Gratitude

“Father, we acknowledge your greatness: all your actions show your wisdom and love. You formed us in your own likeness and set us over the whole world to serve you, our creator, and to rule over all creatures. Even when we disobeyed you and lost your friendship you did not abandon us to the power of death, but helped all to seek and find you. Again and again you offered a covenant to us, and through your prophets taught us to hope for salvation. Father, you so loved the world that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our savior.”

Eucharistic Prayer IV

Grace

It is grace that forms the void inside of us and it is grace alone that can fill the void.
Simone Weil

Change

“God does not love us if we change;
God loves us so that we can change.”
Richard Rohr

Cloud of Unknowing

“The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that we can achieve communion with God only through the Grace of divine Love. To prepare ourselves to receive this gift, we must enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth. Above – between us and God – lies a mysterious “cloud of unknowing”, which our understanding can never penetrate. Between us and the world, we must create a “cloud of forgetting”, leaving conscious thought and desire below. In this timeless place of forgetting and unknowing, we may begin to hear that for which we are listening.
John Luther Adams

Being Chosen

“When we look into the Selectiveness which the Christians attribute to God we find in it none of that ‘favoritism’ which we were afraid of. The ‘chosen’ people are chosen not for their own sake (certainly not for their own honour or pleasure) but for the sake of the unchosen. Abraham is told that ‘in his seed’ (the chosen nation) ‘all nations shall be blest’. That nation has been chosen to bear a heavy burden. Their sufferings heal others. On the finally selected Woman falls the utmost depth of maternal anguish. Her Son, the incarnate God, is a ‘man of sorrows’; the one Man into whom Deity descended, the one Man who can be lawfully adored, is pre-eminent for suffering.”
C.S. Lewis

St. Bonaventure on Contemplation

“If you wish to know how such things [contemplation] come about, consult grace, not doctrine; desire, not understanding; prayerful groaning, not studious reading; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity. Consult not light but the fire that completely inflames the mind and carries it over to God and transports a fervor and blaze of love. This fire is God…. Christ starts the flame with the fire and heat of his intense suffering…. Whoever loves this death may see God, for this is beyond doubt true: ‘No man sees me and still lives' [Ex. 33:20]. Let us die, then, and pass over into the darkness.”

St. Bonaventure