miniZibaldone

"Art is the language of the human being. It is the language of that being, who, before being himself in the multiplicity of things or allowing himself to be absorbed by countless activities that give us the illusion of living intensely, has the capacity for wonder." Wonder, and the poetry that arises from its purpose, is for that which does not pass away. . . . Of the things of this world, only two remain, two alone: poetry and goodness, and nothing else. . . . That which is beautiful is not that what pleases today or has pleased but what should please; just as what is good is not what gives the most pleasure but what makes us better. Artist: the torrent of beauty flows through you, but you are not beauty.   Those who know how to suffer lives from vision and silence. Desire leads us to live paschally.   Beauty is mercy. —Stanislaw Grygiel

From the Angelus Christmas is to celebrate the unheard-of God , or better, it is to celebrate an unprecedented God , who overturns our logic and our expectations. . . . Please, let us not make Christmas worldly! Let us not put the One celebrated aside . In six days, it will be Christmas. The trees, the decorations and the lights everywhere recall that this year also there will be a celebration. Advertising invites to keep exchanging newer and newer gifts to have surprises. However, is this the celebration that pleases God? What Christmas would He want, what presents and surprises? We look at the first Christmas of history to discover God’s tastes. That Christmas was full of surprises . It begins with Mary, who was Joseph’s promised bride: the Angel arrives and changes her life. From being a virgin, she will be a mother. It continues with Joseph, called to be the father of a son without generating Him . . . . However, it’s on Christmas Eve that the greatest surprise arrives...

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love , except to give them endless duration . After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man. You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman. Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial , an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny . This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive . The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, ho...

From a homily With faith everything is possible In this second week of Advent, Pope Francis continued, “we ask for the grace to prepare ourselves with faith to celebrate Christmas.” He noted that Christmas is often marked in a worldly or pagan fashion, but reiterating the Lord’s request that we do so with faith, the Pope said “it's not easy to keep the faith, it's not easy to defend the faith… it's not easy!” “It will do us good today, and also tomorrow, during the week, to take chapter 9 of the Gospel of John and read this beautiful story of the boy who was blind from birth”. “From the bottom of our hearts” he concluded “utter an act of faith and say: I believe Lord. Help me in my faith. Defend my faith from worldliness, from superstitions, from all that is not faith. Keep it from being reduced to theory, be it theological or moral…  Faith in You, Lord”.

Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack “philosophers,” of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. There is probably no age in history that has as many “professional philosophers” as we do, with scores of new PhDs waiting to compete for every slot that opens in the philosophy departments of scores upon scores of colleges and universities. Outside of the academy, we have an even greater array of “professional thinkers” of every sort. There is the novel phenomenon of the “think tank,” an institution whose employees are not paid to produce any tangible goods, but simply . . . to think. There is the rapidly growing sector of “white collar” labor, made up of those who work with their minds rather than with their hands, as do the “blue collar” workers. This sector includes, not only those whose thinking remains tied to industry in some respect—advertisement, management, and so forth—but those in more “liberal” fields, such...

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don't really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man's insurance system. It's never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can. Anyhow, I don't think it's a matter of wanting miracles. The miracles seem in fact to be the great embarrassment to the modern man, a kind of scandal. If the miracles could be argued away and Christ reduced to the status of a teacher, domesticated and fallible, then there'd be no problem. Anyway, to discover the Church you have to set out by yourself. The French Catholic novelists were a hero to me in this—Bloy, Bernanos, Mauriac. In philosophy, Gilson, Maritain an...

The expression "postsecular" does more than give public recognition to religious fellowships in view of the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societally desirable. The public awareness of a post-secular society also reflects a normative insight that has consequences for the political dealings of unbelieving citizens with believing citizens. In the postsecular society, there is an increasing consensus that certain phases of the "modernization of the public consciousness" involve the assimilation and the reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities. If both sides agree to understand the secularization of society as a complementary learning process, then they will also have cognitive reasons to take seriously each other's contributions to controversial subjects in the public debate. —Jürgen Habermas

It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some thing if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea  would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wron...

The blind man who goes out at night between one o'clock  and four with another blind friend. Because like that they are sure of not meeting anyone in the street. If they bump into a lamppost, they can laugh in comfort. They do. Whereas by day, other people's pity prevents them from laughing. "I ought to write," says the blind man. "But no one's interested. What interests people in a book are the signs of a sorrowful existence. And our lives are never like that."   To write, one must always remain just this side of the words (rather than go beyond them). In any case, no gossip. The "real" experience of loneliness is one of the least literary there is — a thousand miles away from the idea of loneliness that you get from books. Cf. the degradation involved in all forms of suffering. One must not give in to emptiness. Try to conquer and "fulfill." Time — don't waste it. —Albert Camus

One need think about the entire world, need worry about Christianity in Africa and Asia, and not only busy oneself with daily occasions of disobedience and errors. . . .Only what is great, what is total, and what brings everything together can help a man put up with the humiliation of care for and attention to details. If one bears within him or herself a sense of the world, then he or she can remain in jail for his or her whole life with the fantastic serenity of a cloistered monk. Yet, if one has not within him or herself the vastness that human nature demands, then tackling the daily fatigue in the name of an energy one is supposed to possess becomes a grueling and exhausting work. —Luigi Giussani

Men are not egoists. They are not able to be. Their misfortune is in not being capable of it. God is the only egoist. Man can only approach a certain shadow of love for himself when he knows how to see himself as God’s creature, loved by God, redeemed by God. Otherwise a man cannot love himself. —Simone Weil

With the mainsail of reason adjusted to the breeze of my desire, I launch on the deep with hope of pleasant voyage. When we look into the cause of what annoys us, we find that in every case it comes from not knowing how best to use time. —Dante Alighieri

The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident. In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them. To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators. —W. H. Auden

Suffering: the superiority of man over God. We needed the Incarnation to keep that superiority from becoming a scandal! — Simone Weil

The Root of Forgiveness In secular society, forgiveness, like hope, is doomed to fail without a foundation in Christ, the origin of the love which is the only truth that can uphold such an ideal by lorenzo albacete Recently, I was watching the movie  Gladiator  with Russell Crowe on the movie classic channel, and I was struck by how the highest ideals were pursued by the most shocking cruelty without anyone noticing the incompatibility between the two. I thought how this was the dominant culture when the first Christians arrived in Rome and the great cities of the Empire. These first Christians did not seek protection from this culture. Instead, by engaging with it at all of its levels, they humanized it, inserting into it their experience of the dignity of the person, the greatness of reason, and the possibility of mercy and forgiveness. This happened not as the result of political strategies, but as a fruit of their efforts to respond to their encounter with Christ...

God Is Mercy Notes from a talk by Luigi Giussani during the Memores Domini Lenten Retreat in Pianazze, Italy, on February 16, 1975 The prayer last night [ “Through our annual Lenten observance, Lord, deepen our understanding of the mystery of Christ and make it a reality in the conduct of our lives.” ] called us to the two results of conversion: the passion of the knowledge of Christ (“knowledge” in the full, biblical sense of the word), thus the passion for Christ, the love of Christ as the desire to cling to Him, and hence the second result, good works. Lent is the instrument–the sacramental instrument–for fostering this conversion. In other words, operating the Lenten sign, making ours the pedagogic indications that the Church uses for the Lenten call to conversion, something happens in us through the power of the Holy Spirit that is greater than what our usual efforts would yield. It is a sacramental time, a time destined by God to give us a greater impetus of transf...

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Reading is the first way to listen, and thus to learn. Invitation to read From  “ The Day After Redemption” “Where in your time, in your body has Jesus redeemed you? Show me where because I don’t see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you, that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?” At the beginning of Flannery O’Connor’s  Wise Blood , the would-be anti-Christ Hazel Motes says to Mrs.  Wally B. Hitchcock, a passenger seated in front of him on a train: “I reckon you think you have been redeemed.” Mrs. Hitchcock, clearly taken aback by the question, “snatched at her collar,” not knowing how to answer the question. “I reckon you think you have been redeemed,” Hazel insisted. “She blushed. After a second she said, yes life was an inspiration, and then she said she was hungry and asked if he didn’t want to go into the diner.” Thus begins Hazel Mote’s relentless efforts to expose Christian hypocrisy by founding ...

Bukong (Max Surban) Abtik ug kursunada Bisa’g asa mi punta Okay bisan way kwarta Ang amo lang buhaton Kaulaw di bati-on Mag-anad sa pamukong Sakay-sakay sa frontsit Ang konduktor thank youhon Busa tawgon dibukong Restawran wa kutrihon Kun masakpan maga-antos Sa plato pahugason Korus: Bukong, kay kami namukong Bisan asa padulong Pirming way riserbisyon Bahala na’g magpungko Magkapyot magtikungkong Antuson lang kay bukong Magdaginot sa gasto Kung duna mi sinsilyo Para lang sigarilyo Usahay kung swertehon Malibre’s paniudto Libre pa’s panihapon To Korus Usahay kun badlungon Bisan nipis nga nawong Bagan na kung hikapon Hilaw na ang pahiyom Ulo kalut-kaluton Ang dagway maglipadhong To Korus Bukong