Love

"Love is a life, coupling together the loving and the loved. For meekness maketh us sweet to God; purity joins us to God; love makes us one with God. Love is fairhead [beauty] of all virtues. Love is [the] thing through which God loves us, and we God, and each one of us other. Love is [the] desire of the heart, ever thinking to that it loves; and when it has that is loves, then it joys, and nothing may make it sorry. Love is yearning between two, with lastingness of thought. Love is a stirring of the soul, for to love God for himself and all the other things for God; the which love, when it is ordained in God, does away all inordinate love in anything that is not good. But all deadly sin is inordinate love in a thing that is naught; then love puts out all deadly sin. Love is a virtue, that is rightest affection of man's soul. Truth may be without love, but it may naught help without it. Love is perfection of letters, virtue of prophecy, fruit of truth, help of sacraments, stabling of wit and cunning (knowledge), riches of poor men, life of dying men. See how good love is."

Richard Rolle: The Form of Living.

Holy Dying

"Religion is no religion, and virtue is no act of choice, and reward comes by chance and without condition, if we are only religious when we cannot choose; if we part with our money when we cannot keep it; with out lust when we cannot act it; with our desires when they have left us. Death is a certain mortifier; but that mortification is deadly, not useful to the purposes of a spiritual life. When we are compelled to depart from our evil customs and leave to live, that we may begin to live, then we die to die; that life is the prologue to death, and thenceforth we die eternally."

Jeremy Taylor: Holy Dying.

Christmas truth

A very good reminder

Hope Christmas is treating you well – if you can peel back the layers of wrapping paper, marketing catalogues and advertising and somewhere underneath it all find the creator of our universe and the reason for your life without a price tag attached to his toe, you’ve done well. - Rowan Lewis

You can't

"You can't learn the meaning of a rose by pulling it to pieces."

"You can't examine a burning coal by carrying it away from the fire."

Elisabeth Elliot

Necessity of restraint in order to have freedom

It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal twelve sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust...

I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite - matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possiblities.

In art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obsticles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chians that shackle the spirit.

It is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organisation of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rehtorics keep orginality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true.

-Baudelaire (Stravinsky's Poetics of Music)

Ritual

Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast - all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient, they are obeying teh hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern haibt of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is not proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.... (the ceremony provides the form, the ritual to which) renders pleasures less fugitive,... which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.

-C.S Lewis from Preface to Paradise

Appraisal

Appraisal
by Sara Teasdale

Never think she loves him wholly,
Never believe her love is blind,
All his faults are locked securely
In a closet of her mind;
All his indecisions folded
Like old flags time has faded,
Limp and streaked with rain,
And his cautiousness like garments
Frayed and think, with many a stain -
Let them be, oh let them be.
There is treasure to outweigh them,
His proud will that sharply stirred,
Climbs as surely as the tide.
Senses strained too taught to sleep,
Gentleness to beast and bird,
Humor flickering hushed and wide,
As the moon on moving water,
And a tenderness too deep
To be gathered in a word.

Job 38:8-11

I found this in a book I was reading, it was unreferenced (except for at the back, when I checked later). I thought it was straight poetry and was curious as to where. To say the most I wasn't thinking about it very hard and to my surprise, it's from Job (maybe I don't know the Bible like I should ;) It was nevertheless a pleasant surprise and a verbal 'wow' came out of my mouth, I have heard this before, but not this version (NEB).

Who watched over the birth of the sea,
when it burst into flood from the womb? -
when I wrapped it in a blanket of cloud
and cradled it in fog,
when I established it's bounds,
fixing it's doors and bars in place,
and said, "Thus far shall you come and no farther,
and here your surging waves shall halt.
-Job 38:8-11

Do not articulate

from The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

"Seat yourself, but do not articulate. I cannot indulge in conversation while I am engaged in the creation of a veal pie" (p.98)

"Are you able to give me your absolute assurance that you are not a smasher?" (p.101)

True religion

"True religion is not a veneer, but an inner spiritual strength. The need is not for superficial change, but an alteration at the center of living."
Todd A Collier

There is a flow to history and culture

"This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind – what they are in their thought world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true of a dictator’s sword."
Frances Schaffer and other

Morning

“The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.” - C.S Lewis

Why First Phrase?

Quotes etc that deserve keeping. Dumpage point. Thought point.