Monday, September 20, 2010

two quotes to ponder

"What you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled…the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment."   -- T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"When you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you will begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men [and women] you will never see on earth. 
"You shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in me and find all things in my mercy which has created you for this end…'that you may become the brother [sister] of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.' "      -- Thomas Merton, Seven Story Mountain, page 462, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

HT: Gone Walkabout

Jubilate Deo, omnis terra

Merton was quite involved with a remarkable journal called "Jubilee", which was founded by his godfather, Ed Rice. The magazine's "roving editor" was his dear friend, Bob Lax.  I have explored Jubilee, which was published from 1953 - 1967, on this blog HERE, with several photos of the magazine.

A comprehensive essay about Jubilee by Mary Ann Rivera is on the web:

Jubilee: a magazine of the church and her people: toward a Vatican II ecclesiology

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Fall, 2007 by Mary Anne Rivera

"Jubilee magazine was a public proclamation of "Jubilate Deo, omnis terra "(Shout with joy to God, all the earth). For its founder, Edward Rice, the magazine proclaimed the "cheerfulness and joy" of everyday life and was a concrete expression of the believers' experience of God."

HT: to Jim Forest

Amounting to Nothing, Brother Paul

  Brother Paul Quenon, Photo by Rhonda J. Miller .  Sorry monk that I am, I never amounted to nothing. Somebody must have laid a curse on me...