BEAUTY, FRIENDSHIP, & LOSS

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The whole world is either symbolic (images & ideas that are throwing life together) or diabolic (pulling life apart). 

It is the color of what we trust most, love most, focus our gaze on most that dyes our soul. The dye of our soul colors our world.

If you could be one of the two, what would you rather be at the end of your life: proud of what you've done or grateful for what you have been given?

Reality is a cosmic drama of divine revelation and human response. 

We need to accept ourselves as revelations of God to us. 

All of reality is either a temple or a tomb.

I know the music I like.
You like the music you know.

The enjoyment of every created good is an enjoyment of heaven.

God is always speaking to us.
Reality is sacred, always speaking to us.

If you receive something as a gift, you trust and hope and live in the one who gave it to you.

Joy is the response to the possession of the good.

The Bible gives us a reason to do things with a creative endeavor because all these things are sacred.

Comments from Fr. Vince, S.J. at a retreat at Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat Home.

LOGOS

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Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
And the felt ferocity of that love
And the felt necessity of that love
The fish explode into many.
Imagine him speaking,
And don’t worry about what is reality,
Or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
Spoken with love.

Mary Oliver

HOLY BEST

But when it comes to putting broken lives back together— when it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls— the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best. To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do — to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst — is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.

Frederick Buechner