“I see clearly with the interior eye, that the sweet God loves with a pure love the creature
that He has created, and has a hatred for nothing but sin,
which is more opposed to Him than can be thought or imagined.”
St. Catherine of Genoa
(gull along the surf / Rosemary Beach, FL /Julie Cook / 2019)
“Man threw away everything he had—his right to speak freely, his communion with God,
his time in Paradise, his unclouded life—and went out naked, like a survivor from a shipwreck.
But God received him and immediately clothed him, and taking him by the hand gradually led him to heaven.
And yet the shipwreck was quite unforgivable. For this tempest was entirely due,
not to the force of the winds, but to the carelessness of the sailor.
Yet God did not look at this, but had compassion for such a great disaster…
Why? Because, when no sadness or care or labor or toil or countless waves of desire assaulted our nature,
it was overturned and fell.
And just as criminals who sail the sea often drill through the ship with a small iron tool,
and let the whole sea into the ship from below,
so when the devil saw the ship of Adam (by which I mean his soul) filled with many good things,
he came and drilled through it with his voice alone, as if it were an iron tool,
and stole all his wealth and sank the ship itself.
But God made the gain greater than the loss, and brought our nature to the royal throne.”
St. John Chrysostom, p. 19
An Excerpt Frp,
A Year with the Church Fathers
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