Worth Reading: Sustenance for Lenten Reflection

Worth reading in the past several days--worth reading specifically because of the spiritual sustenance these pieces provide for Lenten reflection:

1. Joe Feuerherd's commentary in National Catholic Reporter on the recent Cuomo debacle.  Feuerherd is more charitable than I was re: Archbishop Timothy Dolan, when I commented on the Cuomo story--and his commentary is worth reading for that charity and balance alone.  But it also contains more valuable background information about the connection between Edward Peters, who has raised the stink about Gov. Cuomo's reception of communion given his lifestyle, and Cardinal Raymond Burke.  And (reading between the lines) about the  (Republican) political agendas of both Peters and Burke.

2.  Matthew Dowd at Huffington Post writing about Persian poet Rumi and St. Francis of Assisi as valuable complementary witnesses to "the healing power of love in thought and action" at a time in which Islamic Americans are being explicitly targeted by the malicious hearings now being held by Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee. 

3. Lawrence Downes in today's New York Times noting the publication several months ago of selected letters of Catholic activist Dorothy Day in a volume entitled All the Way to Heaven, and proposing Day as a saint for our time.

4. As the anniversary of the martyrdom of Oscar Romero approaches, Jayden Cameron's commemoration of this other extremely important saint for our period of history at Jayden's Gay Mystic blog--with a wonderful snippet from a recent performance of Rene Ochoa's Misa del Pueblo at Prague's Basilica of Sts. Simon and Jude.

5. And John McNeill's beautiful meditation (at his Spiritual Transformation blog) on the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts, and of the emphasis in Judaism's prophetic tradition on the messianic inclusion of the non-procreative (e.g., eunuchs) in the community of God's people.

To all: happy Lenten Sunday, happy Lenten reading.