Dominika

“Even if I wanted to appeal to some objective ground for womanhood, I was being trained to think in a strictly secular, postmodern mode—a mode that favors the particular over the universal, that denies the existence of any objective ground from which to approach this question. In this understanding, all of our conceptual categories, our entire sense of reality, is fundamentally created through language—our words make the world, rather than express it. Any meaning we ascribe to bodily realities is arbitrary and ultimately fictitious.

There is no room in this worldview for a sacramental understanding of maleness and femaleness. The cosmos has been flattened; there are no natural signs of divine realities, because there are no divine realities. There is no givenness to our bodily nature at all, no grand order to which we belong and through which we come to understand ourselves. Sexual difference itself is reduced to mere
biology, something we can manipulate at will, rather than something that is intrinsic to our being, that concerns the whole person, not merely chromosomes or body parts. I turned to feminism to discover the significance of my womanness, and I was initiated into an ideology where womanness itself is ultimately renounced.

What I was unknowingly seeking, and unable to find in either secular or evangelical feminism, was the understanding of woman as a sign. It is not merely the priest who serves as an icon during the Mass; every man and every woman is a living icon, carrying in his or her body a divine sign that reveals the sacred bond between God and humankind.”
― Abigail Rine Favale, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion

“Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacing are swung--are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life to another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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

“I am nothing--nothing--nothing. She was clinging to that, she found, as to a sort of anchor, because it kept her from having to face the terrible possibility that God Himself was not, and the realization of God's nothingness would be the final horror that could not be borne. Yet as time passed she knew that that possibility, too, must be faced. She must let go of the very last thing left her, the knowledge of her own nothingness, and face it. And she let go, and looked around for God and did not find Him; and then there was nothing, except the dark night.
But there was the dark night. Very slowly she became conscious of it, and then she found that she was hugging it to her, wrapping herself in it as though it were a cloak to hide her in this hour of her humiliation. For a long while the night was all that she had, and then suddenly, like a sword stabbing the darkness, came a trill of music. It was a bird welcoming the dawn. That, too, was added. She drew back one of the curtains of her bed and saw a patch of grey light where the window was. That also. During the hours of the night she had been completely stripped, and now one by one a few things were being handed to her for the clothing of her naked, shivering, humiliated soul. For a few things one must have to make one decent if one was to step forth again upon the highway. For that, obviously, impossible though the task seemed to her at this moment, was what she had to do as soon as the full day came, because there wasn't anything else that she could do. She had to go on living and serving, with the living and serving stripped of all pleasure...But there would be something. There would be darkness and light, night and day, both sweet things, and music linking them together. The full glory of the dawn chorus seemed all about her...it was full day by the time she pulled back the muslin curtains that covered her window and flung it wide and leaned out, the scent of the spring earth rushing up to meet her. That also was given back...By whom?”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street