God is Known

The more specific ways in which God is known can be very different: at one moment, one might ascend from the perfections of finite things to the infinite source of all perfection; at another moment one might catch a glimpse of the majesty of the immutable shining through the flitting back and forth of mutable things; at another moment one’s experience of other persons may give one a lively sense of the personality of God as the fulfillment of everything we intimate in personal greatness; or, at yet another moment, we may happen to perceive in the restless activity of creation the ‘active repose and reposing activity’ of the Creator.

—Erich Przywara, Religionsphilosophische Schriften (1922)

The Feeling of Being Needed on Earth

"Oh, this business we've got now--it's been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren't being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was.  Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II.  Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production--know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines.  And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true.  Even then, half the people or more didn't understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making.  They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego...

"Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic.  At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth--hell, dignity."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb

...Lo, faithful Virgin, yields himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though he there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he will wear
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy Son and Brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now
Thy maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark; and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

—John Donne, "Annunciation" (1607)

theology means...

At the very least, theology means 'watching one's language in the presence of God.'

—Gerald O'Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (2007)

'the less it bore their imprint'

Besides, nature, by virtue of all the feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less it bore their imprint, the more room it offered for the expansion of my heart.

—Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913) (trans. Moncrieff & Kilmartin 1981; revised Enright 1992)

a generation of wingless chickens

If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe....I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable....[I]f you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it....It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

—Flannery O'Connor, Letters (1955)

Nothing more would beckon.

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. What if it were proved — absolutely and purely — that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. . . . Would it help . . . [t]o argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation?

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

'something commensurate to his capacity for wonder'

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'a high price for living too long with a single dream'

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . .

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)