Signposts

¬ link

Faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book 1, Chapter 5, “Elders”

¬ link

…love is irrational to the self-protective. What is rational, after all, about creating creatures who you know ahead of time will literally crucify you? Ah but it is rational if rationality is defined as throwing away your life in order to save it. God defines rationality, and love.

— TS (via)

¬ link

My sense is that God likes artful coincidences since they bolster the faith of those already with faith without compelling or forcing it on those who don’t. (Then it wouldn’t be faith, after all, but knowledge.)

— TS (via)

¬ link

For a long time, when driving by a cemetery, I have had the distinct and unshakable sense that those dwelling under the tombstones are watching and waiting and maybe chuckling a little, laughing at the living and their frantic and petty preoccupations. Sometimes, I can’t help but laugh, too.

This idea of the connectedness of the living and the dead runs deep in the human heart, and is confirmed in the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, which is just the Church expounding on the teaching of the Lord that “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:38).

— Tim Jones (via)

¬ link

Ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing.

— St. Gregory of Nyssa (via)

¬ link

Each of us can say to the tempter, “Unlike you, I have not yet become an outcast from heaven through my pride. By my baptism I have become one with him. It is you that should fall prostrate before me.”

— St. Gregory Nazianzen (via)

¬ link

To Be Converted

“To be converted” means to follow Jesus, to walk with him, on his way. But let us again insist on the fact that God “brings us back,” converts us. Conversion is not human self-realization, and man is not the architect of his own life. Conversion consists essentially in that decision by which man ceases to be his own creator, ceases to seek his own self and his self-realization, but accepts his dependence on the true Creator, on creative love, accepts that his dependence is true freedom and that the freedom of autonomy emancipated from the Creator is not freedom but illusion, deception.

— Pope Benedict XVI, from book Journey to Easter

¬ link

Because If You Can Convince Me

Because if you can convince me, then suddenly your beliefs become more real. Right? The more people you can get to jump on your … train, the more your mission is made. So until you get me to swallow your world and believe what you believe, you’ll never have the kind of faith you want to have. You’ll always have a little bit of doubt. You’ll never know if you’re quite right. You’ll always kind of be wondering if it’s real.

— Henry, movie quote from Henry Poole Is Here

¬ link

It’s laughing with your friend at a time when you shouldn’t. It’s the sweat in your palms wanting to know someone you see and the pit in your stomach when they actually see you. It’s being touched by hands that aren’t your own. It’s the thrill of an escape that almost wasn’t. It’s the embarrassment you feel, naked for the first time. It’s helping a friend find something they lost. It’s a smile, a joke, a song. It’s what someone does that they like doing. It’s what someone does that they like remembering. It’s the thinking of things you may never do and the doing of things you may never have thought. It’s the road ahead and the road behind. It’s the first step and the last and every one in between, because they all make up the good life.

— character Jason Prayer, movie quote from The Good Life (via)

¬ link

I can’t help you; I can only give you a road.

— Chen Si, suicide watcher on Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (via from source)

¬ link

Don’t think of them as “Customers” or “Patrons”, think of them as “Users”. Whatever thing you’re selling, it’s not what it does that’s interesting; it’s how people use it that’s interesting. “People Matter. Objects Don’t.” Exactly.

— Hugh MacLeod paraphrasing Kathy Sierra (via)

¬ link

Remember that every single word you say to someone will either curse them or bless them.

— Mother Antonia (Mary Clarke) (via)