The Cloister Walk

“perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.”

There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do.

as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class. The metaphorical intelligence that has pulled disparate elements together to make the poem is of no consequence.

John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”

this is the purpose of celibacy, not to attain some impossibly cerebral goal mistakenly conceived as “holiness” but to make oneself available to others, body and soul. Celibacy, simply put, is a form of ministry—not an achievement one can put on a résumé but a subtle form of service to others.

The human experience is of violence, and the psalms reflect our experience of the world.”

These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all.

temptations are, as well as our gifts—not that we might better “know ourselves,” or in modern parlance, “feel good about ourselves,” but in order that we might become instruments of divine grace for other people, and eventually return to God.

Maybe Mary’s story, and this feast, tell us that if the scriptures don’t sometimes pierce us like a sword, we’re not paying close enough attention.

Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through.