Witchy Catholic

“Jesus we behold you lying in the manger…We see you as poor, in order to teach us that true wealth does not reside in things but in persons, and above all in the poor: forgive us, if we have failed to acknowledge and serve you in them.”

“Attention: deep listening. People are dying in spirit for lack of it. In academic culture, most listening is critical listening. We tend to pay attention only long enough to develop a counterargument; we critique the student’s or the colleague’s ideas; we mentally grade and pigeonhole each other. In society at large, people often listen with an agenda, to sell or petition or seduce. Seldom is there a deep, open-hearted nonjudgmental reception of the other. And so we all talk louder and more stridently and with a terrible desperation. By contrast, if someone truly listens to me, my spirit begins to expand.”

“Most people saw housing the homeless as transitional, or as a form of rehab. But Catholic Worker houses are not rehab houses. They are homes. ‘We let them stay forever,’ [Dorothy] Day once told a social worker. ‘They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family.’”

“It is not enough to look at the cross, or wear it, we must carry it in the depth of our heart.”

“Do not believe your thoughts, neither when they tell you that you are terrible, nor when they tell you that you are a saint.”

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

“[The eucharist] rang with the music of bells, glowed with light, dissolved on the tongue into honeycomb or bloody flesh, and announced its presence, when profaned or secreted away, by leaving a trail of blood.”