What would become of our souls if they lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them, the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the discipline of human struggle to make them strong? What puny powers and bloodless hearts Your creatures would bring to You were they to cut themselves off prematurely from the providential setting in which You placed them!
~ from HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE by Teillard de Chardin
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet, our silence.
I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot. When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast. We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.
~ from "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" by William Yeats
While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness That I was blessed, and could bless.
