Science and Mysticism

Science alone cannot discover Christ. But Christ satisfies the yearnings that are born in our hearts in the school of science… Science will, in all probability, be increasingly impregnated by mysticism.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN My Universe, 1924, IX, 83

Prayer and Desire

We must learn how to request in prayer, not what we desire, but what God desires. Nevertheless prayer must proceed from a real desire: let it be the desire to be more Christian. To pray to be more Christian means that we are praying to be detached from our own selves.

CHARLES NICOLET, SJ

The Beginning of Love

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

THOMAS MERTON

The Slow Work of God

"Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." 

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Baptism of the Lord

Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched.

ST. MAXIMUS OF TURIN

Reality and Our Vocation

"We have only to see how that which makes up the reality of our lives relates to our vocation; we have only to hear the call God makes to us to work with him. Quite often it is not a matter of doing something different, but doing it differently."

JEAN DANIELOU

The Ten Commandments

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”

G.K. CHESTERTON – Illustrated London News, Jan. 3, 1920