❝ My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. ❞
St. Augustine, The Confessions
Have Come,
Am Here
❝ Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held a knife over Isaac. ❞
Flannery O’Connor, On the Importance of Stories
Be still my palpitating cardiac muscle.
❝ Our monastery is 4,000 acres. That’s not an unusually large Colorado ranch. We have 500 head of cattle, and a hundred horses. We also have about 500 coyotes, two to three thousand deer, couple hundred elk, millions of porcupines, foxes—you name it—bears, mountain lions. But we don’t own any of them and we don’t own any of the cattle or horses. We board them, we take care of them. And we get paid for doing that. But we do it on our land, so we call ourselves cow monks. Now, but in the winter’s there’s not much to do with the cows, so we have a bakery in which we bake cookies. We bake orange almond cookies, and oatmeal raisin cookies, and the favorite is chocolate chip cookies. And so we also call ourselves chip monks. ❞
Father William Meninger, Trappist Monk
And after the audience laughter subsided, the interviewer did the smart thing and followed up with: I hope they’re organic. I hope they’re organic cookies.
So naturally, Father Meninger answered: They are organic and we bless them with our left hands so that there’s no calories in them.
(Source: vimeo.com)
❝ …I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. ❞
James Joyce, Ulysses
❝ This is simple truth: Tonight you and I, with billions of others, are sitting around the fire we call “the sun,” telling stories; and from time to time it has been my turn to entertain. ❞
Gene Wolfe, Introduction to Endangered Species
You, darkness, of whom I am born-
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.
The dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations - just as they are.
It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Discussion Topic of the Day: Jeff Bethke, who has made it his mission “to carry the life changing Gospel of Jesus Christ to the inner city,” refers to himself on his Facebook page as “just a messed up dude trying to make Him famous.”
Whether you agree with him or not, there is no doubt his latest spoken-word video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” — which he describes as “a poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion” — is provoking discussion across the web.
Join in below.
[thanks taylor!]
He overlooks the teeny-tiny fact that if it wasn’t for religion, if it wasn’t for the Roman Catholic Church who first compiled the Bible, he would not have known about Jesus in the first place.
