December 2010
27 posts
Light and the Luminous Darkness
“Since Moses was alone, by having been stripped as it were of the people’s fear, he boldly approached the very darkness itself and entered the invisible things where he was no longer seen by those watching. After he entered the inner sanctuary of the divine mystical doctrine, there, while not being seen, he was in company with the Invisible. He teaches, I think, by the things he did...
“Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is...”
– Pope Benedict, XVI
Christmas, Benedict, Freedom →
Advent and the Incarnation →
Some beautiful reflections on the essence of the advent season.
“Let us trust life because this night must lead to light. Let us trust life because we do not have to live it alone.”
The Posture of Grace
“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding….If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.”
- Marylinne Robinson,...
“You never trust a millionaire Quoting the...
“The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is not allowed to follow man,...”
– G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature. 1913. London: Oxford UP, 1947. (via philokalia)
The Secret and the Sacred
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten...
“Love is holy, because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never...”
– Marylinne Robinson, Gilead
Second Elegy, Rilke
Every angel is terrifying. ...
…what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
-middlemarch, george eliot
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and...”
– George Eliot, in Middlemarch (via wesleyhill)
“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (via alaina)
Oh sacred grove, now wounded, what can requite thy worth? Word, grooved with caring hand to word, a craft to bear us, earth to earth. -David Waltner-Toews
Gaelan's Fabric Dwelling of the Day →
Orthodoxy and Mysticism: Turning the City into a... →
The Ground of Our Beseeching: A Christian...
But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
-Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
The idea of place in T.S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets is a self-evident motif. Given the titles of each of its four sections (Burnt Norton, East Coker, Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding), all being names of geographic locations, and the ruminations that proceed from...
A Father's Love
I have said at least once a week my whole adult life that there is an absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little. (I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.)
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead