The Weight of Glory

From “The Weight of Glory”:

Nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine.

St Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3).

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

From “Transposition”:

. . . a poorer medium can respond to a richer. . . .

The attempt to discover by introspective analysis our own spiritual condition is to me a horrible thing which reveals, at best, not the secrets of God’s spirit and ours, but their transpositions in intellect, emotion, and imagination, and which at worst may be the quickest road to presumption or despair.

May we not . . . suppose . . . that there is no experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no vision of Diety Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level?

From “The Inner Ring”:

When promiscuity is in fashion, the chaste are outsiders.

From “Membership”:

The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero.

It delights me that there should be moments in the services of my own Church when the priest stands and I kneel.

The Church will outlive the universe; in it the individual person will outlive the universe.

A rejection, or in Scripture’s strong language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.