(…will be added to gradually as I clean out the emailbox)

Congratulations to reader, commenter and fellow FW resident Yvonne, who gave birth to her 7th child – and 7th son –   last week – Benjamin. He’s beautiful!

From Cleveland, a nice story about a writer of icons:

Chris Rigby can take her simmering ardor and painstakingly arrange it on wood until a painting emerges. But she’s not an artist. Her teacher said so.

"An artist creates work of self-expression," teacher Dennis Bell said, "but an iconographer feels there’s nothing in his petty little life worth expressing."

The pale blonde has no trouble with his words.

"I’m as common and ordinary as dirt," said Rigby of Hudson. But, like her, her icons of Eastern Orthodox Christian biblical figures glow from within. She drapes them in sumptuously colored robes, and encircles the heads of the holy with luminescent gold halos.

Self-expression never entered into Rigby’s decision to learn to paint "windows to the divine," as she sees icons. Although she is Roman Catholic, icons inspired her to better understand the Christian faith.

"I write the icon, and the icon writes me. It teaches me. It changes me," she said.

A reminder of Michael’s Office of Readings podcast – subscription page here. You don’t have to subscribe, though. You can just listen to individual podcasts as you please. Here is today’s. MIchael was on an hour-long show on Chicago Catholic radio on Friday, talking about Lent with several others. Here’s the podcast of that program.

I’ll be on Sirius – on Lino Rulli’s show – this evening at 5pm.