THE SPRING IS NOT FOR ME

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Advent is about the light shining in darkness. Lent is about the human condition.

The message delivered by our contemporary world is: You can have it all. You can have things your way. You can outwit death by engineering your life.

That cross marked on our foreheads last Wednesday delivers a very different message: Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Feb. 11 was the optional memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, and as Lent approached I thought to watch the old black-and-white movie, “The Song of Bernadette” (1943). Based on the popular Franz Werfel novel, the film stars a surprisingly affecting Jennifer Jones in the title role.

Never mind that Bernadette is 14 as the story begins and Jones was 24, with the kind of perfectly sculpted eyebrows, clear skin, and well-kept hands unlikely to have been found among the 19th-century French peasantry. 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.