Great Souls

The best and most nourishing souls are made of a few great and radiant acts of goodness and a thousand tiny obscure miseries which feed their goodness, like the wheat that lives from the decomposition of the soil.

Marie Noel, 20th c. French Poet

Healing

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,

And wounds to the soul take a long, long time,

Only time can help,

And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,

Long, difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake,

And the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake

Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

"Healing" by D.H. Lawrence

Spiritual Birth

“Here [in the spiritual realm] birth is not the result of intervention from outside, as happens with bodily creatures who reproduce in an external way. Spiritual birth is the result of free choice and we are thus, in a sense, our own parents, creating ourselves as we want to be, freely fashioning ourselves according to the pattern of our choice.”
Gregory of Nyssa

Desire

“The language of souls is their desire.”
Gregory of Nyssa

Like a drop of water

“It may be that in the state of union, as many mystics have testified, the soul no longer experiences a difference between itself and God, but the difference remains. The very purpose of creation was that other beings, both men and angels, and through them the whole creation, should participate each in its own unique way in the one being of God. The state of union is often illustrated by saying that it is like a drop of water merging in the ocean, but it can equally be said that it is like the ocean present in the drop. In the ultimate reality, the whole is present in every part and every part parcipates in the being of the whole.”

Bede Griffiths

Saccidananda

“There are schools of Hindu thought which consider that when the spirit of man (the Jivatman) is thus united with the spirit of God (the paramatman), the individuality is lost. But this is not necessarily so. It is true that the individual soul ceases to exist as a separate being. It is transfigured by the light and participates in the very being and consciousness of God. This is the state of saccidananda, the state of being (sat) in pure consciousness (cit), in which is found absolute bliss (ananda).”

Bede Griffiths

Contemplation

“Contemplation is a habit of mind which enables the soul to keep in a state of recollection in the presence of God whatever may be the work with which we are occupied.”

Bede Griffiths

Desire

Desire for vision: Faith.
Desire for Possesion: Hope.
Desire for love: Charity.
By expectation, God increases desire.
By desire, he empties out souls.
In emptying them out, he makes them more capable of receiving him.”

Augustine, Commentary on 1 John

Imagination

“Through the five senses the soul feels, knows, and understands, coordinating their deliverances as a unity. The wonderful conjunction of body and soul has its closest bond in the imagination (the image forming faculty) which is not more of soul than it is of body and vice versa.

Aidan Nichols, Epiphany Ch. 1