Clergy

"Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional"

"Once there was an old man who lived in a tiny village. Although poor, he was envied by all, for he owned a beautiful white horse. Even the king coveted his treasure. A horse like this had never been seen before — such was its splendor, its majesty, its strength."

"All I know is that the stable is empty, and the horse is gone. The rest I don’t know. Whether it be a curse or a blessing, I can’t say. All we can see is a fragment. Who can say what will come next?"

"Exitus acta probat."

"For those who believe, no words are necessary. For those who do not believe, no words are possible."

"Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

"We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchical Church defines it thus."

"Ignatius, for understandable reasons, is the saint I know better than any other. He founded our Order. … Jesuits were and still are the leavening — not the only one but perhaps the most effective — of Catholicism: culture, teaching, missionary work, loyalty to the Pope. But Ignatius who founded the Society, was also a reformer and a mystic. Especially a mystic. … They have been fundamental. A religion without mystics is a philosophy. … I love the mystics; Francis also was in many aspects of his life, but I do not think I have the vocation and then we must understand the deep meaning of that word. The mystic manages to strip himself of action, of facts, objectives and even the pastoral mission and rises until he reaches communion with the Beatitudes. Brief moments but which fill an entire life."

"The enemy is like a woman, weak in face of opposition, but correspondingly strong when not opposed. In a quarrel with a man, it is natural for a woman to lose heart and run away when he faces up to her; on the other hand, if the man begins to be afraid and to give ground, her rage, vindictiveness and fury overflow and know no limit."

"[Friends of order] are often heard to say that the Jesuits must be reestablished. Without disputing the merits of this order, one must say that this suggestion for their reestablishment indicates a lack of deep reflection. Do they mean that St Ignatius is at hand ready to serve our purposes? If the order were destroyed, perhaps it could be reestablished by some lay brother with the same inspiration that created it originally, but all the sovereigns in the world would never succeed."

"The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness. So the best way seems to be to scourge oneself with thin cords which hurt superficially, rather than to use some other means which might produce serious internal injury."

"The picture. A great plain, comprising the entire Jerusalem district, where is the supreme Commander-in-Chief of the forces of good, Christ our Lord: another plain near Babylon, where Lucifer is, at the head of the enemy."

"Out of this crucible of trial, self-examination, and anguished yearning for peace and light there emerged in Iñigo de Loyola that balance of spirit and matter, of mind and body, of mystical contemplation and pragmatic action that has ever since been recognized as typically and specifically "Ignatian," as distinct from the spirituality of, say, St. Benedict or St. Dominic or St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila."

"Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual."

"He said it himself, he sinned long and hard, to quote Luther; his conversion was total, his expiation very long, accompanied by a love of life and works, including the foundation of a Company that after 400 years is still one of the pillars of our Church."

"Up to his twenty-sixth year the heart of Ignatius was enthralled by the vanities of the world. His special delight was in the military life, and he seemed led by a strong and empty desire of gaining for himself a great name."

"Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison."

"Protestant success, at first amazingly rapid, was checked mainly as a resultant of Loyola's creation of the Jesuit order."

"I have studied at Barcelona, at Salamanca, at Alcala, at Paris; what have I learned? The language of doubt; but in me there was no harbor for doubt. Jesus came, and my trust in God has grown by the doubts of men."

"Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, All I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me."

"Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand."

"God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself."

"There is much cloudy unpredictable process throughout the whole of the physical world. It is a coherent possibility that God interacts with the history of creation by means of "information input" into its open physical process. The causal net of the universe is not drawn so tight as to exclude this possibility. Mere mechanism is dead, and a more subtle and supple universe is accessible to the providential interaction of the Creator."

"God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show."

"Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this. The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going. It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening."

"Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are."

"All art is anonymous."

"I have been Merlin wandering in the woods Of a far country, where the winds waken Unnatural voices, my mind broken By a sudden acquaintance with man’s rage."

"I have known exile and a wild passion Of longing changing to a cold ache. King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns, Knowing the body’s sweetness, the mind’s treason; Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen, Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart’s need."

"I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens"

"He was wonderful, very pure, very bitter but the bitterness was beautifully and very sparely rendered. He was completely authoritative, a very, very fine poet, completely off on his own, out of the loop but a real individual. It's not about being a major or minor poet. It's about getting a work absolutely right by your own standards and he did that wonderfully well."

"I have been all men known to history, Wondering at the world and at time passing; I have seen evil, and the light blessing Innocent love under a spring sky."

"Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?"

"somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time."

"He arose, pacing the floor Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure The long torture of delayed birth."

"His example reduces most modern verse to footling whimsy."

"Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long, And saw love in a dark crown Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree Golden with fruit of a man's body."

"We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge."

"What was the shell doing, on the shore? An ear endlessly drinking? What? Sound? Silence? Which came first? Listen."

"A slow singer, but loading each phrase With history’s overtones, love, joy And grief learned by his dark tribe In other orchards and passed on Instinctively as they are now, But fresh always with new tears."

"Is there a place here for the spirit? Is there time on this brief platform for anything other than mind's failure to explain itself?"

"Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand."

""Sunlight's a thing that needs a window Before it enter a dark room. Windows don't happen." So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose."

"They left no books, Memorial to their lonely thought In grey parishes: rather they wrote On men's hearts and in the minds Of young children sublime words Too soon forgotten. God in his time Or out of time will correct this."

"It was not I who lived, but life rather that lived me."

"In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason?"

"Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder."

"You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven."

"There was a larger pattern we worked at: they on a big loom, I with a small needle."

"True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. … I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable."