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Michelangelo’s painting of the Prophet Jeremiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Michelangelo once remarked that “in painting, the idea is an image that the intellect of the painter has to see with interior eyes in the greatest silence and secrecy.”¹ There are two aspects to the comment. One is that meaning in art is veiled and secret; the other that silence is necessary for contemplation and conception.

Dear reader of my blog.  The Holy Spirit moves me to make a confession.  God has blessed/cursed me with a multi-faceted personality.  Note well that I did not say that I have multiple personalities.  It is just that some days I feel that the Holy Spirit is calling me to be Jeremiah.  So, I blog my way through the internet ( a modern-day Nineveh) posting calls for repentance for electing Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States of America.  Or, I chastise my brother bishops for being cowards in the face of the diabolical attacks on the Church by dissidents, relativists, secularists, agnostics, heretics, atheists, hedonists, and others who seek to destroy the Church, which of course they cannot do because Jesus Christ has guaranteed its immortality, but not its freedom from pain.

Then on other days I feel that the Holy Spirit is calling me to be like Saint Phillip Neri, allowing my sense of humor (at times a far-out, wierd sense of humor) to influence the posts that I write on this blog.  I am not aware that here is any record of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, laughing or even smiling.  Yet because he was perfectly man it is impossible that he did not have a sense of humor.  {Charlie Johnston reminds me that little children were drawn to Our Lord.  Yes, Jesus surely smiled at them.  Who can resist smiling at the faces of innocent children who look at you with such trust.  Jesus would not have been human on those occasions when he was surrounded by laughing, smiling children if he did not smile back at them !!!} It was just that the mission entrusted him by the Father was so grave (no pun intended) that it would have been out of character for him to show his sense of humor.  Yet, even in what he did one can detect an element of humor.  Take for instance the twelve men he chose to be his apostles.  Surely they were the least qualified of all men to be the founders of His Church.  Until the descent of the Holy Spirit on them they frequently spoke and acted like a bunch of fools.  Saint Phillip Neri continually surprised and even shocked people by the things he sad and did, all with a mischievous twinkle in his eye or smile on his face.   That John Henry Newman became a member of his religious order is something of a stamp of approval on Saint Phillp Neri’s far-out sense of humor.

So bear with me, dear Reader!!!