Status Updates From Heaven in Stone and Glass: ...

"It is a commonplace of the spiritual masters that the deepest part of the soul likes to go slow, since it seeks to savor rather than to accomplish; it wants to rest in and contemplate the good rather than hurry off to another place" (97).

This is definitely a spiritual stumbling block and thus a needed discipline for me. Savor the good instead of hurrying to the next good.

No wonder I've never liked labyrinths. Barron says they're particularly frustrating to the goal-oriented person: "The analytical mind knows that the shortest distance bween two points is a straight line, but the soul is not the least bit beguiled by that facile piece of logic. The straight journey might be the shortest, but it might not be the most radiant or the most beautiful" (98).

Love the chapter on gargoyles!

“Chartres Cathedral will not allow the viewer to separate Christ from the strange, loamy, densely textured world out of which he arose and in which he alone becomes intelligible. It states concretely what Pope Pius XI said in the 1930s: ‘We Christians are all spiritually Semites’” (63).

Wow what a radical thing to say in the 1930s!

Speaking to my soul: “If we are to appreciate the great cathedrals, we must move into the medieval mind. And this means that we must become comfortable with a relentlessly symbolic imagination. We, the heirs of the Enlightenment and the age of technology, have a prosaic cast of mind: we like our ideas direct and unambiguous…” (11).

This whole book may be underlined… 😂