The Awful Futility of Explaining
In Marcel Billot’s foreword to Sacred Art by M.A. Couturier, he explains that L’Art Sacré was a review run for a time by two Dominican priests, Father Couturier and Father Pie-Raymond Régamey. They managed, apparently, to work together and produce…
Trust Issues
Domenique de Menil writes, in her foreword to Sacred Art, a collection of essays and reflections by M.A. Courturier, O.P. : “For Père Couturier, to be sure, straightforwardness, which begets clarity, was the simple and immediate principle of his personal…
All We Need for the Journey
For one reason or another, I saved a Magnificat meditation by Dorothy Day. Her words appear in purple. Today the atmosphere is very heavy. Rain threatens. So often one is overcome with a tragic sense of the meaninglessness of our…
One Traveler
Perhaps these words from Bishop Kenneth Untener (as shared by Maureen Sullivan, OP) in her book, The Road to Vatican II, are good openers for some thoughts. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise…
Who Do You Trust?
I think I had trust issues, but not necessarily with other people: with myself. What’s more, I have a feeling that my inability to trust myself enough, to let others consistently plant doubts in my mind, is the key to…
It Can Get Hazy Among Humans
Reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels set in Roman Britain is a bit of a paradox. As a lover of freedom, I should be rooting for the native tribes who have had their ways of life upset, curtailed, and sometimes ruined by…
Big Pictures
Through the details unique to each story, literature shows us the big pictures in life. When I take in the stacks and stacks of shirts in Jay Gatsby’s closets, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and the…
The Old and the Novel
The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well.…
Please Don’t Get Comfortable
The best part of reading more than one book at any period of time is finding the connections among them. It is a conversation, and like most conversations, paying attention is important, because if you do, you’ll likely find answers…
Freedom of the Humble Soul
I had every intention yesterday of writing about the interesting bits I found in The Gaze of Love by Sister Wendy Beckett, but I managed to get off on a political tangent. Can you imagine? Let’s see if I can…
Messengers
Speaking of questions: I just stumbled across a thought or two about them from Madeleine L’Engle (who’s generally good for getting the thoughts warmed up): If God is in and part of all creation, then any part can be a…
Where I am Going
Where I am going, you cannot drive me. Those words are there in my mind, for one reason or another. I read them somewhere once, and they were appropriate for the speaker uttering them. I don’t know that they would…
