tonreihe's blog

“Today I was on as deacon at Benediction. The new sense of practicality did not extend to the ceremonies. I was in a fog, but very happy. All I could think about was picking up the Host. I was afraid the whole Church might come down on my head, because of what I used to be—as if that were not forgotten!

“The great tragedy of our age is the fact, if one may dare to say it, that there are so many godless Christians—Christians, that is, whose religion is a matter of pure conformism and expediency. Their ‘faith’ is little more than a permanent evasion of reality—a compromise with life. In order to avoid admitting the uncomfortable truth that they no longer have any real need for God or any vital faith in Him, they conform to the outward conduct of others like themselves. And these ‘believers’ cling together, offering one another an apparent justification for lives that are essentially the same as the lives of their materialistic neighbors whose horizons are purely those of the world and of its transient values.”

“Saint Hilary in the Night Office says that the best way to handle the problem of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, is to have absolutely nothing of the things that are Caesar’s, and then he will have no claim on you.”

“It is no new problem. It troubled Plato, and Tolstoy also, I understand. All Utopians, most moralists and the men of prudence, all the putters-to-rights, are in danger of having ‘two bugbears’: Religion and the Muses. In these latter days what has been a poser for ‘the thinkers’ shows signs of emerging as a fact seen by all. The subject is an enormous one, and can only be hinted at here, but it is the most important subject of all. Any order, new or old, ‘ours or theirs’, local or a world-state, which binds the Muses, breaks the totems, and withdraws the people from contemplation, is already dead in the judgement of history, no matter what fanatic vitality shines in its morale, or however reputable its ethic.”

“My great God, you know all that is in the universe, because you yourself have made it. It is the very work of your hands. You are omniscient, because you are omnicreative. You know each part, however minute, as perfectly as you know the whole. You know mind as perfectly as you know matter. You know the thoughts and purposes of every soul as perfectly as if there were no other soul in the whole of your creation. You know me through and through; all my present, past, and future are before you as one whole. You see all those delicate and evanescent motions of my thought which altogether escape myself. You can trace every act, whether deed or thought, to its origin and can follow it into its whole growth and consequences. You know how it will be with me at the end; you have before you that hour when I shall come to you to be judged. How awful is the prospect of finding myself in the presence of my judge! Yet, O Lord, I would not that you should not know me. It is my greatest stay to know that you read my heart. Oh, give me more of that openhearted sincerity which I have desired. Keep me ever from being afraid of your eye, from the inward consciousness that I am not honestly trying to please you. Teach me to love you more, and then I shall be at peace, without any fear of you at all."

“Analysis! You know that it is a travesty of the Devil, don’t you? God help from speaking disrespectfully about a man whom the Church has placed on its altars and whom I firmly believe to be a great saint. But it is certain that the Society of Jesus has terribly abused Saint Ignatius’ Exercises, an infinitely profitable book and method, to be sure, for some souls, but dangerous for so many others! and whence comes the hateful, abominable, depraving contemporary psychology. To always be analyzing oneself, anxiously interrogating oneself, looking at one’s navel! The Jesuit method, in the final analysis, arrives at substituting the contemplation of oneself for the contemplation of God, and it is in this way that I explain the furious absence of saints today which is one of the most undeniable signs of the demise of Christianity. Run from analysis as from the Devil, throw yourself at God like a madman…”

“Same thoughts as twenty days ago. Psychology invented by the Jesuits. Method that consists in continually examining oneself, with a view to avoiding sin. It is the contemplation of evil in place of the contemplation of the good. The Devil substituted for God. Is that not the entire genesis of modern Catholicism?”

“It seems to me that Saint Ignatius’ Exercises correspond, in a way, to Descartes’ Method. Instead of looking at God, one looks at oneself.”

“Everything that happens in life is adorable: I maintain this, with all the authority of my misery, which is perfect because God is perfect, and which is itself adorable consequently. We may complain all we like, the two of us, but we cannot avoid this law and we will never succeed in giving life to a plausible grief against Providence. If we lack money, it is because money would be disastrous for us, but we will certainly be overwhelmed by it on the day when this metal stops being an occasion of peril to us.”

“Easter. I am cold to the core of my soul, and I am also as close as possible to despair. Such is, on me, the effect of this great feast. Easter Sunday is ordinarily painful for me, sometimes terrible. Impossible to hide my distress, which is expressed nearly like this: I do not arrive at feeling the joy of the Resurrection because the Resurrection, for me, never arrives. I always see Jesus in agony, Jesus on the cross, and I cannot see him in any other way.

“Jesus is at the center of everything, he takes everything on himself, he bears everything, he suffers everything. It is impossible to strike another being without striking Him, to humiliate someone without humiliating Him, to curse or kill whomever it might be, without cursing or killing Him. The vilest of all louts is forced to assume the Face of Christ to receive a slap, from whatever hand. Otherwise, the clout could never reach him and would remain suspended between the interval of planets, for centuries upon centuries, world without end, until it would have finally met the Face that pardons…”