"Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat. Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us. Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.
Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists. Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless."
From Hymn to the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Wherever we have some sign of God’s will, we are obliged to conform to what that sign tells us. We should do so with pure intention, obeying God’s will because it is good in itself as well as good for us.
It takes more than an occasional act of faith to have such pure intention. It takes a whole life of faith, a total consecration to hidden values. It takes sustained moral courage and heroic confidence in the help of divine grace.
But above all it takes the humility and spiritual poverty to travel in darkness and uncertainty, where so often we have no light and see no sign at all.
When I see my trials not as the collision of my life with a blind machine called fate, but as the sacramental gift of Christ’s love, given to me by God the Father along with my identity and my very name, then I can consecrate them and myself with them to God. For then I realise that my suffering is not my own. It is the Passion of Christ, stretching out its tendrils into my life in order to bear rich clusters of grapes, making my soul dizzy with the wine of Christ’s love, and pouring that wine as strong fire upon the whole world.”
"As far as you are in God,
thus far you are in peace,
and as far as you are outside God,
thus far are you outside peace."
Meister Eckhart, The Talks of Instruction.
My spirit longs for Thee
Within my troubled breast,
Though I unworthy be
Of so divine a Guest.
Of so divine a Guest
Unworthy though I be,
Yet has my heart no rest
Unless it come from Thee.
Unless it come from Thee,
In vain I look around;
In all that I can see
No rest is to be found.
No rest is to be found
But in they blessed love:
O, let my wish be crowned,
And send it from above!
J. Byrom of Manchester, England (1692-1763)
…is to retain indeed with all one’s mind the love of God and neighbour, but to rest from all exterior action, and cleave only to the desire of the Maker, that the mind may now take no pleasure in doing anything, but having spurned all cares, may be aglow to see the face of its Creator; so that it already knows how to bear with sorrow the burden of the corruptible flesh, and with all its desires to seek to join the hymn-singing choirs of angels, to mingle with the heavenly citizens, and to rejoice at its everlasting incorruption in the sight of God.
Who else could have imagined
a gift so wide and bold,
as emptiness abundant
for all from young to old?
Each home a sudden cloister
into which we are installed -
take note, this points unswervingly
to whom we are now called.
Seize the chance to seek release
into the real embrace,
of that which fills
the depth and breadth and height
of every space.
Stilled England, 2nd April 2020
I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
No preacher
No professor
No policeman
Nor police state
No prince
No president
No prime minister
Nor pope
No general
No journalist
No expert
Nor idol
I know
No authority
But God.
Stilled England, 24th March 2020.
Being a walking question mark 