January 2010
10 posts
“The LORD will comfort Israel again and make her deserts blossom. Her barren...”
– Isaiah 51:3
“You name me.
Who am I?
That I should company with something so divine?
Mercy...”
– Jars of Clay
“The weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought...”
– King Lear
Believer Faint not then, but pray and wait, Never, never ceasing. Soul What! when prayer meets no regard? Believer Still repeat it often. Soul But I feel myself so hard. Believer Jesus will you soften. Soul But my enemies make head. Believer Let them closer drive you. Soul But I’m cold, I’m dark, I’m dead. Believer Jesus will revive you.
D.H. Lawrence, Almond Blossom
Something must be reassuring to the almond, in the evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long, nights, Some memory of far, sun-gentler lands, So that the faith in his heart smiles again And his blood ripples with that untenable delight of once-more-vindicated faith, And the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds, Pearls itself into tenderness of bud And in a great and sacred...
To Luther, a sacrament is...
a visible sign of divine intent. We must cling to them with a staunch faith as to the good staff which the patriarch Jacob used when crossing the Jordan, or as to a lantern by which we must be guided, and carefully walk with open eyes the dark path of death, sin, and hell…It points to Christ and his image, enabling you to say when faced by the image of death, sin, and hell, ‘God...
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts. They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be...
Today, I read of an Irish nun, whose “birth name was Deirdre, but she was nicknamed Itha (or Ita), meaning thirst, because of her thirst for God…Devotion to the indwelling Holy Trinity was the core of her life”.
Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts
We taste thee, O thou living bread, and long to feast upon thee still; we drink of thee, the Fountainhead, and thirst our souls from thee to fill. Our restless spirits yearn for thee, where e’er our changeful lot is cast; Glad when thy gracious smile we see, blest when our faith can hold thee fast.
—St. Bernard of Clairvaux
“But before the first death came murder. A fracture broke across the rings...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke