… the reason for Weil’s refusal of baptism that most stands out to me is perhaps the simplest: She didn’t love the church. “I love God, Christ, and the Catholic faith,” Weil writes. “I love the saints through their writings. . . . I love the six or seven Catholics of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites, and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love.”
Simone Weil, a kindred spirit for church outsiders
Category: Quote
I am not well
I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
… becoming free
If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non-existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical—New Testamental? (The Byzantine, Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers)
Sánchez-Escobar, Ángel F.. ON ASCESIS AND HESYCHASM, AND THE CHURCH FATHERS (Books on Christian Orthodoxy) (p. 47)
hegelian hangover?
In Hegelian philosophy the outer (the externalization) is higher than the inner.
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), 60.
… through a choice
So, then, what truly can be said to draw to itself must be something in itself or something that is in itself. So it is when truth draws to itself, for truth is in itself, is in and for itself—and Christ is the truth. It must be the higher that draws the lower to itself—just as when Christ, the infinitely highest one, true God and true man, from on high will draw all to himself. But the human being of whom this discourse speaks is in himself a self. Therefore Christ also first and foremost wants to help every human being to become a self, requires this of him [XII 150] first and foremost, requires that he, by repenting, become a self, in order then to draw him to himself. He wants to draw the human being to himself, but in order truly to draw him to himself he wants to draw him only as a free being to himself, that is, through a choice.
Practice in Christianity
SK on solitude
In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals. But since it is a crime in our day to have spirit, it is indeed quite in order to classify such people, lovers of solitude, with criminals.
Sickness unto Death
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the temporality of modern times that nowadays the only way people can think of using solitude is as a punishment, as prison. What a difference from the times when—regardless of how worldly temporality has always been—people nonetheless believed in the solitude of the monastery, when people thus revered solitude as the highest thing, as the category of eternity—and now people avoid it like a curse, so that it is only employed as a punishment for criminals. Alas, what a change.
Jounral Volume 6
… Adoro te, Domine Jesu Christe
I adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, hanging upon the Cross, and bearing on your head a crown of thorns: I beseech you, Lord Jesus Christ, that your cross may free me from the avenging Angel.
I adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, wounded upon the cross, drinking vinegar and gall: I beseech you, Lord Jesus Christ, that your wounds may be my remedy.
I adore you Lord Jesus, placed in the tomb, laid in myrrh and spices: I beseech you, Lord Jesus Christ, that your death may be my life.
I adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, descending into hell, liberating the captives: I beseech you, never let me enter there.
I adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, rising from the dead, ascending into heaven and sitting on the right hand of the Father: have mercy on me, I beseech you.
O Lord Jesus Christ, the good shepherd, preserve the righteous, make righteous the sinners, have mercy on all the faithful: and be gracious to me, a sinner.
O Lord Jesus Christ, I ask you for the sake of that most bitter suffering which you bore for my sake upon the cross, and above all when your most noble soul left your most holy body: have mercy on my soul at its departing. Amen. We adore you O Christ and we bless you, Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Lord hear my prayer. And let my cry come to you.
We adore you O Christ and we bless you, Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Lord hear my prayer. And let my cry come to you.
The prayer:
O most kindly Lord Jesus Christ: turn upon me, a miserable sinner, those eyes of mercy with which you beheld Peter in [Caiaphas’] court, and Mary Magdalene at the banquet, and the thief on the gibbet of the cross: and grant that with blessed Peter I may worthily lament my sins, with Mary Magdalene may perfectly serve you, and with the thief may behold you eternally in heaven. Who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (pp. 325-326). Yale University Press.
… tears
As Jewish women saw it as a dishonour to be without children, so should the Xn see it as a dishonour to be without tears (which, like children, are gifts from God), and should pray, like Rachel, that God will open the womb and viscera of the heavenly man, and in the heart’s inward motions give testimony of conception.
KIERKEGAARD’S JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS, 2
… the passionate
There is only one proof for the truth of Xnty and it is quite rightly the passionate proof that results when the anxiety of sin and the troubled conscience compel a person to cross the thin line that sep[arates] despairing madness―and Xnty. There lies Xnty.
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks
How do I feel about Jesus? The first question in Baptism (and the renewal) is, Do you turn to Jesus?. Do I? What does that mean in my context?
alienation?
What is alienation, and what is an alienated person, and what are the results of alienation? Alienation is the psychological condition of somebody who is never allowed to be fully himself. For example, in the social order a slave is an alienated person because he does not belong to himself. His work is not his own. There is no real personal meaning to his life, because everything he does belongs to somebody else. Anything can be taken away at any moment.
Transfer that obvious example to a person who is never able to be himself because he is always dominated by somebody else’s ideas or somebody else’s tastes or somebody else’s saying that this is the way to act and this is the way to see things. We live in a society in which many people are alienated in that sense without realizing it. Their choices are made for them, they don’t really have ideas and desires of their own; they simply repeat what has been told them. And yet they think that they are making free choices, and to some extent maybe they are.
What happens to a person in this condition is that, without realizing it, he does not have any real respect for himself. He thinks that he has ideas and he thinks he is doing what he freely wants to do, but actually he is being pushed around, and this results in a sort of resentment, which in turn leads to hatred and violence under a cover of respectability. This is the problem of our world, psychologists tell us. People feel inner tensions and violence and hatred, and they are ready to explode at any moment because they don’t really belong to themselves.
Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1989), p. 74.
this solitary life 