Dominika

“Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, willful, terrible, crazed, and adoring. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. Other times they'll reach out and touch you like adoring grandparents on their deathbeds trying to memorize your face with their fingers...Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Sacraments and the rituals surrounding them are not harsh burdens placed on humans by God—rather, they are manifestations of God’s abundant grace. To put it simply, the sacraments are not for God; they are for us. Sacramental worship exhibits a deep understanding of our nature as human beings: our dependence on the senses, on food and water for sustenance, our need for tangible signs. What better way for God to supply us with sanctifying grace than through these signs made alive?

In contrast to the onerous rites of the Old Testament, which signified a divine reality without actually transmitting it, the Christian sacraments are signs that effect what they signify. We can discern, in a shadowy, inchoate form, the body of Christ’s church in the people of Israel, just as we can see in Israel’s sacrificial worship an anticipation of our sacramental worship—but the sacraments, as extensions of the Incarnation, are not just symbols. They are alive with Christ’s power, which is Life itself. To quote Vonier once more: “Sacraments are, then, truly an energy that comes from Christ in person, a radiation from the charity of the Cross; a stream of grace from the pierced side of Christ.”
― Abigail Rine Favale, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion

“You cannot see God. But He sees you, and He knows how much you suffer. He protects you, and He will always be beside you to protect you. And He will give you signs to let you know that He is there. God is there for everyone. If you open your heart to Him, He will show you the way.”
― Carlo Acutis

“In truth, submission should be the spiritual posture of every Christian. Receptivity, obedience, surrender—these are not weaker, delicate traits best left to the ladies. These are the lifeblood of spiritual vitality. Mary, in her yes to God that broke open our world, her yes that became an eternal bridge between God and humankind—in this self-abandonment to the divine will, we find the pinnacle of human becoming, the perfect response of creature to Creator. This surrendering of the will does not obliterate it, making us some kind of automaton—no, it sharpens it, heightens it, by redirecting it toward the good, the beautiful, the true.”
― Abigail Rine Favale, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion