add, exploiting his “descriptive conceits” with rhapsodies on “the golden apples of the Jersey shore” and the pleasure of “being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition?”

A newspaper writer…