Author: Tim

• Anger’s Entire Function is to Enact Justice

  Injustice or unfairness, real or perceived, makes us mad.  It is a precognitive force, discovered within us at some point in those moments after the Fall when we were rearranging all our internal powers to make sure we were dealt with fairly…. just after that bliss when “fair” was an unknown concept.   Fish don’t know…

• And Isaac Rustled Like the Wind

  Barbara and I walked in the park after dark, hand in hand. The gravel paths shimmered from the moon, and the moon’s twin floated in the flat creek. The voices of other walkers were muffled by the warm air. The trees stood stories high and rippled in a slight wind. Long after we might have…

• Quotes from here and there I’ve not categorized

  “We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands , so does our power to think….If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality.” Madeleine L’Engle: A Circle Of Quiet, p.149 …”the idiosyncratic has triumphed over the normative..” Joseph A. Mazzeo: “An…

• The Roman Exorcism Rite: “…Ipse venena bibas…”

  Vade Retro Satana. Numquam suade mihi vana. Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas. Crux sacra sit mihi lux. Non draco sit mihi dux. (Begone Satan! Suggest not vain things to me. Evil is the cup you offer. Drink the poison yourself. May the Holy Cross be my light. Let not the dragon be my…

• Thomas Merton: “If I can unite in myself…”

  “If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of…

• Aulen: Pascha and atonement

  “The Paschal season has never ceased to be the impregnable citadel of the classic idea of the atonement.” Gustaf Aulen: Christus Victor, p.133

• Meister Eckhart on Simplicity

  “So I say that the aristocrat is one who derives his being, his life, and his happiness from God alone, with God and in God and not at all from his knowledge, perception, or love of God, or any such thing….This much is certain: when a man is happy, happy to the core and root…

• Meister Eckhart: 20th sign of genuine seers: “…they will let him prevail…”

  If you would know and recognize the really sane and genuine seers of God, whom nothing can deceive or misinform, four and twenty signs can detect them… The twentieth sign: if any man fight them, they will let him prevail before accepting help of any sort but God’s… These are the signs of the true…

• Meister Eckhart: “…one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms…”

  “According to one master, many people arrive at specific understanding, at formal, notional knowledge. There are few who get beyond the science and the theory; yet one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms is more dear to God than the hundred thousand who have the habit of discursive, roving reason. God…

• Meister Eckhart: “God is…innocent and free…”

  “God does not seek his own. In all his acts, he is innocent and free and acts only out of true love. That is why the person who is united to God acts that way–he, too, will be innocent and free, whatever he does, and will act out of love and without asking why, solely…