Good morning, digital neighbors! Happy Wednesday, my friends across the inter-webs! Today we celebrate the feast of St. Jerome, who gifted the early Church with the Vulgate, the Latin translation of Sacred Scripture from the Hebrew and Greek. It was not without its faults; to translate is to lose something in the process. There are subtleties of language and nuances of speech that do not always carry over from one language to another.

Jerome's big conversion moment was a dream in which Jesus told him that he loved Latin literature more than Him. And Jerome did love Latin; he was fond of Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, and many minor authors. He had difficulties with other languages and was not overly fond of Greek or Hebrew, but even with all his complaints, he strove to learn them so he could faithfully translate the Scriptures into Latin, making them available to any who wanted to read them in the common tongue of the West. The eastern part of the empire still relied on Greek as its common language.

His life's work was the translation of Scripture and his immersion in it. When I think about Jerome's life, I am prompted to wonder: what do you and I consume with our minds? What we regularly consume, we become, even when we are unaware of it. The brokenness of culture is the fruit of poor and often evil consumption. Since WWII, our cultural guardians and anchors have abandoned their posts to become our cultural overlords. The media no longer informs, political careerists no longer serve, academia no longer educates, entertainment no longer celebrates our story, and Big Pharma and Big Tech serve only their bottom line.

All these former guardians of culture want to find ways to create more quislings, control the self-serving herd, and silence opposition. The easiest way to control is to dumb down and distract. They make sure we live only on an emotional level of reaction. None of us are called to be Vulcans, devoid of emotion, but when we live primarily on that level of emotional engagement, we surrender the growth that only comes when we allow our minds and imaginations to awaken to the wonders of ideas and concepts that are at first beyond our comprehension but may be acquired with effort and study.

I mention all this because each of us decides what content, ideas, longings, or distractions gain access to our interior space. Even if it never gets past the front room of emotional reaction, what you let into your interior space is on you. Jerome wanted God to be Lord of that space, and even with all his foibles and faults, Jerome knew that was his only hope. He was not an easy person to befriend. His life was marked by a quarrelsome nature, easily offended pride, and a temptation to sarcasm in his personal letters. Despite all that, he strove to love God and, from all accounts, to love his neighbor. A few quotes from the man to round out the day:

"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." (Commentary on Isaiah, Prologue)

"When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting." (Letter 58, to Paulinus)

"A clergyman who engages in business, and who rises from poverty to wealth, and from obscurity to a high position, avoid as you would the plague." (Letter 52, to Nepotian)

"A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept." (Letter 3, to Rufinus)

"Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you." (Letter 22, to Eustochium)

"Never inspect the teeth of a gift horse." (Commentary on Ephesians, Preface)

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