Significance of trivial things James Joyce There are moments when the outer world is seen with an almost pristine wonder….Sudden brilliance of the chestnut tree across the road. Bright yellow leaves in the sun. How enlivening, inspiriting they are in those unexpected shafts which strike into the heart from them outside world. Philip Toynbee Ian […]
Grandly related Henry Thoreau In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. […]
There is nothing now but kestrel. Iris Murdoch I begin to think about what happens when a landscape or a great tree or the spectacle of the night sky presents itself and commands attention. That quite ordinary scene beyond the railway track had ceased to be merely an object I was looking at. It had […]
Truly being here is glorious Rainer Maria Rilke Now – Here Learning to be present Grace is the courage to be at home in the moving resonance of the present Everyone needs to feel at home, to feel earthed, for it is impossible to say, ‘Who am I?”’ without but asking, ‘Where am I?’ ‘Whence […]
He had the beauty of himself alive in the only moment of his life. Wendell Berry My mind becamebeautiful by the sight of him. He had the beautyof himself alive in the only moment of his life. Wendell Berry in a poem about a yellow-throated warbler Image: Makoto Fujimura, Golden Sea God’s first gift to […]
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. Nietzsche …behind and beneath the smooth wheels of the socially constructed world are two abiding facts: unreconciled pain and unexhausted compassion, the history of men and women and the history of God with us. Rowan Williams In the beginning when God created […]
Pray as you can: not as you can’t Dom John Chapman I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention….How to be idle and blessed…. Mary Oliver Stop searching, stop travelling, and you will arrive. There is nowhere to go! Be still and see what is before your eyes. The […]
Peace and love are always in us, living and working, but we are not always in peace and love. Julian of Norwich In God’s sight we do not fall: in our own sight we do not stand. And both of these are true, as I see it. But the way God sees is the higher […]
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now…. Romans 8:22 God is to be experienced in art and culture, in everyday reality. But the natural world is a primal place where God is to be met – a ‘precinct of epiphany, the geography of grace’. Just how much a […]
and it is here and nowhere else we will find God. Paul Collins From earliest childhood, I was always conscious of a strong, sometimes frightening, sometime deeply necessary current of sheer meaning in things and people, a pressure of significance that only rarely carried over into what people commonly said. The world was resonant and […]