“Nothing is more educative for man in his totality than the liturgy. The Bible is certainly a marvelous teacher of prayer, of the sense of God and of the adult convictions of conscience. Used alone, the Bible might produce a Christian of the Puritan tradition, an individualist and even a visionary. The liturgy, however, is the ‘authentic method instituted by the Church to unite souls to Jesus.’ The sort of Christian produced by an enlightened and docile participation in the liturgy is a man of peace and unified in every fibre of his human nature by the secret and powerful penetration of faith and love in his life, throughout a period of prayer and worship, during which he learned, at his mother’s knee and without effort, the Church’s language: her language of faith, love, hope, and fidelity. There is no better way of acquiring ‘the mind of the Church’ in the widest and most interior interpretation of this expression.”
—Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P., 1963 (quoted by Geoffrey Hull in The Banished Heart, 2010)
December 2011
24 posts
“Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
—Henri J. M. Nouwen (via mikegarycole)
“Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity. I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such reflection. Theology is intrinsically funny. This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God. I have often laughed at myself as these sentences went through their tortuous stages of formation. I invite you to look for the comic dimension of divinity that stalks every page. It is not blasphemy to grasp the human contradiction for what it is. The most enjoyable of all subjects has to be God, because God is the source of all joy.”
—Tom Oden (via Philip Tallon on Twitter)
“I believe that we ought so to love and trust God in our lives, and in all the good things that he sends us, that when the time comes (but not before!) we may go to him with love, trust, and joy. But, to put it plainly, for a man in his wife’s arms to be hankering after the other world is, in mild terms, a piece of bad taste, and not God’s will. We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we mustn’t try to be more pious than God himself and allow our happiness to be corrupted by presumption and arrogance, and by unbridled religious fantasy which is never satisfied with what God gives… . Everything has its time, and the main thing is that we keep step with God, and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead — nor keep dawdling a step behind. It’s presumptuous to want to have everything at once — matrimonial bliss, the cross, and the heavenly Jerusalem, where they neither marry not are given in marriage. “To everything there is a season.”
—Bonhoeffer, LPP (via ayjay)
“God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.”
—go read the whole excerpt from one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters over at Nijay Gupta’s blog (via wesleyhill)
“The grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him as easy as not. It can bend him and make him crooked. And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind, that’s who. Them is the one’s scarred with God’s mercy. Striken with his love. Every legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God.”
—Cormac McCarthy, “Outer Dark” (via my wife, of course)
“For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.”
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Jonah Lehrer: Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us
An editor of Nature magazine posted a link to this article with a comment, “But science is the only way to untangle the mystery.” Oddly defensive and almost certainly mistaken. AKA: “Science! It’s not just a methodology, it’s a worldview.”
“The problem with this assumption, however, is that causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.”
—Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine
“But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. “I think, therefore I am. I think.” We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot.”
—Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Doug Wilson Reflects | Christianity Today
“
Mr. Plantinga readily admits that he has no proof that God exists. But he also thinks that doesn’t matter. Belief in God, he argues, is what philosophers call a basic belief: It is no more in need of proof than the belief that the past exists, or that other people have minds, or that one plus one equals two.
“You really can’t sensibly claim theistic belief is irrational without showing it isn’t true,” Mr. Plantinga said. And that, he argues, is simply beyond what science can do.
” —New York Times on Alvin Plantinga, via gttd
“Martin Luther had the basic insight that moralism is the default mode of the human heart.”
—Tim Keller, The Advent of Humility
“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
—Japanese proverb (via notyourgramma)
“As for Mister Rogers himself … he doesn’t look at the story the same way the boy did or I did. In fact When Mister Rogers first told me the story, I complimented him for being smart—for knowing that asking the boy for his prayers would make the boy feel better about himself—and Mister Rogers responded by looking at me first with puzzlement and then with surprise. ‘Oh heavens no, Tom! I didn’t ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession.’”
—My New Hero (Fred Rogers)
“The most important motives for man’s activity in doing or making are neither animal instincts nor caprice. We hold that love is more important and not merely prettier than instinct. Upon such a ground and from such a place of vantage we survey the works of men. We see all things as evidence of love. We make what we love—in accordance with our loves so we make. A pair or scissors, no less than a cathedral or a symphony, is evidence of what we hold good, and therefore lovely, and owes its being to love.”
—Eric Gill, A Holy Tradition of Working. (via onwork)
“It’s the perennial problem that I learned about as a young political theorist—the problem of dirty hands and concrete action. As Bonhoeffer says, “you may incur guilt.” Free responsibility may bring a measure of guilt along with it, because when you act, there is rarely a way that is an absolute pure and true pathway. The ways in the world are always fraught with peril; there are always unintended consequences of your actions. To acknowledge this is not to preemptively dismiss criticism! Yet one is called upon to act. Otherwise, you retreat into private virtuousness, and I’m afraid there is a lot of that going on.”
—Jean Bethke Elshtain, Dirty Hands and Concrete Action
“Though strictly considered, life is but a web of illusion and a dream within a dream, it is a dream that needs to be managed with the utmost discretion, if it is not to turn into a nightmare. In other words, however much life may mock the metaphysicians, the problem of conduct remains.”
—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism
“This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”
—
Edward Gorey’s Never-Before-Seen Letters and Illustrated Envelopes | Brain Pickings
Love his handwriting as well.
“An analogy is never a provable fact. An analogy is something that opens the door or the window and gives us a glimpse of the truth that gives meaning to lives.”
—Madeleine L’Engle
“I learned a basic thing from my high school students: cosmic questions do not in mortal terms have mortal answers. We learn through analogy, through story. A distinguished writer friend of mine said that Jesus was not a theologian but God who told stories.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, in Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic Questions
“One of my greatest difficulties in considering to think of religion … was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God had made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the beautiful, Religion the love of the Beautiful, & Heaven the House of the Beautiful—nature is tenfold brighter in the sun of righteousness, and my love of nature is more intense since I became a Christian.”
—George MacDonald, letter to his father, quoted in Life and Religion Are One - Christian History & Biography
“
analogia entis: (Latin, “analogy of being”) Also, “analogy of imitation” or “analogy of participation.”
The belief that there exists an analogy or correspondence between the creation and God that makes theological conversation about God possible. While many would say that finite beings with finite language cannot describe an infinite God, theologians of the medieval era discussed this problem, seeking to resolve it by developing a theory which allotted the communication of words into three separate categories. Some words are univocal (always used with the same sense), some were equivocal (used with very different senses), and some were analogical (used with related senses). It is this third sense that the analogia entis finds meaning. While finite man cannot describe an infinite God perfectly (univocally), he can do so truly, as God has created man in his image and hence, has provided an analogical way of communicating himself. To deny the analogia entis is thought by some to be a self-defeating proposition since it would present the situation where an all-powerful God is not powerful enough to communicate himself to his creation.
” —analogia entis | Theological Word of the Day
“Flowers … are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”
—
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via janebennetworld)
Essays: XIII. Gifts (1844)
“
Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood.
In a child’s nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,
In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast’s fangs and in the terror of dark rooms,
In youthful infatuations where childhood delight find completion.
And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?
Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living
And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us?
Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing,
Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low,
According to the nature of our bodies, of our language.
The same could be said of beauty. It should not exist.
There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against.
Yet undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness.
The voices of birds outside the window when they greet the morning
And iridescent stripes of light blazing on the floor,
Or the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the dark-blue mountain meet.
Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green.
All that, hasn’t it been invoked for centuries
As mystery which, in one instant, will be suddenly revealed?
And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand.
One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower.
And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.
Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,
It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence
And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.
And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.
Czeslaw Milosz, “One More Day”
via DCM on Facebook
“Young man of the name of Guppy! There have been times, when ladies lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within call, when that poor life of yours would not have been worth a minute’s purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at this moment.”
—Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
