nor one ray without Him

foxglove | 23 | he/him | spiritual blog

[bright-friend]

about

my name is fox & this is my spiritual blog. episcopalian taking a lot of inspiration from the quaker tradition.

[thoughtkick]

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.”

— Thomas Merton

[cloudswamp]

77, ee cummings

[many-sparrows]

Yesterday was Pentecost. Our advocate the Holy Ghost is out haunting the streets. She is anointing the heads of her apostles and they are speaking in tongues of righteous rage, of Love that refuses to look away, of compassion and protection. Christ is in the crowd, overturning tables and driving out agents of greed and evil. The young are having visions of what will happen if power is left unchecked and the old are dreaming dreams of justice.

[dioscrucificado]

holy mother of god church in voskepar, armenia.

[prayer-booke]

The Fragrance of Christ 

Help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go - let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by my example - by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do, the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to you. - John Henry Newman

[theinwardlight]

From an interview with Lloyd Lee Wilson, Quaker minister

[katoptromantia]

José María Rojas

[speakthewordonly]

Our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures. That is to say, there is no creature that is made that may know how greatly, and how sweetly, and how tenderly our Maker loveth us.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

[mindofeloquence]

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

[iscariotapologist]

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

[papalspillage]

[ID: “Christianity itself is this— temporal, relative— to some extent. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man. This is why he could be a paragon of rationality for eighteenth-century England, a heroic figure of the imagination for the Romantics, an exemplar of existential courage for writers like Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see.” End ID].

[mioritic]

Icons representing saints from the Styrian farmers' calendar (Bauernkalender / Mandlkalender), published with regularity since the early 18th century.

The figures represented here are (L to R, top to bottom): Leo IX, Afra, John of Nepomuk, Augustine, Felix and Regula, and Lazarus.

Sepp Walter, Der steirische Mandlkalender. Seine Zeichen und Bilder (Graz: Leykam-Alpina, 1992)

[magdaleneconvert]

"My vocation is love." - St. Thérèse of Lisieux

[pantherandpine]

[barcarole]

The Beguinage at Bruges, Belgium. Photo by Bruno Barbey, 1979.

[bright-friend]

happy Easter everyone

[gratiae-mirabilia]

not only He loves you— even more, He longs for you.

christopher west, theology of the body for beginners / laura makabresku / robyn cadwallader, the anchoress / rutilio di lorenzo manetti, st. catherine of siena holding Christ / hadewijch of brabant, visioenboek / laura makabresku / robyn cadwallader, the anchoress / st. teresa of calcutta