Scientific, philosophical, and theological inquiries have their limits. Each pursuit provides head knowledge but the interior life requires more – to understand with the heart spiritual reality beyond the habitual binary thinking that feels safe but limits our ability to see the truth of things in the wholeness of reality.
The continual practice of prayerful contemplation at a still point will support the interior life. A passionate pursuit of the Real will involve our imagination which is more important than knowledge. For, our imagination can take us on a journey beyond the pedantic to places of mystery, wonder, suffering, truth, and beauty.
Do you want a faith that sees beyond terrible reality? A faith that takes on a Giant named Despair[i]? Practice prayerful contemplation continually.
Poetry can help us contemplate the Passion of Christ – what I call, using T.S. Eliot’s words, “the still point of the turning world”[ii]
The Agony by George Herbert invites us to a garden and then a cross to fathom the depths of sin and of love.
The Agony
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.
Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
[i] The Pilgrim’s Progress: Part 1: Giant Despair and Doubting Castle
[ii] “At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is… Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” – T. S. Eliot (Burnt Norton). https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/18/t-s-eliot-reads-burnt-norton/
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A selection from the chapter Gethsemane, in the “The Lord” by Romano Guardini:
After saying these things, Jesus went forth with his disciples beyond the torrent of Cedron, where there was a garden…” (John 18:1) “According to his custom” adds Luke.
And they came to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here, while I pray.’ And he took with him Peter James and John, and began to feel dread and to be exceedingly troubled. And he said to them, ‘My soul is sad, even unto death. Wait here and watch.’ . . .
Jesus’ consciousness of the world’s corruption is not grounded in the world and therefore the prisoner of existence. It springs from above, from God, and enfolds the whole globe, seeing as God sees: around existence, through existence, outwards from existence. Moreover, Jesus’ divine consciousness, before which everything is stripped and lucid, is not extrinsic, but intrinsic, realized in his living self. He knows with his human intellect, feels the world’s forlornness with his human heart. And, the sorrow of it, incapable of ripping the eternal God from his bliss, becomes in Christ’s human soul unutterable agony. From this knowledge comes a terrible and unrelenting earnestness, knowledge that underlies every word he speaks and everything he does. It pulses through his whole being and proclaims itself in the least detail of his fate. Here lies the root of Christ’s inapproachable loneliness. What human understanding and sympathy could possibly reach into this realm in which the Savior shoulders alone the yoke of the world? From this point of view Jesus was always a sufferer, and would have been one even if men had accepted his message of faith and love; even if salvation had been accomplished and the kingdom established alone by proclamation and acceptance, sparing him the bitter way of the cross. Even then, his whole life would have been inconceivably painful, for he would have been constantly aware of the world sin in the sight of a God he knew to be holy and all love; and he would have borne this terrible and inaccessible knowledge alone. In the hour of Gethsemane its ever-present pain swells to a paroxysm.
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Do you have Empathy for Real Victims? Or, has your “empathy” become toxic – aligned with the lawlessness and ‘anything goes’ morality of Progressivism? Are your loves disordered? Are lesser things loved above greater things (e.g., strangers over kin), leading to personal and societal decay?
The mother of Rachel Morin, the Maryland mom of five brutally raped and murdered by an illegal alien in August of 2023, on Wednesday joined a White House briefing to urge the media to share her daughter’s story.
“Tell the truth,” Patty Morin said. “Tell like how violent it really is.”
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media with a Special Guest, Apr. 16, 2025‘Tell the truth’: Mother of Maryland woman slain by illegal alien urges media to share her story
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As Democrats work themselves into hysterics over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a now-deported El Salvadoran man (aka, ‘Maryland Man’) at the center of an intense court battle, several new details about ‘St. Abrego’ have surfaced in the last several days – most recently that the Biden administration flagged him as a ‘suspect alien’ who was potentially involved in “human smuggling/trafficking” following a traffic stop hundreds of miles away from his Maryland home, according to DHS records reviewed by Just the News.
Human Trafficking Too? Biden Admin Flagged Deported El Salvadoran As ‘Suspect Alien’ | ZeroHedge
What deep state media (MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, The Atlantic, et al) won’t tell you:
Wife of Abrego Garcia in court documents — My husband beat me many times.
Violent restraining order filed against Garcia.
Kingdom Venturers 