Tuesday, February 17, 2015

A thought for Shrove Tuesday


From a Jesuit:

We cannot find anything that does not originate in God.   Each tiny thing that we encounter, especially each human person, is directly related to the Godhead in all its glory.
-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p.188

Some decades earlier, G.K. Chesterton put a similar thought more epigrammatically:

Man cannot love mortal things.
He can only love  immortal things --
   for an instant.

Oddly, although that phrasing wears the badge of Chestertonian love of paradox, this fragment seems -- paradoxically -- more intuitively convincing.  Father Schall’s pensée is nice, is pious, but might well be met with doubt.  With Chesterton, you suddenly just see it.

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