January 10, 2022
"How does one hate a country, or love one? I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and roads. I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country: it is hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."
December 8, 2021
"As to the faith in Christ's incarnation, it is evident that the nearer men were to Christ, whether before or after Him, the more fully, for the most part, were they instructed on this point, and after Him more fully than before, as the Apostle declares." (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q. 174 a. 6 corp.)
November 6, 2021
"The Baroque stem [of devotion to the Sacred Heart] was only there to enable the growth of the grain of wheat that today is dying and falling into the earth, and that tomorrow will bring forth fruit: ... the fruit that is the folly of the cross and the courage to die in a world that believes it has overcome death because it hides the dying in hospitals and thinks it is bringing about life when it is just prolonging the death-agony." (Karl Rahner, Servants of the Lord)
October 14, 2021
"If we do not feel the weight of the passion, the cross, and the death, we cannot cope with the problem of providence without either hurt to ourselves or secret anger with God." (Martin Luther, "Preface to Romans")
November 12, 2020
"So the law and Melchisedek are preparatory sketches of the picture in colors, and grace and truth are that picture in colors, while reality belongs to the age to come, just as the Old is a type of a type, and the New a type of reality." (John of Damascus, Treatise I on the Divine Images)
November 11, 2020
"Without faith, celibacy just creates a clerical class of professional bachelors often locked in a depressive and lonely isolation devoid of any form of chaste intimacy." (Larry Chapp)
September 5, 2020
The fundamental attitude of the baptized is "to play extremely hard ball with the world by remaining constantly clearheaded about what the world can and cannot do for itself, and about its perennial need for grace and judgment. Christian orthodoxia steadily regards the world as abnormal by its own choice." (Aidan Kavanaugh, On Liturgical Theology)
July 24, 2020
"The very obscurity in which most of us raise our children, tend our homes, and practice our faith is part of what guards and nurtures growth in sanctity. If the world was watching or if we thought one day our story would be told, we probably could not be dependably detached from our egos in living out the Gospel. To be a mother is intrinsically a vocation to hiddenness, and this fact is perhaps what makes it most potentially satisfying." ("Motherhood as a Path to Sainthood")
cf. also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDSpWiGdEjw
June 19, 2020
"The Christian remains the guardian of that metaphysical wonderment which is the point of origin for philosophy and the continuation of which is the basis of its further existence. Wonderment is constantly on the point of turning into a marveling at the beauty of existence as a whole." (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
June 13, 2020
"You wish to reform the world? Reform yourself, otherwise your efforts will be in vain." (St. Ignatius of Loyola)
"We must try to have the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the intellectual approach of St. Dominic, the easy conversations about things that matter of St. Phillip Neri, the manual labor of St. Benedict." (Peter Maurin)
June 11, 2020
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table." (Ronald Reagan, "Farewell Address")
May 20, 2020
"This poor soul does not feel a single flicker of fervor but just the reverse, an extreme coldness that leaves it numb, and so weak that it constantly falls into really obvious imperfections--this soul is deeply wounded, because its love suffers greatly on seeing that God pretends not to see how much it loves him, leaving it as if it were something that did not belong to him; and it seems to the soul that amidst all its faults, distractions, and coldness, our Lord lets fly at it with this reproach: 'How can you say that you love me, since your soul is not with me?' This is like a dart of pain through the heart, but the pain comes from love, because if the soul did not love, it would not suffer as it does from the fear of not loving." (St. Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God)
May 17, 2020
"They want totalitarianism without brutality." (Michael O'Brien, Father Elijah)
April 24, 2020
"Ok, I could try way harder. But I don't think you can really have a life that's essentially self-giving if you're just putting together this kind of patchwork of volunteerism. You have to commit yourself to something, don't you? And it can't be just anything!" (Joey Prever)
April 22, 2020
"The problem with modernity is that it refuses to compromise with, and thereby incorporate, the moral goods of pre-modernity, not that modernity's goods are inferior or not goods at all." (Will Lombardo)
"We should not grieve because we write little and poorly, but because we pray little and poorly, and live in the wrong way." (Arvo Part)
"Lent is a time when we give up those things that help us hide from, or ease the sting of, our own innate spiritual poverty." (David Griffith)
April 16, 2020
"I have learned that if I only get what I already want there is no room for my desires to become what they should be. It is a poverty for me to accept only what I already want." (Emily Lindley)
April 3, 2020
"You are a woman who could be happy or unhappy, but never bored." (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
March 4, 2020
"it is not the proper duty of Christianity to form leaders--that is, builders of the temporal, although a legion of Christian leaders is infinitely desirable. Christianity must generate saints--that is, witnesses to the eternal. The efficacy of the saint is not that of the leader. The saint does not have to bring about great temporal achievements; he is one who succeeds in giving us at least a glimpse of eternity despite the thick opacity of time." (Henri de Lubac)
January 27, 2020
"The quest for good...requires listening to, respecting, and taking seriously the opinions and ways of others, precisely because all opinions seriously held and defended probably embody a certain intimation of what is true, and, at the very least, attest to the human concern with what is good and true, a universal concern more significant than the disparity among the opinions held on these matters." (Leon Kass)
September 22, 2019
"when we ask someone, who are you?, most often we want to ask, what is your name? Or: what is your profession? Or, again, Why are you here? What are you doing here? But when the question is genuine and deep, when it corresponds to a desire to know the person as such, the only response is: "You will see...you will see." Moreover, it cannot be given except in an experience rooted in love or friendship. Love consists precisely in the space that is opened, in which the person can say, or rather, show, what he or she is. Or rather, what he or she will be." (Remi Brague)
"the first thing of which we must be convinced is that all the good we can do comes from God and from Him alone: apart from me you can do nothing, Jesus said (John 15:5). He did not say, "you can't do much," but you can do nothing. It is essential that we be persuaded of this truth. We often have to experience failures, trials, and humiliations, permitted by God, before this truth imposes itself on us, not only on an intellectual level, but as an experience of our entire being." (Fr. Jacques Phillipe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace)
September 16, 2019
"In the Bridegroom's face each of us finds a similarity to the faces of those with whom love has entangled us on this side of life, of existence. They are all in him." (Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop)
"How does one hate a country, or love one? I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing...Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope." (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness)
September 13, 2019
"And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment."
(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding")
September 10, 2019
"the holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was...every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. the fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities." (Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness)
"as an adult, I can't accurately judge whether that experience was spiritual or aesthetic. I suspect that those two categories of perception are more interdependent than most people believe, especially in a child." (Dana Gioia, "Singing Aquinas in L.A.)
September 8, 2019
"I mean, I had to be interested in her, and at the same time I accepted the fact that I had to. Though I could have behaved differently from the way I felt I must, I thought there would be no point...love can be a collision in which two selves realize profoundly they ought to belong to each other, even though they have no convenient moods and sensations." (Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop)
August 25, 2019
"Whenever we want to ask some favor of a powerful man, we do it humbly and respectfully, for fear of presumption. How much more important, then, to lay our petitions before the Lord God of all things with the utmost humility and sincere devotion. We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words. Prayer should therefore be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace. In community, however, prayer should always be brief, and when the superior gives the signal, all should rise together." (St. Benedict, Rule, Chapter 20: Reverence in Prayer)
August 1, 2019
"The Liturgy is organically linked to our nature, and leads us by organic degrees of transformation toward the supernatural. In the Liturgy, too, of course, we die with Christ in order to arise with Him; in the Liturgy, too, we die to the world in order to live to God; but this dying is an organic process: it does not mean a killing off and a forced denial of nature, an artificial benumbing, but an inner emptying of oneself for God. This way of linking nature with the supernatural is precisely typical of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic path of transformation in Christ.
An example of this is the attitude toward suffering in prayer. When St. Teresa asked God for suffering in order to be still more closely linked with the suffering of Christ, this was an organic consequence of the degree of her communion with God and the special graces in which she participated. Her prayer is therefore true, valid, and of sublime greatness. But if we wanted to begin our transformation and our conforming to Christ by asking for suffering, this would be an inorganic, forced, and untrue attitude. This would be to behave as if we had no nature. The organic way in praying to God is to ask Him to protect us from sufferings and ordeals if it please His holy will to do so; but if in His divine providence God chooses to send us sufferings, we should ask Him to give us the strength to bear them in the spirit of Christ. Such precisely are the prayers of the Liturgy.
In the Litany of All Saints on Holy Saturday, we pray: 'A peste, fame, et bello, libera nos, Domine' (From plague, famine, and war, deliver us, O Lord); 'A fulgure et tempestate, libera nos, Domine' (From lightning and tempest, deliver us, O Lord)." (Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality)
"The very obscurity in which most of us raise our children, tend our homes, and practice our faith is part of what guards and nurtures growth in sanctity. If the world was watching or if we thought one day our story would be told, we probably could not be dependably detached from our egos in living out the Gospel. To be a mother is intrinsically a vocation to hiddenness, and this fact is perhaps what makes it most potentially satisfying." ("Motherhood as a Path to Sainthood")
cf. also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDSpWiGdEjw
June 19, 2020
"The Christian remains the guardian of that metaphysical wonderment which is the point of origin for philosophy and the continuation of which is the basis of its further existence. Wonderment is constantly on the point of turning into a marveling at the beauty of existence as a whole." (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
June 13, 2020
"You wish to reform the world? Reform yourself, otherwise your efforts will be in vain." (St. Ignatius of Loyola)
"We must try to have the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the intellectual approach of St. Dominic, the easy conversations about things that matter of St. Phillip Neri, the manual labor of St. Benedict." (Peter Maurin)
June 11, 2020
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table." (Ronald Reagan, "Farewell Address")
May 20, 2020
"This poor soul does not feel a single flicker of fervor but just the reverse, an extreme coldness that leaves it numb, and so weak that it constantly falls into really obvious imperfections--this soul is deeply wounded, because its love suffers greatly on seeing that God pretends not to see how much it loves him, leaving it as if it were something that did not belong to him; and it seems to the soul that amidst all its faults, distractions, and coldness, our Lord lets fly at it with this reproach: 'How can you say that you love me, since your soul is not with me?' This is like a dart of pain through the heart, but the pain comes from love, because if the soul did not love, it would not suffer as it does from the fear of not loving." (St. Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God)
May 17, 2020
"They want totalitarianism without brutality." (Michael O'Brien, Father Elijah)
April 24, 2020
"Ok, I could try way harder. But I don't think you can really have a life that's essentially self-giving if you're just putting together this kind of patchwork of volunteerism. You have to commit yourself to something, don't you? And it can't be just anything!" (Joey Prever)
April 22, 2020
"The problem with modernity is that it refuses to compromise with, and thereby incorporate, the moral goods of pre-modernity, not that modernity's goods are inferior or not goods at all." (Will Lombardo)
"We should not grieve because we write little and poorly, but because we pray little and poorly, and live in the wrong way." (Arvo Part)
"Lent is a time when we give up those things that help us hide from, or ease the sting of, our own innate spiritual poverty." (David Griffith)
April 16, 2020
"I have learned that if I only get what I already want there is no room for my desires to become what they should be. It is a poverty for me to accept only what I already want." (Emily Lindley)
April 3, 2020
"You are a woman who could be happy or unhappy, but never bored." (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
March 4, 2020
"it is not the proper duty of Christianity to form leaders--that is, builders of the temporal, although a legion of Christian leaders is infinitely desirable. Christianity must generate saints--that is, witnesses to the eternal. The efficacy of the saint is not that of the leader. The saint does not have to bring about great temporal achievements; he is one who succeeds in giving us at least a glimpse of eternity despite the thick opacity of time." (Henri de Lubac)
January 27, 2020
"The quest for good...requires listening to, respecting, and taking seriously the opinions and ways of others, precisely because all opinions seriously held and defended probably embody a certain intimation of what is true, and, at the very least, attest to the human concern with what is good and true, a universal concern more significant than the disparity among the opinions held on these matters." (Leon Kass)
September 22, 2019
"when we ask someone, who are you?, most often we want to ask, what is your name? Or: what is your profession? Or, again, Why are you here? What are you doing here? But when the question is genuine and deep, when it corresponds to a desire to know the person as such, the only response is: "You will see...you will see." Moreover, it cannot be given except in an experience rooted in love or friendship. Love consists precisely in the space that is opened, in which the person can say, or rather, show, what he or she is. Or rather, what he or she will be." (Remi Brague)
"the first thing of which we must be convinced is that all the good we can do comes from God and from Him alone: apart from me you can do nothing, Jesus said (John 15:5). He did not say, "you can't do much," but you can do nothing. It is essential that we be persuaded of this truth. We often have to experience failures, trials, and humiliations, permitted by God, before this truth imposes itself on us, not only on an intellectual level, but as an experience of our entire being." (Fr. Jacques Phillipe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace)
September 16, 2019
"In the Bridegroom's face each of us finds a similarity to the faces of those with whom love has entangled us on this side of life, of existence. They are all in him." (Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop)
"How does one hate a country, or love one? I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing...Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope." (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness)
September 13, 2019
"And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment."
(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding")
September 10, 2019
"the holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was...every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. the fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities." (Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness)
"as an adult, I can't accurately judge whether that experience was spiritual or aesthetic. I suspect that those two categories of perception are more interdependent than most people believe, especially in a child." (Dana Gioia, "Singing Aquinas in L.A.)
September 8, 2019
"I mean, I had to be interested in her, and at the same time I accepted the fact that I had to. Though I could have behaved differently from the way I felt I must, I thought there would be no point...love can be a collision in which two selves realize profoundly they ought to belong to each other, even though they have no convenient moods and sensations." (Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop)
August 25, 2019
"Whenever we want to ask some favor of a powerful man, we do it humbly and respectfully, for fear of presumption. How much more important, then, to lay our petitions before the Lord God of all things with the utmost humility and sincere devotion. We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words. Prayer should therefore be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace. In community, however, prayer should always be brief, and when the superior gives the signal, all should rise together." (St. Benedict, Rule, Chapter 20: Reverence in Prayer)
August 1, 2019
"The Liturgy is organically linked to our nature, and leads us by organic degrees of transformation toward the supernatural. In the Liturgy, too, of course, we die with Christ in order to arise with Him; in the Liturgy, too, we die to the world in order to live to God; but this dying is an organic process: it does not mean a killing off and a forced denial of nature, an artificial benumbing, but an inner emptying of oneself for God. This way of linking nature with the supernatural is precisely typical of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic path of transformation in Christ.
An example of this is the attitude toward suffering in prayer. When St. Teresa asked God for suffering in order to be still more closely linked with the suffering of Christ, this was an organic consequence of the degree of her communion with God and the special graces in which she participated. Her prayer is therefore true, valid, and of sublime greatness. But if we wanted to begin our transformation and our conforming to Christ by asking for suffering, this would be an inorganic, forced, and untrue attitude. This would be to behave as if we had no nature. The organic way in praying to God is to ask Him to protect us from sufferings and ordeals if it please His holy will to do so; but if in His divine providence God chooses to send us sufferings, we should ask Him to give us the strength to bear them in the spirit of Christ. Such precisely are the prayers of the Liturgy.
In the Litany of All Saints on Holy Saturday, we pray: 'A peste, fame, et bello, libera nos, Domine' (From plague, famine, and war, deliver us, O Lord); 'A fulgure et tempestate, libera nos, Domine' (From lightning and tempest, deliver us, O Lord)." (Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality)
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