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An idea so far not accepted
‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’ … It is an idea given to our civilization but so far not...
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Creation
Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden Being. Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology Tagged: creation, Philip Sherrard,...
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In sheep pastures …
The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in...
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A stable-place sufficed
Our God, Heaven cannot hold him Nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away When he comes to reign: In the bleak mid-winter A stable-place sufficed The Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ. From...
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Where to put one’s gratitude
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty did never quite engage me in the way that I had expected, but here are what for me were the book’s three highlights: … poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. And so it...
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Sermons and churches
Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without...
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Modern Christianity has stood silently by
Modern Christianity … has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and...
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Looking into one another’s eyes
In his essay ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community’, Berry laments contemporary society’s ‘gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eyes, to the specifically sexual anatomy’,...
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The gifts of sun and moon, of ancient mountains and eternal hills
I pray that his land is blessed by God: with heaven’s gifts from above, with the deep waters stretching out underneath; with the gifts produced by the sun, with the gifts generated by the moon; with...
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No one would take him for a clergyman
Two thoughts from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View … … one a profound comment by the narrrator: The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but...
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If I kill my enemy
Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily...
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Time to wonder
Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary: The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and...
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Very bad news for competitive blokes
Some admittedly rather varied passages from Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of: The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. Here’s one that made me...
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Saint or Communist?
When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why they were poor, they called me a Communist. Dom Helder Camara Tagged: communist, Dom Helder Camara, poor, random thoughts, saint
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Perfect rest is an art
Some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wonderful and inspiring book The Sabbath, first published in 1951: There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give,...
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Lower the defences
Dialogue is born from a respectful attitude toward the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of...
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The brute from the slime
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty...
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Scars
Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body. Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots Tagged: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Paul Vallely, Pope Francis,...
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Authentic power
And another quote by Pope Francis, again as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots: Let us never forget that authentic power is service. . Tagged: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Paul Vallely,...
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The mind and the senses
They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever...
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