Category: Commonplace_1
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Thomas Merton on Integ-rity
“The worst thing that can happen to a person who is already divided up into a dozen different compartments is to seal off yet another compartment and tell him that this one is more important than all others, and that he must henceforth exercise a special care in keeping it separate from them. That is…
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Portrait of a Good Teacher (Memories of Mark Van Doren)
Mark Van Doren’s students remember him, and their comments taken together are the job description of a teacher [old link is dead] ************************* …the reason Van Doren exerted such a strong force on students, especially those with big literary and intellectual ambitions, was that he had no agenda, no outsized ego, and he treated them…
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Pavel Florensky: “…who repeats after you the lessons of love.”
“On quiet autumn nights, in holy hours of silence, when a tear of rapture sparkles on my eyelashes, I will secretly begin to write down for you schemata and pitiful fragments of those questions which we so much discussed together. You know in advance what I will write. You know that my writing will not…
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George MacDonald on people who want to govern
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen. – I don’t know where it is from, or even if it real, because I found it on the internet. I just like it.
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St. John Of The Cross: “The Dark Night of the Soul”
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!– I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest. In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy chance!– In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,…
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William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some…
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T.S. Eliot: “Little Gidding” (excerpt )
I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that…
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Thomas Merton: closing passage of Seven Story Mountain
“But you shall taste the true solitude of My anguish and My poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of My joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end, and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin…
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David Hart on the Christian Basis for Religious Freedom
Christian thought…desires the freedom of other stories, in part, that they might be free to be defeated. The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 442
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David Hart: “An Exilic Interiority”
Hell…is the soul’s refusal to become…the expanding vessel into which the beauty of God endlessly flows. …Exile is possible within the beauty of the infinite only by way of an exilic interiority, a fictive inwardness, where the creature can grasp itself as an isolated essence. …the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight,…