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