Anyone who really carries out this existence [ of the Discalced Carmelites ] in spirit and letter must see it as a foretaste of death, of the radical and irrevocable parting from all things that make life rich, sweet and attractive. It is a venturing into death in the hope of receiving a new, mysterious life from the hand of the Lord.
Austrian writer and noble (1901–1971)
Ida Friederike Görres (born Elisabeth Friederike, Reichsgräfin Coudenhove-Kalergi; 2 December 1901, in Schloss Ronsperg, Bohemia – 15 May 1971, in Frankfurt am Main) was a Catholic writer. From the Coudenhove-Kalergi family, she was the daughter, one of seven children, of Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Japanese wife Mitsuko Aoyama.
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A happy childhood means - or ought to mean - that one's first experience of the world is a true experience - not yet comprehensive, of course, yet comprehending the prime reality, so that it becomes an experience of an essential order which thenceforward will serve as a basis of comparison, in whose light all future falsification, all disorder, will be recognised as wrong and invalid. A happy childhood means above all a loved child. Because Thérèse was a happy child, her beginnings could contain perfection. Because she was a loved child, she received from the beginning the knowledge that others must struggle towards so consciously, with such difficulty, by painfully strenuous detours: the simple truth that to so many of us seems the most incredible and amazing lesson of religion: that we can be loved without having deserved it: that grace comes first..It is bliss simply to be someone's child, a child of a father, of a mother, living, moving and having its being in a love which is unmerited, unmeritable , anticipatory, unconditional and immutable. On this basic mystery and reality Thérèse's childhood was built. This was the source of her subsequent doctrine of the way of spiritual childhood.
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the protective, healing silence of forgiveness is just as much part of confession as its quality of judgment - stressed so much more. For in confession sin is not so much subjected to the light of the word, of judicial sentence, as received into the darkness of merciful, secret acceptance, sunk into divine oblivion.
I'm reading a biography of St John Baptist de la Salle - Extraordinary what educational insights and experiments have existed already - and what has been forgotten!. That reformatory, for instance, which he founded on the most amazing principles somewhere around 1680...The young delinquents were detained in solitary confinement to begin with, being promoted later..to community life..But in their single cells they were given flowers and plants to cultivate and singing birds to breed! The prisoners took their meals together with the Brothers, and each of the boys in solitary confinement was entrusted to one particular Brother...The Jansenists were bitter opponents of the Brothers, for in all his schools de la Salle laid great stress on frequent Communion..They did their best to oppose him personally and to hinder his work. The French Revolution wrecked his Institute, some of the Brothers were executed, others emigrated.
I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking , written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. (Norman Vincent Peale)..He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'...Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing...But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden...
Take my own case: from nursery days we were taught to believe the worst of people...We were drilled, in principle and emphatically, never to believe anyone, never to trust anyone, all people are liars, people are always hypocrites, especially if they are nice to you, everyone can be bought, etc..Scandal was the sole topic of conversation in Stockau: 'Just to show you what the world is really like.'...I was fiercely determined to have no illusions, to confront even the ugliest reality face to face. I would smuggle The History of Prostitution and such-like books out of the library, disclosures of financial scandals I couldn't understand, books on the crimes of colonial government...And what was the result? I believed every word people told me, they could lie and swindle and make up whatever they liked...Could it be that my insatiable and often so incautious hunger for people who are good, pure, beautiful and holy is in fact the direct result of that early training to despise people?
I just revelled in that High Mass at Beuron Abbey on All Saints' Day..Of course it's a spectacle, but that's just what makes sense, the very same sense as monasticism in general...ritual as the reflection of glory. How marvellously impersonal it is - the strict anonymity of the monks, even more impressive when they raise their hoods. They are just figures and voices. What an achievement to divest oneself of everything private, individual, to enact this holy drama day after day, indifferent to one's personal mood, representing all of us simply as mouth of the Church.
I've just finished a (for me) very important book about the parents (Louis Martin and Zélie Martin) of the Little Flower..It confirms my thesis 100 per cent: that everything claimed by her super-heralds as her direct inspiration, her unique originality, in fact stemmed from inheritance, upbringing and repetition...Most interesting for me is the recognition how alien and remote this bourgeois piety of the late nineteenth century has become, even for cultivated contemporary Catholic writers - a veritable terra incognita; otherwise this so wide-spread legend of Thérèse's uniqueness could never have grown up.
For his Spiritual Church Joachim of Fiore foresaw the continuance of the Papacy (much modified), but the bishops were to disappear. If I think at all of the Church to come, then I hope and pray above all for a revival, indeed resurrection of the episcopal office. To my mind it is still a prisoner of its almost thousand-year long disastrous fusion with temporal power. Strange - only a few years ago I thought the Emperor Otto I just marvellous and was full of admiration for his genius in raising the bishops to Reichsfürsten - princes of the realm - thus securing an unshakeable foundation for his Empire. Politically it was a brilliant decision...Yet I can imagine no way in which a mortal enemy of the Church in all craft and cunning could have fastened a worse fate upon her...For how often was their charismatic office as pastors overshadowed, indeed frequently rendered impossible, by their temporal mission and worldly achievements..
the posthumous visibility of the saints is a puzzling phenomenon indeed, and varies enormously.
Little Thérèse emerged from complete obscurity to world-wide publicity; but Vincent Ferrer, for instance, one of the most prominent, most spectacular and dramatic saints in the whole history of the Church seems barely to have outlived his own lifetime. Today he's as good as forgotten.
another article by Karl Rahner in Geist und Leben - What he reveals is an issue of the utmost importance: how essential it is for the Christian to recognize a plural, numinous universe, made up of angels, saints, the dead and demons - which are not the same as God...that if this created numinous plurality ceases to be understood as a reality, the very concept of God will be disfigured and distorted..to deny all such powers and figures is just as false, just as ominous as to succomb to them.
Léon Bloy, despite his many impressive qualities..what a hater he was! - wild and implacable, and what power of abuse! Strange don't you think that Ernst Jünger should comment at length in his war-diaries how irresistibly Bloy reminded him of Hitler in his paroxysms of rage and his foul and ribald tongue?..Yet Bloy was undoubtedly a man with great gifts of vision and perception, and charity, too - even in the midst of his orgies of hatred. And much of what he writes about Our Lady of La Salette in his La Salette book is very fine and often goes straight to one's heart...