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“From the natural point of view we come to know God from the vestiges of Himself that He has left in the splendors of the visible universe: the blazing red sunset, the snow-covered mountain peaks, the graceful flight of a bird, the breathtakingly magnificent complexity of a single living cell. On a still more exalted level we know Him in the loveliness of the saints – but it remains a knowledge of the infinite through the finite.”— Fr. Thomas Dubay, p.188-89
The psalms keep teaching me that to be emotionally and spiritually whole, there’s no drawing lines inside the human heart. It’s like my students keep showing me. We can feel it all. Rejected and radiant. I think the psalms show our inner lives are a celestial place, a Milky Way, and as John Muir wrote about everything being connected, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
— from the book What Was Lost: Seeking Refuge in the Psalms
by Maureen O’Brien
//Franciscan Media//
“No one denies what everyone knows, for nature herself teaches it: that God is the Creator of the universe, and that it is good, and that it belongs to humanity by the free gift of its Creator. But there is a vast difference between the corrupted state and the state of primal purity, just as there is a vast difference between Creator and the corruptor. … We ourselves, though we’re guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we’re image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony’s ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don’t think so.”— Tertullian, p. 11