ALTARED by Claire and Eli. @claireandeli - Tumblr Blog

Even in the natural order, all genuine love is a victory of weakness. Loving is not dominating or possessing, imposing oneself on the person loved. Loving means that one welcomes the other person without putting up any defenses. In return, one is certain of being welcomed totally by that person without being judged, condemned or compared. There are no more trials of strength between two people who love each other. There is a sort of mutual inner intelligence, thanks to which one can no longer fear any danger whatever coming from the other person. This experience, even if it always remains imperfect, is already convincing. And yet it is only a reflection of the divine reality.

Jacques Philippe

To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head…

Flannery O’Connor

Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw love out.

St. John of the Cross

Left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom. All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain, that makes the cycle a roller coaster. When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process.

Anthony de Mello

Divine Love is comparable to the atmospheric pressure surrounding us, which sustains each being and also exerts pressure from all sides. Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading into the heart, by means of which Love can permeate everywhere. The difference between the sinner and the saint is that the sinner closes his heart to Love while the saint opens himself to this same Love.

Lev Gillet

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

Soren Kierkegaard

#Brooding Danish dudes

There cannot be a surer rule, nor a strong exhortation to the observance of it, than when we are taught that all the endowments which we possess are divine deposits entrusted to us for the very purpose of being distributed for the good of our neighbor.

John Calvin

Doctrine is not an affair of the tongue, but of the life; it is not apprehended by the intellect and memory merely, like other branches of learning, but is received only when it possesses the whole soul, and finds its seat and habitation in the inmost recesses of the heart.

John Calvin

The whole of the great spiritual tradition of Christianity sees in this divine fire, in the fire of the Burning Bush, in the fire which seems to have a passion for self-communication, the incandescent charity of the Lord, the incandescence indeed of his love. His love... Not without some hesitation do I dare make use of that word. It has so often been abused, so often profaned! Yet we must not forget that the one and only definition of God in the New Testament is in the worlds 'God is love.' God is fire. God is love. God is a self-propagating emotional power, a fire that shares itself. Centuries after Moses beheld the flames of the Burning Bush, this same fire merged with the tongues of flame at Pentecost, and with the fire that burned within the hearts of the disciples at Emmaus.

Lev Gillet

Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other's windows and they always agree on everything.

Charles D'Ambrosio

If love is denied or weakens, if one falls away from love, it is pride (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, worldly pride-1 John 2:16). Love, as the life of God--in that life there is no pride... God gives that love, God makes man part of that love and that communion is the Church. Thus, in the Church, there are no rights, nor connected with those rights, no equalization. No equalization, hence no comparison--which is the main source of pride. The call to perfection addressed to each person is the call to find one's self, but not by comparing, not by self-analysis (where is my potential?) but in God. Hence, a paradox: one can find one's self only by losing one's self and it means in identifying one's self totally with God's calling, design for one's self revealed not in one's self but in God! To love--one's self and other--with God's love: How needful this is in our time when love is almost completely misunderstood. How profitable it would be to think more carefully and more deeply about the radical particularity of God's love.... the absence of the sentimentality with which the world and Christianity have usually identified that love. In God's love, there is no promise of earthly happiness, no concern about it. Rather, that love is totally submitted to the promise and the concern about the Kingdom of God, that is, the absolute happiness for which God has created man, to which He is calling man. Thus, the first essential conflict between God's love and the fallen human love. 'Cut off your hand,' 'pluck out your eye,' 'leave your wife and children,' 'follow the narrow way...'--all of it is so obviously irreconcilable with happiness in life. This is what turned off this world from total love and what filled it with hatred. But--and this is so important--the world became turned off when in the Church itself something changed, something was 'turned off.' But about this I might write some other time...

Father Alexander Schmemann

Art and morals are, with certain provisos, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch

Christianity requires, absolutely requires, simplicity; it requires a "clear eye," a "seeing love." Christianity is distorted everywhere--where there is strain, where it relies on howling and wailing. Our times are saturated with it; our whole civilization is permeated with it to an impossible degree. Man has lost the ability to admire, to wonder, and everything for him has become a problem. One must leave, come out of these problems; this means purifying one's sight, purifying the heart from all unhealthy excitement.

Father Alexander Schmemann

Epistle: 'There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear...' (1 John 4:18). The opposite of love is not hate, but fear. How deep and how true. Fear is, first of all, the absence of love, or, rather, it is what grows like weeds where there is no love--therefore, angst, angoisse, anxiety--which all kinds of therapies try to overcome but which, in fact, is quite normal in this world; is its substance. The fall of the world is its alienation from God, who is love--hence, darkness and shadows of death.

Father Alexander Schmemann

I spent two hours with [ ], who is interested in anthropology. He is unhappy, frustrated, offended. How can one explain to him that he is actually interested only in himself, his role in life, and that this interest is at the root of his unhappiness--it is always so, without exception. To be detached from the world is not to leave it, since to leave it can also be playing a role, searching for oneself and one's own; it is to liberate oneself from all this concern about 'my' place, 'my' role, and then to start a life that passes all understanding. "Unless it dies, it will not live." This is the uniqueness of Christ and Christianity. Everything is resolved only when the question of death is resolved.

Father Alexander Schemann

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

D.H. Lawrence

The Cross is a tree set on fire with invisible flame, that illuminates all the world. The flame is Love: the Love in His bosom who died on it. In the light of which we see how to possess all the things in Heaven and Earth after His similitude.

Thomas Traherne

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

ALTARED by Claire and Eli.