January 2012
166 posts
9 tags
“We long for the promised reign. Dare we hope? Will the JUST ONE come, a strong...”
– Janet Schlighting, The Scriptures of the Season: Words of Desire (via beautifuladvent)
December 2011
166 posts
9 tags
“In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
“In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons...”
– W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (via wesleyhill)
7 tags
“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
10 tags
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“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
“Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the...”
– Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (via residueatlas)
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“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
“And what else did [the first witnesses of Jesus’ public ministry] see? Here we...”
– Oliver O’Donovan (via wesleyhill)
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“With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not...”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
The best poem.
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“Theologian Jean-Luc Marion, in his book God without Being, addresses idols. An idol, for Marion, is that which consigns the divine to the measure of the human gaze. It is not mysterious or unknown or evasive. The idol ‘never deserves to be denounced as illusory since, by definition [that is, by the word’s etymology], it is seen. It even consists only in the fact that it can be seen, that one...
8 tags
“We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
1 tag
4 tags
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“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
“One of my greatest difficulties in considering to think of religion … was that I...”
– George MacDonald, letter to his father, quoted in Life and Religion Are One - Christian History & Biography (via triadic)
7 tags
“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the...”
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
3 tags
“The more we reduce faith to vague religiosity that serves primarily to energize,...”
– Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith, p. 40. (via hargaden)
8 tags
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern...”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
5 tags
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“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a...”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
1 tag
“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to...”
– Henri Nouwen (via mikegarycole)
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“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which...”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
“A church that feels that Christ has no quarrel with Caesar as long as he is...”
– William H. Willimon, Pastor (via existtheblog)
5 tags
“And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the...”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
8 tags
Sam Wells, "Christmas Needs to Get More...
This is Christianity: not some set of disembodied ideals and noble values, but the life shaped around the logic of God in a human form, at Christmas found in a tiny crying baby, on Good Friday found in a naked man hanging on a cross, on Easter Day found in the wonder of a man defeating death and opening the gates of glory. And this is what we find difficult about Christianity: not its sense of the...
6 tags
The logic of God became an actual person. That which the great philosophers had taken to be inscrutable fate became tangible flesh. The great and mighty Yahweh, the one whom the children of Israel were warned they could not even set eyes on, came among us as a human being. The message of God became a man. What mattered became matter. Meaning became material.
- Sam Wells, Christmas Eve Sermon 2006
2 tags
“We give you thanks for the babe born in violence.
We give you thanks for the...”
– Walter Brueggemann, “In violence and travail,” in Awed from Heaven, Rooted In Earth: the Prayers of Walter Brueggemann (via catechumenate)
So good.
4 tags
“Holy Saturday provides a vocabulary consonant with being a survivor. It is a...”
– Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma (via shortbreadsh)
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T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"
A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing...
7 tags
“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only...”
– T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (Four Quartets)
“Israel’s God’s bodied love continues world-making.
The modifier “Israel”...”
– Walter Brueggemann, Gospel in Seven Words. (via mshedden)
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“We Christians confess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in “one, holy,...”
– Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters
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St. John Chrysostom's Christmas Homily
Behold a new and wondrous mystery. My ears resound to the Shepherd’s song, piping no soft melody, but chanting full forth a heavenly hymn. The Angels sing. The Archangels blend their voice in harmony. The Cherubim hymn their joyful praise. The Seraphim exalt His glory. All join to praise this holy feast, beholding the Godhead here on earth, and man in heaven. He Who is above, now for our...
“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled...”
– Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” (via alaina)
9 tags
Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and...
9 tags
“The allegedly autonomous self who acknowledges no authority but himself is...”
– Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters
“Worship is the natural overflow of those who, with humble and grateful heart,...”
– Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year (via sethhaines)
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“There are no doubt unthinking Catholics. Asked what they believe, they say they...”
– Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters
liveandlovethequestions:
” We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
Always reblog.
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“It is true that, as the sixteenth-century St. Ignatius of Loyola put it, we...”
– Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters
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“The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused...”
– Saint Basil the Great (via theophilus79)
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A Defense of Rash Vows →
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have...
“For the love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one...”
– 2 Cor 5:14-15 (via shortbreadsh)
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“You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.”
– G.K. Chesterton
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“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
– G.K. Chesterton
“Ere long the Bible says to us, in a manner candid and friendly enough, with...”
– Karl Barth (via mshedden)
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“And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but...”
– G.K. Chesterton