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"When contemplation makes us drop the book from our hands, there is nothing more for us to do than to let it fall without worry."
"Quand le recueillement nous fait tomber le livre des mains,
il n’y a qu’à
le laisser tomber sans scrupule."
François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Maxims of the saints 20.True, trans. Chad Helms, Classics of Western spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2006), 262. I was put onto this by Dictionnaire de spiritualité, sv Lectio divina et lecture spirituelle III (col. 502), by André Boland. French from the critical edition of 1911, ed. A. Chérel, p. 242, here.
"In a sense, I guess I did read my way into the Church. But I didn’t reason my way. I was drawn in large measure by envy of Joyce, who had been raised in a Catholic Church that had spiritual and imaginative power, and that went on haunting him after he had left. I couldn’t imagine writing an autobiographical novel to compare with Joyce’s Portrait, about a young woman who grew up singing 'On Eagle’s Wings.'"
Julia Yost, as interviewed by Matthew Schmitz in "A conversation between two converts," First things, 12 November 2018, an excerpt from the book Mind, heart, and soul: intellectuals and the path to Rome, ed. Robert P. George and R. J. Snell (TAN Books, 2018).
"There’s a lot of talk about how Catholics have something called the 'sacramental imagination.' Often this is said sentimentally, as if Catholics were romantic savages who view everything as suffused with wonderment and beauty, enchanted people who climb up and down the rungs of the analogy of being. This is a way of talking around the actual content of the faith. What the sacramental imagination should mean, first of all, is actual belief in the sacraments: Marriage is indissoluble and ordained by God. Christ is present in the Eucharist and must be revered. My grandparents in their concern for my baptism were much better examples of the sacramental imagination than all the faith-in-fiction litterateurs combined. The sacrament of baptism was real to them, and so long as I went without it, they feared my damnation. They had the sacramental imagination in that cold, narrow sense. My parents did not."
Matthew Schmitz, as interviewed by Julia Yost in "A conversation between two converts," First things, 12 November 2018, an excerpt from the book Mind, heart, and soul: intellectuals and the path to Rome, ed. Robert P. George and R. J. Snell (TAN Books, 2018).
"son amour n'est durable que si son esprit est nourri."
Bernard-Marie Chevignard, O.P., "Formation spirituelle," Dictionnaire de spiritualité 5 (1964), cols. 705 (cols. 699-716).
"When contemplation makes us drop the book from our hands, there is nothing more for us to do than to let it fall without worry."
