Matthew Heyd

“The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life. Nothing new to be discovered? The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“If some temptation arises in the place where you dwell in the desert, do not leave that place in time of temptation. For if you leave it then, no matter where you go, you will find the same temptation waiting for you.”
― John Moses, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent

“A mystical experience—and by this I mean to include those experiences of spiritual release and transcendence (in nature, in prayer, in art, etc.) that are available to every single person who will prepare himself for and accept them—does not simply result in action; its reality is confirmed only within action. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his death, Jesus is said to have prayed so hard that he sweated blood—a metaphor, I take it, but in any event a suggestion that his experience of God at that moment was what we would call mystical (it’s not all harp music and happy rapture, this brush with Beyond).”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer