Ad Altare Dei

religion and spirituality posting. 30s. episcopalian. he/they. follows from @letlovemeetlove.

[beguines]

Yes, we are lonely. There exists in our heart an inner land, where we are alone, to which nobody finds the way except God. This innermost unreachable chamber in our heart exists. The question is whether we, in a foolishly guilty way, avoid it, because nobody else and nothing of what is familiar to us on earth can enter into it with us. Let us enter there ever so quietly! Let us shut the door behind us! Let us listen to the ineffable melody that fills the silence of that night. Here the silent and lonely soul sings for the God of her heart her finest and most personal song.

Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. XXIII

[letlovemeetlove]

In no particular order,

I feel I am being:

Remade.

Reborn.

Refashioned.

Renewed.

Refreshed.

And all in real time,

Which means that I am

Really damn tired.

[letlovemeetlove]

"We fly to the sensation of sex in order to avoid the passion of eros."

-Rollo May, Love and Will, New York, Norton & Co., 1969.

[clementinefight]

“Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it.”             — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird 

[kafk-a]

Louise Glück, from an interview with poet in Poets & Writers

[givemearmstopraywith]

Crucially, then, the Eucharist works not simply to stir desire but to transform it. By joining the sensual desire to consume bread and wine to the spiritual desire to receive Christ’s sacramental body, it trains us to see that our desire for and delight in creation’s materiality is really, finally, a desire to delight in the transcendent source of that materiality.

Adam Glover, Eros, Eucharist, and the Poetics of Desire

[letlovemeetlove]

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

-Walt Whitman

[letlovemeetlove]

“I have always thought it quite appropriate that celibate priests be called ‘Father.’ It is a radical judgment on the presumption that biology constitutes fatherhood.” — Stanley Hauerwas

[letlovemeetlove]

“Damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won’t get in the circle, that won’t enjoy, that won’t throw its heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, full of existence....”

-Sr. Helen Kelley, IHM

[beguines]

Frank Paino, from "Between Oneself and the World"

[letlovemeetlove]

In my experience, it is unique, this sensation of being drawn out of language by language which the Divine Office occasions. Praying, chanting the psalms, draws me out of whatever I might be thinking or remembering (for so much thinking is remembering, revisiting, rehearsing). I am launched by the psalms into a memory to which I belong but which is not mine. I don’t possess it, it possesses me. Possession understood not as ownership, but as embrace. The embrace of habitation. Hermitage of the word.

Patricia Hampl. “A Week in the Word,” Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion. No. 19, Spring 1998. 76.

[letlovemeetlove]

Sleeping in on the weekends does not break your vow to dedicate yourself to the liberation of all beings. It just means you are tired of holding up the world and are taking a minute to recharge.

Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism

[nyctaeus]

Afraid is a Country, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Words by Audre Lorde superimposed over the Trump administration’s Executive Order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries entering the US.

[thirdity]

“And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great — that is for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty — so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”

— Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

[beguines]

"Because he was lonely he became a theologian," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer's closest friend Eberhard Bethge, "and because he became a theologian he was lonely." . . . What Bethge is trying to express is that Bonhoeffer became a theologian because he sensed that his primal loneliness had its origin and end in God, and because he gave his life over to this pursuit, he became in some way unfit for ordinary happiness . . . [H]e was lonely in a way that only God eases, and he was Christian in a way that knows that God, insofar as he is fully Christ and thus fully human, never quite does (never quite can?). To put it differently, loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

[hermitcoat-deactivated20260321]

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

[thenextdoormatilda]

–Palestinian poet and editor of Mizna, George Abraham.