Spec-tac-u-lar

A phone message last night that my new glasses are ready to be picked up. I think I'll go get them on Friday, the Official Day Off.
It is still cold, and it goes on snowing (TIDDLY POM), just a little, just enough to make the roads surprising all over again every morning.
Vagaries of the postal system -- I've had three successive issues of the Times Literary Supplement all in the last couple of days. The TLS is favourite in-bed reading -- nice and light, so if I fall asleep and drop it, it won't hurt me (unlike, say, the Larousse Gastronomique--ouf!)
In the most recent of the newly-arrived issues is a very good review by John Polkinghorne of books by John Cornwell and John Humphrys -- I like Polkinghorne's mind (hey! I agree with him, but that's not the whole story) and frankly at this point it is a comfort to find anybody on either side of the New Atheism debate with any detectable mind at all. Somebody pointed out -- maybe it was Terry Eagleton? -- that while the statements about religious faith and about Christianity made by people like Dawkins and Hitchens cause serious, careful, responsible Christian thinkers to clutch their heads in despair...so does the thinking, not to mention the behaviour, of a great many Christians...
I remember one of my students at Local University who said he couldn't understand why I was going to be ordained, when "everybody knew" that "anybody who has anything to do with religion, and, like, churches, is, sort of...well...DUMB." And he seemed quite intrigued by the notion that there was anything to LEARN or to THINK ABOUT in religious belief, at all--although flatteringly willing to take my word for it, when I assured him that if he ever really wanted to give his brains a work-out, I could introduce him to a couple of fellows named Rahner and von Balthasar, just to name two.
Now I have to write a letter to a dear elderly parishioner who is HONING to donate a stained glass window in memory of her late husband, and has set aside what she feels is quite a munificent sum, so to do -- and it is; but it would buy a stained glass window about the size of a cat-flap, and it's my job to point this out to her, gently and lovingly. Who's the patron saint of tact, does anybody know???