As mankind elevates the world’s beauty through his senses, so his soul is elevated. He is transformed from a mere consumer of the world, to its attentive lover. And in this transformation he becomes what he was always meant to be: made in the image of God, participating in the Divine work of preserving and sustaining creation, fully inhabiting the created world, in which he lives and moves and has his being.
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Seeing and Knowing
I saw things from the top of the mountain. Unforgettable things. I saw them and they were now part of me.
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Another Sort of Learning (Book Recommendation)
If I am concerned about teaching or lecturing or grading, it is because I am most concerned about the highest things to which we are called, called by being attracted to them in our souls, which are somehow open to what is beyond us.
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[Dis]placed Poet: Thomas Merton’s Pilgrimage
The humble act of limitation in the Incarnation means that not only can God speak to us through various times and places, but rather that time and place are now qualities native to the eternal and omnipresent God. To be a person means to be a person in a place.
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Notre-Dame, the New West, and Wanting to See from the Inside
Perhaps Paris (and with it much of the West) does now seem to be a kind of twilight world – a museum to a way of life that has all but vanished, inhabited by a people who cannot seem to entirely forget. But perhaps it is in that very refusal to forget, in the inability to turn away from beauty, in the instinct of the Parisians (believers or not) who gathered on the streets to sing Ave Maria, that we should look for hope.
