Soskice, looking back

"Looking back on it, I had very condescending attitudes towards religious believers.  I assumed that they were all people who needed some kind of emotional or social crutch and couldn't manage on their own—which is, of course, precisely true.  What changes when you become religious is that you realise you're one of those people. . . ."

Janet Martin Soskice, in an interview with Rupert Shortt.  God's advocates:  Christian thinkiers in conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2005), 24-25.

". . . those continual prayers that are performed with the body, out of which prayer in the heart is born. . . ."

St. Isaac the Syrian, "Concerning aspects of the way of stillness," =chap. 1 of the long-lost Second Part of the Writings, trans. Sebastian Brock. Sebastian Brock, "St Isaac the Syrian: two unpublished texts," Sobornost 19, no. 1 (1997): 16 (7-32).  Context:  "an easy rule that is useful for someone who is weak":  "because the feeble body grows weary of standing continually on its feet in order to fulfil the customary acts of worship, and for this reason is often hindered from those continual prayers that are performed with the body, out of which prayer is born, you should fall down many times on your face at your seat—just as is described by your hands—and spend a while in supplication, in such a way that converse with scripture may be intermingled with prayer.  Then, the light which you will receive from these two quarters will be raised up, to your soul's enjoyment.  As a result prayer will give you delight because of reading, and you will again be illumined in reading by means of the keys of prayer."

Just guarding the walls for the sake of Christ

". . . one of the Fathers bids that, as a result of just being seated unoccupied in one's cell, sitting there without any work and just guarding the walls for the sake of the name of Christ, one should have great hope. . . ."

     St. Isaac the Syrian, "Concerning aspects of the way of stillness," =chap. 1 of the long-lost Second Part of the Writings, trans. Sebastian Brock. Sebastian Brock, "St Isaac the Syrian: two unpublished texts," Sobornost 19, no. 1 (1997): 19 (7-32).  "Abba Sarmata in Budge, The Book of Paradise, i. 593 (no.9)", according to Brock.

so that they might be aware of him

"he it is who, while dwelling in his own being when there was none to urge him—in that nothing existed—of his own accord and in his grace was pleased to will that the worlds should come into being so that they might be aware of him, and he effected the creation in his grace, even holding us human beings—who are dust from the earth, a mute nature—worthy, for by means of his creative craftsmanship he raised us up to the state of rationality, so that we might stand and speak in his presence in prayer. . . ."

     St. Isaac the Syrian, "Concerning aspects of the way of stillness," =chap. 1 of the long-lost Second Part of the Writings, trans. Sebastian Brock.  Sebastian Brock, "St Isaac the Syrian:  two unpublished texts," Sobornost 19, no. 1 (1997):  27 (7-32).

Joyce on the final form of the text

—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.

Art thou there, truepenny?

—Interesting only to the parish clerk.  I mean, we have the plays.  I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived?  As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said.  Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's drinking, the poet's debts.  We have King Lear:  and it is immortal.

James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 9 (Ulysses:  the corrected text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York, NY:  Random House, 1986), 155, ll. 181-188).

"All at once, and with no two ways about it, I was being told to put my life in order."

". . . Yet more agreeable than bringing modern ideas and scholarship to the Poles was the sight of the old tried ways of Europe, thriving in the face of oppression, and awakening in the young British visitor the deep-down awareness of the Christian way of life. The Oxford students would come to Poland with left-liberal politics, agnostic beliefs, pleasure-loving ways and a habit of sneering at things old and venerable. All of them would leave in a thoughtful frame of mind, sceptical of political utopias, respectful of religion and with a new appreciation of the orderly soul and its destiny.
     "I differed from the students only in my starting point. I too was moved, refreshed and also troubled by those orderly souls that I encountered. . . . Most orderly of all was Barbara, and her beautiful lop-sided face with its high Slavonic cheekbones, dark eyes and left-handed smile gave the impression, when she looked at me—which she did often—that she opened a door into my soul and stood quietly inside it. She was a messenger from another realm—an angel in the original meaning of the term; and she entered my life like an annunciation.
". . . it was no underground activist, no banned writer, no samizdat publisher, no chivalrous knight of a forbidden order who waited for me in the woods at Każimierż.  It was Basia, who stepped quietly across my path and looked with a disarming seriousness into my eyes.
     "'You have no ring on finger,' she said.  'But in West is freedom, and rings make chains.  So I ask a question.'
     "I took her hand, which was small, like a child's.
     "'Someone waits for you? You get down from that airplane and maybe a face with smiles and a flower comes out of a crowd?'
     "'No flower,' I responded truthfully.
     "'So, just a face.' She detached her hand. 'This is pity because already you are a little bit in my heart.'
     "I received this news in unastonished silence. All at once and with no two ways about it, I was being told to put my life in order.  I reviewed the chaos that had dogged me from year to year since my divorce, and to which I had never yet confessed.
     "'Well yes,' she said, 'you say nothing. It is not for a woman to tell feelings—woman must hide otherwise she is cheap. But you come here for truth I think. So it is much worse than I tell. I love you. I want to be yours. And it is impossible. This is God's work for me. To—how do you say—come over my love?'
     "'Overcome.'
     "'Yes, overcome,' she said with a self-deprecating laugh. . . .
". . . Basia was young and her first need was to confess. I learned that the order in her soul was not innate but acquired, and acquired by swimming constantly against the current of sensual desire. She had visited England as an au pair to a Pakistani family, had been seduced by the husband, and had come back to Poland with his baby inside her. She had lived thereafter in the full consciousness of her body, knowing that it must be ruled and guided. She confessed to her unchastities with chaste and reverent words. And she brought home to me, then and subsequently, what is perhaps the most important truth conveyed by religion, . . . the truth that sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between, and that nothing matters more than the customs, ceremonies and rites with which we lift the body above its material need and reshape it as soul. . . . Basia phrased [this thought] in the pure, simple, liturgical language of her church, and showed through her emotion that she had re-made herself, so as one day to give herself entirely. Perhaps she should have been a nun; but it was too late for that. Now her first thought was to encounter the temptation that I presented, not to flee from it, but to vanquish it. For the crazy idea had also come into her head that she could help me to salvation.
". . . [Basia] observed her world with the eye of religion, seeing in everything the sign of God's creative power and the call to free obedience. Hers was a simple, humble, priest-haunted life, and yet it was lived more intensely and more completely than mine. It was wholly natural to her to believe that fulfilment and renunciation coincide, and that a carnal love could be transcended, as the priestess Diotima revealed to Socrates, so as to rescue both lover and beloved from the dross of this world."

     Roger Scruton, "Stealing from churches," chap. 5 of Gentle regrets: thoughts from a life (London: Continuum, 2005), 72-76.

"the full power of worship will only be felt if its sacramental character is realized in undiminished form"

"the full power of [the Christian (73)] worship [that is irreversibly 'the deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital' (69-70) but that 'cannot be "done" for the sake of' leisure (72)] will only be felt if its sacramental character is realized in undiminished form, that is, if the sign is fully visible.  In leisure, as was said, man oversteps the frontiers of the everyday workaday world, not in external effort and strain, but as though lifted above it in ecstacy.  That is the sense of the visibility of the sacrament:  that man is 'carried away' by it, thrown into 'ecstacy'.  Let no one imagine for a moment that that is a private and romantic interpretation.  The Church has pointed to the meaning of the incarnation of the Logos in the self-same words:  ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur, that we may be rapt into love of the invisible reality through the visibility of that first and ultimate sacrament:  the Incarnation."

Joseph Pieper, Leisure:  the basis of culture, trans. Alexander Dru (San Fransisco:  Ignatius Press, 2009 [1963/1952]) , 73-74.  The Latin is from the Preface of the Nativity (Octave of Christmas, i.e. Christmas Day through Epiphany Eve, with the exception of the Feast of St. John), and goes back to the Gregorian Sacramentary (nos. 38, 51, and 1537) at least.  See The Gregorian sacramentary under Charles the Great:  edited from three mss. of the 9th century by H. A. Wilson, Henry Bradshaw Society 49 (London:  Henry Bradshaw Society, 1915), :

for through the mystery of the Word made flesh thy splendour has shone before our mind's eye with a new radiance, and through him whom we recognize as God made visible we are carried away in love of things invisible

(The MIssal in Latin and English, being the text of the Missale Romanum with English rubrics and a new translation (New York:  Sheed & Ward, 1959), 763).