Right is right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

 – G.K. Chesterton

There are moments when even a person wholly devoted to this world and
to the things of the flesh awakens from the slumber which possesses
him. He suddenly sees everything clearly, he sees that his previous
life on earth was nothing but a chain of errors, weaknesses,
transgressions, betrayals of God, that his actions were naturally the
seeds of future punishments and that all his virtues will not
withstand the gaze of the Eternal Judge. Beholding all this, he
condemns himself, trembling to the core of his being, and,
disillusioned with himself, through this despair turns with hope to
God. This disposition towards repentance is nothing but the “rushing
of a mighty wind” which precedes the descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts
2:2).

- Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, from a sermon at Pentecost

                     .... The Holy Ghost
does not abhor a golfer's jargon,
a lower Austrian accent, the cadences even
of my own little anglo-american
musico-literary set (although difficult,
saints may at least think in algebra
without sin): but no scared nonsense can stand Him....

                                   .... about
catastrophe or how to behave in one
I know nothing, except what everyone knows -
that if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

- W. H. Auden, from 'Whitsunday In Kirchstetten'

Sanctity is the reality of communion with the Holy Spirit. For this reason, the whole question of the Church comes down to its sanctity, its being filled with the Holy Spirit, the individuals of whom the Church consists, being filled with the Holy Spirit.   

- Sergei Fudel, At the Walls of the Church

.... The Catholic imagination saw all things, sunrise, moonlight,
chocolate ice-creams, a friend’s face, a lover’s touch, as metaphors
for the divine. It was the richness of this world and the power of the
stories, he wrote, that persuaded Catholics to stay in the church when
they couldn’t take the nitpicking rules any more. They stayed on their
own terms. And they read his books—making him a rich man, with a condo
in the John Hancock building, and giving him both on paper and online
a parish after all.

For God loved him, Andrew Greeley, loved him with all his stupidities,
his blunderings, his spitefulness, his spiritual sloppiness; his
inability ever to forgive a bad review, his failure to achieve
anything before ten o’clock in the morning, his unblinking belief that
the Bears and the Bulls (Miserere eis, Domine!) would win this season.
All of it. God—whom he often called “She”, partly to stir up trouble,
partly for the soundest theological reasons, since all opposites were
resolved in Him or Her—loved him and all created beings with the
passion of a lover, that can’t-live-without-you ecstasy. And couldn’t
stop now, or ever.

- The Economist, obituary for Andrew Greely

....

Pleased with his one good remark,
A cuckoo repeats it;
Well-satisfied,

Some occasional heavy feeder
Obliges
With a florid song.

....

- from W H Auden, 'Ascension Day, 1964'

This account of the healing of a blind man begins with the all too
familiar question: who is to blame?

The disciples ask the Lord if the responsibility for this man's
tragedy rests with the man himself or with his parents. In fact they
put it very pointedly. They ask: whose sin has resulted in this
blindness?

It is only an ancient response to affliction to see it as the fruit of
some hidden guilt!  We ourselves often think about misfortune - the
misfortune of others, our own misfortune - in just this very way.
Someone must be guilty of something. Someone somewhere must be to
blame.

In this story, our Lord contradicts this kind of thinking.  For while
the disciples ask out of the conviction that bad things are the result
of blameworthy actions, they are in fact completely wrong. The Lord
says: neither the blind man nor his parents sinned. The blindness is
not a punishment, not a consequence of someone doing something wrong
and blameworthy.

The disciples' attempt to pin blame on someone is similar in attitude
to that of the Pharisees. The Pharisees are very quick to judge, to
'connect the dots', to condemn. They pass judgement not only on the
blind man - you are a sinner through and through, since you were born
- but on the Lord Jesus Christ - we know that this man is a sinner.
These are people skilled in blame and put-downs. They are
mean-spirited.

But of them the Lord says:  your guilt remains.  They are guilty
because wilfully spiritually blind and mean-spirited.

In short, in place of affirming misfortune and tragedy as the guilty
and just consequence of sin, the Lord's offers a liberating judgement,
a miracle of healing and forgiveness, a gift of reconciliation, a new
life.

But the self- righteousness of the Pharisees, so thick with
condemnation of others, is revealed as guilt. They respond to
suffering by heaping on more suffering -  they punish, humiliate,
drive away, and make miserable with with doubt and guilt.

Their attitude is so very, very far from the example of the Lord, who
came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved
through him. (John 3:17).

.... Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That's exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called "hope toward God."

"It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy," Weil writes, "in order to find reality through suffering." This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love....

- Christian Wiman, "Love Bade Me Welcome (Gazing Into the Abyss)"