The Flickr Bypl Image Generatr

I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
—Paul Elie, The Life You Save, p. 155.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God…. This little point of nothingness in us, as our poverty, is the pure glory of God in us….
-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Melbourne: Image Books, 1968), 158.

I won't take any photographs of those I love; I'll just take all the faces and familiar gestures I have collected and hang them up along the walls of my inner space so that they will always be with me.
-Etty Hillesum

The present moment –amid such insecurity –became sacred. ‘… that cup of coffee’, she writes one morning, ‘must nowadays be drunk with reverence, for each day it may be our last’. The pressure of the times branded this on her heart. Later, in Westerbork, Matthew 6.34 becomes a mantra to her –she repeats it often: ‘Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’
-Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum; A Life Transformed

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily existence. At what moment do lovers come into the most complete possession of themselves if not when they say they are lost in each other?"

-Teilhard de Chardin "The Phenomenon of Man pp 265

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for
my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity.
Selflessness is my true self.
Love is my true character.
Love is my name.
-Thomas Merton
Love, Life, Wisdom Thomas Merton (2007).
"New Seeds of
Contemplation", p.60,
New Directions Publishing

All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance, emerging from God like the rays of the sun.“

– Hildegard of Bingen

"Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness.
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair."
-Thomas Merton

Theologian Catherine Keller has described contemporary life as one that is lived “from a broken web.”14 We are not autonomous individuals in the model of the classic hero, but relational selves who draw strength and learn selfhood and accept limits from all those others who live with us, whose lives and experience interpenetrate our own. Like spiders on a web, we are affected by every touch, every tremor, every action that takes place anywhere in the web of our relationships.
-“In Every Generation”: Judaism as a Living Faith Peter A. Pettit and John Townsend

,,,The world is not a vacuum,
Either we make it an alter for God
or it is invaded by demons.
There can be no neutrality.
Either we are ministers of the sacred,
or Slaves of evil.
-Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder

Flannery O’Connor is a metaphysical realist whose philosophical and artistic starting point is not thought or a world of ideas but reality itself, what she calls what-is. O’Connor grounds her narrative art in the visible and invisible reality created by God and knowable to human beings who are composed of visible and invisible components, both body and soul, making the human person a knower, not simply a thinker.
-Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art Paperback – August 3, 2023
by Damian Ference

The ultimate motive which leads the believer to Mary is, as already said, the desire to be within the orbit of her holy life. The believer desires to dwell in her proximity, in the aura of her being, and in the intimacy of her mystery. The word mystery does not stand here for a riddle in the sense of something still unsolved. It conveys rather a quality, a potentiality, a sphere: the governance of God in man, the breath of eternal life. Here the worshipper wants to enter; here he wants to dwell, to breathe, to become quiet, and to receive comfort and strength to continue his life with renewed courage.
-The art of praying : the principles and methods of Christian prayer : formerly entitled Prayer in practice / Romano Guardini.

There was a time when I thought I had to come up with a host of brilliant ideas each day, and now I sometimes feel like a barren stretch of land in which nothing grows, but which is nevertheless spanned by a high, wide sky. And this way is by far the better.

Nowadays I am suspicious of the multitude of thoughts that well up ; I would sooner lie fallow and wait. Such an awful lot has happened inside me these last few days. Something has crystallized.

I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, and my love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in anyway discouraged. I continue to grow from day to day, even with the likelihood of destruction staring me in the face. I shall no longer flirt with words, for words merely evoke misunderstandings : I have come to terms with life, nothing can happen me, and after all my personal fate is not the issue, it doesn’t really matter if it is I who perish or another.

What matters is that we are all marked men.
That’s what I sometime say to others, although it doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t really explain what I mean. By “ coming to terms with life “ I mean : The reality of death has become a definite part of my life ; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitably.

Through non-acceptance and through having all those fears, most people are left with just a pitiful and mutilated slice of life, which can hardly be called life at all. It sounds paradoxical : by excluding death from our life we can not live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.
-Etty Hillesum', July 1942

Beatrice has not demonstrated a truth, as if in a physics class. She has conveyed something of the radiance of truth, a beam of light that he can follow. She was a sun in his youth. She is proving to be so in his adulthood. He looks into her eyes and enjoys the gaze.
-Mark Vernon, Dante’s Divine Comedy; A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, Paradiso 3

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
-Joseph Campbell

And from her spirituality a sense of vocation, even ‘destiny’ was born in her. It becomes inevitable that, despite the pleas of many, she will refuse to hide. And one of the easy-to-miss flowerings of her spirit.

As the world around her grew uglier, her eye and need for beauty grew keener. One of the loveliest dimensions of Etty’s story is her relationship with living things … with trees … and with flowers, especially flowers.
-Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum; A Life Transformed

This comparison of picture and the object of the picture would seem to be the defining cognitive delight of mimetic art. But there is an intellectual delight even more important than this, and that is the contemplative delight in the object of the picturing itself…

…The wonder of mimetic art is that it can make us feel so like how we feel in real life, but with feelings that remain circumscribed within a fundamentally contemplative attitude. Picturing allows for a powerful affective response to occur within a wider space of tranquility and reflection.
-Beauty and Imitation
A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Daniel McInerny

What we love we shall grow to resemble.
-St. Bernard of Clairvaux

You must walk what paths life assigns to you at any given moment, walk the paths, passable only with difficulty, of this slice of history in which we now live. You must always see your own life in this broad context And if a strong emotion develops, well, just let it grow. Being carried too far by an emotion, which I am sometimes so afraid of, is something that just cannot happen. Provided, that is, it does not destroy you, does not turn you to ashes, but fills you with life and helps you to be creative.
-Etty Hillesum