17 July 2008

A decade I found...

...while praying (through) the Rosary:

What if, in the midst of our everyday anxiety, we heard the angels calling, “Help is on the way.”

“The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.” -Oscar Wilde

“The secret to holiness is simply this: To accept every moment of your life as coming to you from the will of God.” - Fr. Walter Ciszek, who spent 5 years in solitary confinement and 12 years in a prison labor camp.

“Must you continue to be your own cross? No matter which way God leads you, you change everything into bitterness by constantly brooding over everything. For the love of God, replace all this self-scrutiny with a pure and simple glance at God’s goodness,” said St. Jeanne de Chantel.

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not … in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. … To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." ~ Page 89 of George Weigel’s, “Letters to a Young Catholic,” quoting GK Chesterton’s, “Orthodoxy.” Chesterton died in 1936. He was a journalist and novelist.

“(Sometimes) to say that it is bad is to tell the truth. To (to ever) say that it is hopeless is to lose sight of Mary.”

What if God’s dreams for us are more than anything we could have ever dreamt for ourselves?

It feels like the whole world is waiting for a miracle. And I think we would get one if we could just be still enough.

“Just think of Jesus’ 30 years when he was doing God only knows what kind of work that was so unimportant it didn’t even make it into our history books.”

Thinking about Christ’s passion, the priest said, is like baking with flour. It sticks to your heart the way flour stays on your hands.

No comments: