🖤

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it

[northstargrassmaiden]

[northstargrassmaiden]

[mycupoverfloweth]

[weil-weil-lautre]

“The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God’s supplication to us. By waiting humbly we are made similar to God. God is the only good. That is why he is waiting there in silence. Anyone who comes forward and speaks is using a little force. The good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting. Beggars who are modest are images of Him.”

— Simone Weil, “The Things of the World”

[divinum-pacis]

A Christian pilgrim rests her head while praying during Easter Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site where according to tradition Jesus was crucified and buried, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Sunday, April 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

[northstargrassmaiden]

“When to all outward appearances men give us no credit, when they do not think well of us, then we are more inclined to seek God Who sees our hearts. Therefore, a man ought to root himself so firmly in God that he will not need the consolations of men. When a man of good will is afflicted, tempted, and tormented by evil thoughts, he realizes clearly that his greatest need is God, without Whom he can do no good. Saddened by his miseries and sufferings, he laments and prays. He wearies of living longer and wishes for death that he might be dissolved and be with Christ. Then he understands fully that perfect security and complete peace cannot be found on earth.”

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas À Kempis

[northstargrassmaiden]

ok now my little meltdown thesis complete logging off

[northstargrassmaiden]

“What good is much discussion of involved and obscure matters when our ignorance of them will not be held against us on Judgment Day? Neglect of things which are profitable and necessary and undue concern with those which are irrelevant and harmful, are great folly. We have eyes and do not see.

What, therefore, have we to do with questions of philosophy? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks is free from theorizing. For from this Word are all things and of Him all things speak -- the Beginning Who also speaks to us. Without this Word no man understands or judges aright. He to whom it becomes everything, who traces all things to it and who sees all things in it, may ease his heart and remain at peace with God.

O God, You Who are the truth, make me one with You in love everlasting. I am often wearied by the many things I hear and read, but in You is all that I long for. Let the learned be still, let all creatures be silent before You; You alone speak to me.

The more recollected a man is, and the more simple of heart he becomes, the easier he understands sublime things, for he receives the light of knowledge from above. The pure, simple, and steadfast spirit is not distracted by many labors, for he does them all for the honor of God. And since he enjoys interior peace he seeks no selfish end in anything. What, indeed, gives more trouble and affliction than uncontrolled desires of the heart?”

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas À Kempis

[northstargrassmaiden]

“For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God? Vanity of vanities and all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone. This is the greatest wisdom -- to seek the kingdom of heaven through contempt of the world. It is vanity, therefore, to seek and trust in riches that perish. It is vanity also to court honor and to be puffed up with pride. […] It is vanity to love what passes quickly and not to look ahead where eternal joy abides.

Often recall the proverb: ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing.’ Try, moreover, to turn your heart from the love of things visible and bring yourself to things invisible. For they who follow their own evil passions stain their consciences and lose the grace of God.”

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas À Kempis

[northstargrassmaiden]

being the one mentally ill person in the radius of lives that surround you just makes life feel like there’s a secret code at the center of everything that would make it all better and possible and communicable and easy but it just can never be cracked or broken. and it’s instead just pleading and breast beating that god had not made your mind in particular individual and independent.

[northstargrassmaiden]

i just want to be precious to someone 😔

[northstargrassmaiden]

it feels like on interpersonal levels it almost never manages to be about being a whole unique individual person made in the image of god for our eternal souls (“Only in the light of Christ, the God-man, can the unity of the universal orientation toward God and the concrete responsibility of man for God’s creation—nature, history, and society—be understood and implemented in the ethical-social dimension”) but as a comparison to the particular earthly and mutable mores and expectations of a moment in time that reduce ppl into oversimplified fractions (“Modern philosophies such as those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which make truth dependent on perspective or on its disclosure within a particular historical epoch, render truth time-bound. Christ, by contrast, is the truth in person, revealed in the fullness of time. In him, all epochs of salvation, ecclesiastical life, and doctrinal development are united within the Church’s consciousness of faith across past, present, and future”) ie rn the “ideal” of a perfectly therapized person (“psychology and psychoanalysis, as methods for understanding human emotional life, must be distinguished from Freud’s mechanistic and atheistic view of man”), or a perfectly ideological person (“salvation comes not from the perfecting of the class structure of society, but from the conversion of individual hearts”), and where one falls short of that and that’s the framework people speak to and know one another in. i get we have to have a social context but i actually just can’t stand having an imposed completely arbitrary set of rules and “authority” that are not true or perfect and are in actuality vain and objectifying like i cannot live life that way or stand being judged by them!!!!! if we’re going to impose any sort of rules or context on one another they should be the true and perfect ones!!!! “The supernatural knowledge of faith presupposes the natural cognitive ability of man, who can draw conclusions about the existence and wisdom of God from the existence of the contingently existing world and its order (Rom. 1:20)”

[alexklementski]

“Everyone saw in my face evil traits that I didn’t possess. But they assumed I did, and so they developed. I was modest, and was accused of being deceitful: I became secretive. I had a strong sense of good and evil; instead of kindness I received nothing but insults, so I grew resentful. I was gloomy, other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them, but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, so I learned to hate. My colorless youth was spent in a struggle with myself and with the world. Fearing mockery, I buried my best feelings at the bottom of my heart: there they died.”

— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

[northstargrassmaiden]

“The idea that the Kingdom of God could be built now, within history, had reared its head through the centuries […] In the late twentieth century, it appeared again in Liberation Theology and other ‘theologies of hope’. Pope Benedict XVI, a critic of this tendency, warned that ‘To some it even seems that the necessary struggle for human justice and freedom in the economic and political sense constitutes the whole essence of salvation. For them, the Gospel is reduced to a purely earthly gospel.’ This is what theologians call ‘over-realised eschatology’: the promises of the World to Come fulfilled now, in our time and in this world, whereas orthodox Catholic eschatology maintains a balance between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’.

I’ve been thinking lately about what Catholic Social Teaching would look like if it had taken notice of the critique leveled by Simone Weil, who was writing as early as 1942 against the theological use of ‘human rights’ and ideas like dignity. For her, these were scandalously insufficient to meet people in the depths of suffering. They were the terms of contract, of bargaining, and people whose very souls had been torn into by affliction were in no position to bargain. The only thing that could help them was grace. A theology of affliction is also a theology of supernatural virtue, whereas a theology of dignity runs closer to natural goodness. There is less need for grace and therefore less room for it. A Weilian social catechism would look more to heaven and, by extension, more deeply into the pits of human misery that merely human solidarity cannot touch.”

Earth in Heaven, Rose Lyddon

[karafina]

i need to quit my job and listen to music

[plant-scans]

Jellyfish, Bermuda Life on Earth, David Attenborough 1979

[northstargrassmaiden]

watching a mommy and baby rabbit romp around the yard together and feeling my womb wrenching