Love Bade Me Welcome

a pilgrimage in words & wonderment

[gloryfromdust]

Every figure we teach is a metonymy for the future.

Jeff Nunokawa in class today

[gloryfromdust]

[gloryfromdust]

Mercy is always a scandal.

The reason for this speaks volumes about human nature.

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Beware the Christian person whose "righteousness" makes them anything but utterly compassionate, radically humble, and selflessly loving. Boasting of conquest and success in the spiritual contest is a sign of a bold sort of immaturity.

[gloryfromdust]

“Yet a little while.” “Light and momentary.” Maybe these are hyperbole. But if they are, they are parental hyperbole. They come from the heart of a mother or father who seeks to calm an anxious child. They are not a deception. No, the deceiver says: “He ain't never coming back for you.” “This is hard, painful, and ain't gonna get any better or easier or less painful. You better start living your life the way you wanna, or else you're gonna waste it!”

[gloryfromdust]

The Spirit of God is the warmth in the hearth of the self, the homemaker, the comforter, the balm and ballast and brightness of being. Otherwise we make our dwelling among the shaded tombs or in the unripe cold of the wolves' wilderness. The Spirit is homecoming, and we are the vagabonds.

[gloryfromdust]

The Lord loves us more dearly than we can love ourselves; but the soul in her distress supposes that the Lord has forgotten her, even has no wish to look upon her, and she suffers and pines. But it is not so, brethren. The Lord loves us without end, and gives us the grace of the Holy Spirit, and comforts us....The soul is like a bride, and the Lord the Bridegroom; and they love each other, and yearn for one another. The Lord in His love longs for the soul and grieves if there is no place in her for the Holy Spirit; while the soul, having come to know the Lord, yearns after Him, for in Him lie her life and her joy.

St Silouan the Athonite

[gloryfromdust]

Without the solitude of heart, our relationships with others easily become needy and greedy, sticky and clinging, dependent and sentimental, exploitative and parasitic, because without the solitude of heart we cannot experience the others as different from ourselves but only as people who can be used for the fulfillment of our own, often hidden, needs.

Henri Nouwen

[gloryfromdust]

Most mercies remain, at least on this side of the epistemic veil, imperceptible.

Indeed we may never know all that we've been spared.

[gloryfromdust]

‪If friendship has a basis it is this: that a person may desire the company of someone for whom he has no specific purpose.

Roger Scruton

[gloryfromdust]

And it occurs to me that infinities cannot be seen much less enfolded in my arms

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Pentecost

Breathe, O God of endless reaching, the breeze that carries heaven—Himself—to men, and men—caught up in its balminess—to heaven; encircle, enkindle, enliven our worlds entombed in darkened robes, the empires that sprawl in human hearts; lighten tongues weighed down with leaden words, harshnesses, hate, curses, and cries; sing into sullen faces the brightness of the never-setting Dawn; be our revivification, our spur, remembrancer, maker of the music of the age which is to come; the voice of our vocation to be again, to rise, to dance, to speak in the tongues of ecstasy in the temples of frozen tapers and cold, aimless queries; O Spirit, descend, upend, and send us in and out of your joy.

[gloryfromdust]

Caring about humanity without caring about the environment is like saying you love your neighbors but you're going to let their house burn down anyway.

[gloryfromdust]

What if we don't like ourselves clean? What if the caked-on gunk has become for us a strange source of comfort? What if we don't want to know what's underneath? What if we don't like ourselves quiet? What if the incessant noise has become for us a kind of lullaby? What if we can't stand to imagine what we're really like in the silent place? Well then, the muck stays on, and the cacophony keeps squalling. And we never know what we might be, for fear of what we are.

[mapsontheweb]

Rand McNally Popular Map of British Isles, 1939.

[gloryfromdust]

Knight, Errant

It was foolish to ride out into battle the way I did — I see that now. This deep gash, the pounding in my shattered head, the weakness of my once-lionlike heart, they remind me. The chainmail I wore that day was amateurishly made and cheaply bought. My horse was young, untrained, easy to spook. My helmet hardly fit. How silly of me to pretend that any of it made me less vulnerable. But Solomon says the beginning of wisdom, its very trailhead, is fear. Fear of God, to be more precise, awe in the face of all that man is not and cannot be. And is there anything more conducive to fear and awe than the sun glinting off the ivory surface of freshly exposed bone? Can anything be more efficacious at making a man attend to his own frailty than needing to entrust the heft of his bloodied and broken body into the solemn embrace of a stretcher? It was not wise, riding into battle the way I did. But, believe me, I've gained wisdom by it.

[gloryfromdust]

Inhabiting a world walled in with thick drapes, one soon begins to assume that it is a life of light and joy -- not shadow and sorrow -- which is the more unmanageable, the more unrealistic burden. But then the veil is rent. Through a cruciform aperture brightness streams in. Joy is given room to breathe, to be, to blossom. The shadows flee to the margins, and tears begin to refract the light like diamonds. Alas, despair is the unwieldy thing. It shifts and heaves and sighs. Darkness is a leaden garment no one need don. Light, too, must be worn. And it, too, has a heft, a gravity, a cost. But within its embrace is the everlasting now, the eighth day's dawn, felicity.