A man's creation is his mirror. Even where it is false, he is false.
Often, the sentence reveals the man the book conceals.
Wonders surround us and throw us off balance.
Billions of people pray for you; in churches, temples, mosques, all over the world, they pray; for the sick, the dying, the captive, the poor, the lovelorn, the addicted, and the lost; for seekers, travelers, laborers, widows, orphans, and mothers; the cowardly, the selfish, melancholy, wrathful, and tired; for people under every conceivable station and condition of life. Hearts turn and are lifted towards you. Good souls gather to remember you in their thoughts.
Flowers give their fragrance to the room, but we, so far congested, can scarcely smell them without approaching. So it is with holy books. You may place them beneath a table, still, a saint will sniff them out. Others, like ourselves, must see them, read them, even reflect upon their contents, in order to draw a breath of that same exalted perfume.
I'm a writing fool.
It's a lot like being a dancing fool,
except that it requires fancier footwork.
If you follow my lead.
Like harp strings, the mind plucks words of virtue, and their music vibrates in the heart.
The heart's attention wanders, even while the mind keeps watch.
If I do not speak of love, I can give no honest accounting of my speech, -- unless it is that I speak with love, and to such a degree that my words, whatever their ostensible meaning, unambiguously proclaim their intimacy and allegiance to love.
We are always looking to romance and be romanced by life. We want her to shock and inflame our souls and our guts; be struck by her beauty, grandeur, and light. She has to wow us sometimes, and lead us to awe. To fall completely out of love with life, to lose all hope of reconciliation with the one who gives you breath, can only end in suicide. Our love for life, therefor, directly infuses us with the vitality to life; the life-force which propels us, more or less willingly, upon the currents of life.
Love is surely at the heart of the universe, for there is no other heart besides your own, and no substance more dear, more formed of love, by love.
Beauty weaves into kinship all things; the more disparate the elements, the more elaborate are the jewels and joints by which they are fixed to one another; the gold and diamond bands they thread upon each other's hands.
Anyone who has experienced tenderness has felt the touch of Mary's fingertips. All who yield to a quiet, soft and gracious manner submit themselves as plainly to Her will. She is the bright star by whom pilgrims are led into the presence of God. Who among the living and the dead has not gazed in luxurious awe upon this blessed luminary, whatever name he knew Her by?
Who but Christ deserves to be called the highest, the clearest symbol for love? And for the tendency, the will, of love to entice, seduce, and unite together the affections, ligaments, and aims of God and man? It is love which enlightens the mind, -- and persuades it to settle in the heart, of man. Love guides him to the kingdom, to the foot and very seat of the throne. Love intimately relates him, by the spiritual blood of it's substance, to the source of what is best in all things; what we might call the reason and purpose of all things; the once, eternal, and ever-recurring Creator, or creative impulse, behind, within, and anticipating all things. Who but Christ personifies this supreme ontological truth, and gives it a face in the world? Love has been firmly and forever united with Christ; clearly identified with His image and name. We cannot imagine Him apart from love without inflicting the most glaring disfigurement on His memory. Call upon Him and love comes to mind. Nor can love be considered apart from Him, if it is only the highest and purest form of love. Truly, He has made it His own, -- even as He has made it ours, pouring it out so freely on us all; truly, when Christ climbed Golgotha and planted the flag of His cross, He claimed the entire world for love.
They alone have understood love who levitate at the sign of the cross, and collapse into ecstasy at the mention of His name.
The Lord is beautiful when He bends, and breathtaking when He bleeds.
There is no true beauty without pathos; if every rose wears a thorn, every bleeding heart wears a crown of them. Do not our very sins and blemishes present us in the soft light of mercy, and make us beautiful? Even tears of joy contain some melancholy in their structure. While the view from the mountain is breathtaking in its own right, nonetheless, the summit takes our breath away mostly on account of the climb.
Those who observe merely the outward forms of religion, perhaps as a pretext for socializing, or solely as a matter of custom, rather obeying a current of public convention than the secret promptings of God, already have their reward (as the scriptures say), -- but they have no religion; only a mawkish semblance of it. Conversely, the atheist who wrestles passionately against the notion of God, nevertheless, still worships and has faith in "the god who is not". However he decides it, on whichever side he positions himself, the existence of deity, and the conceptions people hold with respect to deity, continues to occupy a sincere and solemn place in his thoughts. This is, at least in a preliminary sense, what it means to be religious.
Real faith in God is not about pretending to possess knowledge of secret or mysterious matters. On the contrary, it is born directly from an uncompromising admission of our total ignorance. And not merely ignorance, but, our absolute inability to answer the most important questions of life and death. Finally, our inability even to leave untouched the most stubborn and inviolable paradoxes which confront us as human beings; -- questions without answers and problems without solutions; which were, perhaps, never meant to be answered or solved, but simply interacted with and, ultimately, accepted. Not because we are illumined, either by divine revelation or mere delusion, but, because we regard ourselves in perfect darkness, we rely upon the Light of God. His prophets say, "Love, for God is love, and whosoever loves is of God", and we who receive Him say, "Well, why not!?" In lieu of another answer or source of light, love will do nicely. Maybe divinely. And, anyway, who can imagine a better one? We may be ignorant of many things, but love proposes itself as the single response to the most pressing of difficulties, and though we may be unsure, we cannot help but be enticed and seduced to believe in love. In our ignorance, we latch onto love, and hang on by the skin of our teeth; that is, by our faith. Because it is either love or it is nothing; darkness; groping; unknowing. So we take love. We take love as God. We can convince ourselves of no other answers, but here, at least, is one we can follow in the hope of being convinced. It seems nothing but love could possibly command this quality of attention. Love alone suffices; for love, we can abandon all else as mere distraction; for love, we can become single-minded, single-pointed beings. Or, for love, we can die trying. Love assures us that anything which can become our all, or which we would like to become our all, has already become God for us. In a heart sensitive to love, nothing more is required to satisfy the qualifications we imagine for the existence of God. We may dispense with omnipotence, omniscience, even consciousness itself. Love is enough, and it is enough that love is. I myself would follow a mortal man who had entirely devoted himself to love and not hesitate for a moment to identify him with the immortal God; I would wear him, as Hamlet says, "in my heart of heart".
I propose that love is the only emotion in the heart, as light is the only "color" in the church; though stained glass refracts it into various hues, and dust collects it into shadows.
The visionary imagines, believes, and speaks, what the mystic feels, knows, and lives.
The past is a skin we can never shed; we drag it, like chains, beyond the grave.
Even the man newborn in Christ must carry, like a cross, the flesh of the man he once was,
and of all the men he has ever been.
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