Wise Words On Wednesday: Closed and open doors
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
Hellen Keller
"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
Hellen Keller
One’s homesickness for Heaven finds at least an inn there; and it’s an inn on the right road.
– Ruth Pitter
“None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can’t teach people that – they have to learn by experience”
Dorothy L. Sayers
“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought”
– Dorothy L. Sayers
By the bye, what are your views, now, on the question of sacraments? To me that is the most puzzling side of the whole thing. I need hardly say I feel none of the materialistic difficulties: but I feel strongly just the opposite ones—i.e., I see (or think I see) so well a sense in which all wine is the blood of God—or all matter, even, the body of God, that I stumble at the apparently special sense in which this is claimed for the Host when consecrated. George Macdonald observes that the good man should aim at reaching the state of mind in which all meals are sacraments. Now that is the sort of thing I can understand: but I find no connection between it and the explicit “sacrament” proprement dit [“properly so called”]. The Presbyterian method of sitting at tables munching actual slices of bread is clearly absurd under ordinary conditions: but one can conceive a state of society in which a real meal might be shared by a congregation in such a way as to be a sacrament without ceasing to be also their actual dinner for that day. Possibly this was so in the very early Church.
– C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II
Earlier this week I shared a quotation from Joy Davidman. I also made a graphic for it:
“If we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us?”
– Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain