“He wills that we take ourselves with great strength to the faith of holy Church and find there our most precious mother in comfort and true understanding with the whole communion of blessed ones. For a person by himself can frequently be broken, as it seems to himself, but the whole body of holy Church…
Quotes
The Church will become poor
It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek… The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the…
Blessed are you, O Christ
Blessed are you, O Christ our God. You have revealed the fishermen as most wise. By sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, through them you have drawn the world into your net. O Lover of all, glory to you. Once the Most High came down and confused the tongues and divided the nations; but…
Claudel:
Now it is no longer the Word alone, but the Word made flesh that, by means of the Holy Spirit, draws from the Father the breath with which to express him to himself. -Paul Claudel, I Believe: A Meditation on the Apostles’ Creed
Miroslav Volf:
Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God–a “foursome,” as it were–for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also…
Grace is the divine possibility
Grace is the divine possibility for men which robs them, as men, of their own possibilities. Grace is the relating of the visible man to his invisible personality which is grounded in God. Grace is related to the visible man as death is to life. . . We believe in our identity with the invisible…
Beauty makes us remember
Beauty makes us remember… We remember that we are exiles. We remember that the object of our longing has either not yet arrived or has gone away. We remember that we are utopian beings, with no solid ground under our feet. Beauty uproots us from the solid realities of our daily lives, the ‘reality principle,’…
The cantus firmus
There is always a danger of intense love destroying what I might call the ‘polyphony’ of life. What I mean is that God requires that we should love him eternally with our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus firmus to which the…
Donne
Thou know’st thy selfe so little, as thou know’st not, How thou did’st die, nor how thou wast begot. Thou neither knowst, how thou at first camest in, Nor how thou took’st the poyson of mans sin. Nor dost thou (though thou knowst, that thou art so) By what way thou art made immortall, know….
Between the gulfs
I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed. -Martin Buber