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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)
The flame of love
grows as it is divided
it increases by being shared
from one, then two, then three
and darkness is transformed into glory
and the walls reflect its light
Share your flame!
Share your flame!
— St. John of the Cross
The Mystery of Personality in God
The Feast of the Sacred Heart was for me a day of grace and seriousness. Twenty years ago I was uncomfortable with this concept. Now I see the real meaning of it (quite apart from the externals). It is the center, the “heart” of the whole Christian mystery.
There is one thing more—I may be interested in Oriental religions, etc., but there can be no obscuring the essential difference—this personal communion with Christ at the center and heart of all reality, as a source of grace and life. “God is love” may perhaps be clarified if one says that “God is void” and if the void one finds absolute indetermination and hence absolute freedom. (With freedom, the void becomes fulness and 0 = infinity). All that is “interesting” but none of it touches on the mystery of personality in God, and His personal love for me. Again, I am void too—and I have freedom, or am a kind of freedom, meaningless unless oriented to Him.
— Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life