fix your sights and do not hide!

“Fix your minds on the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Inflamed with love for us, he came down from heaven to redeem us.
For our sake he endured every torment of body and soul and shrank from no bodily pain.
He himself gave us an example of perfect patience and love.
We, then, are to be patient in adversity.”
St. Francis of Paola

(bullseye glass / Paris, France, Julie Cook / 2018)

“Now man need not hide from God as Adam did;
for He can be seen through Christ’s human nature.
Christ did not gain one perfection more by becoming man,
nor did He lose anything of what He possessed as God.
There was the Almightiness of God in the movement of His arm,
the infinite love of God in the beatings of His human heart and the
Unmeasured Compassion of God to sinners in His eyes.
God was now manifest in the flesh; this is what is called the Incarnation.
The whole range of the Divine attributes of power and goodness,
justice, love, beauty, were in Him.
And when Our Divine Lord acted and spoke, God in His perfect nature became manifest
to those who saw Him and heard Him and touched Him. As He told Philip later on:
Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father [John 14:9].”
Fulton J. Sheen, p. 21
An Excerpt From
Life of Christ

distortion

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

(bullseye glass/ Galway, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

“All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its ‘nature’ cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed. There is good reason, therefore, to praise an uncorrupted thing, and if it were indeed an incorruptible thing which could not be destroyed, it would doubtless be all the more worthy of praise. When, however, a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is, by just so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good. As long, then, as a thing is being corrupted, there is good in it of which it is being deprived; and in this process, if something of its being remains that cannot be further corrupted, this will then be an incorruptible entity [natura incorruptibilis], and to this great good it will have come through the process of corruption. But even if the corruption is not arrested, it still does not cease having some good of which it cannot be further deprived. If, however, the corruption comes to be total and entire, there is no good left either, because it is no longer an entity at all. Wherefore corruption cannot consume the good without also consuming the thing itself. Every actual entity [natura] is therefore good; a greater good if it cannot be corrupted, a lesser good if it can be. Yet only the foolish and unknowing can deny that it is still good even when corrupted. Whenever a thing is consumed by corruption, not even the corruption remains, for it is nothing in itself, having no subsistent being in which to exist.”
― Augustine of Hippo

(***time is not my own these days, so my apologies for a post or two that are a bit less than–less than creative, less than truly personal and or overtly creative….)