More and More More: Coincidentally?

So on Saturday, March 1, my husband and I had to watch Wichita State University's last home game of the 2013-2014 season on ESPN. In case you don't know it, our alma mater just concluded a perfect season, 31 wins and 0 losses. They are on their way to St. Louis for the Missouri Valley Conference tournament and need to beat three teams to win that championship too--they have already won the Missouri Valley regular season. They've already beaten every team in the conference twice, home and away, so we are confident they can do it again--and then off to the NCAA March Madness.

After watching the game, I needed to run an errand to Eighth Day Books because my cake stand was still there. I'd left the cake remaining from the February 21 GKC meeting for weekend staff and shoppers to enjoy, hadn't had time to pick it up once the cake was eaten, and wanted to bake another cake. Business was slow at Eighth Day Books; perhaps other shoppers had been watching the game. To support my local bookseller, I bought this Vintage Spiritual Classics edition of works by St. Thomas More. I plan to read The Sadness of Christ during Lent.

Thomas More is perhaps most familiar to us from his courageous struggle with Henry VIII, unforgettably portrayed in Robert Bolt’s classic, A Man for All Seasons. But that final struggle, which ended in his execution for treason, was only the crowning act in a life that he had devoted to God long before.

In the first selection in decades made for the general reader from his collected works, this volume traces More’s journey of moral conviction in his own words and writings. Drawing on a variety of More’s late writings–the extraordinary “Tower Works,” written in prison, his poignant last letters to his daughter Margaret, and his poems, private prayers and devotional works–this collection will provide even readers lacking a background in Renaissance humanism or history with a rich introduction to a startlingly modern man of spiritual principle. Also included is the famous “Life of Sir Thomas More,” written by his son-in-law, William Roper.

Home again and the cake in the oven, I turn on TCM, and there's A Man for All Seasons! And then, looking back at the book I just bought, I read the Preface by Father Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. in which he rightly points out that Robert Bolt misrepresented St. Thomas More's view of conscience. Timing!

My late father had a saying, "If dog, rabbit", usually to describe why something didn't happen. In this case, something so wonderfully coincidental or even serendipitous wouldn't have come together if I hadn't wanted to bake a cake. "If cake, More"?