Vanessa Johnson > Recent Status Updates

"I slammed the door to show what I thought of priests. They are between us and God, I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.'

"He is saved because of the solicitude of others, because, unbeknownst to himself and through no choice of his own, other mouths become his imploring mouth.... Where would any of us be were it not for the conspiracy of love and mercy taking place behind our backs, whereby brethren we perhaps know nothing of bear us, in our unconscious impotency, to the Source of strength and life?"

"Imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins. If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among those ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful - intact cathedrals, Bach concertos - but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called 'Christendom'."

I'm always amazed at the depths Leiva-Merikakis can plumb in a single verse!

On Matthew 9:26: "The glory of the deed and the voice of the Bride go out and fill the earth as resounding epithalamion, because all of creation is by rights the nuptial chamber of the Word and longs to vibrate with his wedding song."

"He transforms a place of death into a bridal chamber. His everlasting gesture as Word is to lead his creaturely bride by the hand, graciously and mightily, out of inescapable death into a joy of indestructible life in a communion of love. In this dark solitude, suddenly transfigured by the presence of Jesus and his act of bright love, the girl has nothing to do but awaken to contemplate the beauty of Jesus' face"

"Oh, how easy everything would be if one only followed one’s inclination! A morning with my books, an afternoon in my garden, my piano after tea, and a friend like you to come in to dine with my Pepino and me and scold me well, as you’ll soon be doing for being so bungling over Mozartino.”

"The deepest meaning of Christian discipleship is not to work for Jesus but to be with Jesus....The work of the apostle then becomes nothing other than the overflowing of the joy, wisdom, and nourishment he has himself partaken of during the intimate banquet at his Lord's table."

"Only a saint can be patient, respond and never react, know the best way to intervene each time, and put up with the constant struggles that come with raising children... Learning how to parent is not about trying to be the perfect parent, but being perfected as parents. Our call as parents is to become holy, to be sanctified and healed in and through our parenting."

"Just the act of considering what a child might be feeling instead of reacting is an act of veneration that shows a deep respect for the person of your child."

"I never have time for their fights. However, I have to remind myself that this is what my time is really for...through those struggles they're acquiring the timeless virtues that will transform them and lead to a perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless life.... We are working for the salvation of our children's souls, and God is forming them as persons through our responses to sibling conflict and rivalry."

"The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.... If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?”- BXVI

"The heart of Christian living is the contemplation of the unfathomable Person of Christ, a contemplation that spontaneously bursts into the hymn of glory that flows from us as we behold how near God has come, and how unendingly."

"Art is immense. Life is brief. Our lives are much too short to waste on what is inferior."

"The New Year begins in October when New York is suddenly alive and jumping with new Broadway shows and new books in the bookstores and a new Philharmonic season and new restaurants opening and everybody moves quickly, everybody makes plans, there are new worlds to conquer and anything can happen!"

"I'm always so ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I've never read you wouldn't believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory."

"To give life to someone else is always to give away something of your own and to saddle yourself with a love that can be almost unbearable. A child’s life really does come at the cost of yours. But Ferrante’s novels, which cover decades and span multiple generations, remind the reader that no matter how hard we might try, life cannot be hoarded. Every life is a life that will be lost."

"The divine act of intervention in the most intimate regions of our being both communicates the radiance of his Face and drowns the unclean, swinelike ferociousness that makes us refuse the approach of his healing love."

"Q also introduced me to John Henry Newman, who taught at Oriel, Oxford, and when I finish with Trinity I'm going over to Oriel to sit in John Henry's chapel and tell him I still don't know what he was talking about most of the time but I've got whole pages of the Apologia by heart, and I own a first edition of The Idea of a University."

"Lear himself is greater at the close of the play than at the beginning. His growth from error to acknowledgement of his poor, stripped nature, to repentance and a humble kneeling before Cordelia, is an upward progression as well as a downward one. He is greater on his knees than on his throne."

"....the centurion utters the second half of his prayer, which has been immortalized by the Roman liturgy as the exclamation before receiving Holy Communion. Such liturgical use, in fact, is the Church's way of molding every generation of Christians according to the mind of the centurion. Few other characters in Scripture have received such an honor."

"There is absolutely no necessity at all that any leaf on any tree, any tree in any forest, any forest anywhere on earth, any planet or star in any galaxy, any galaxy in any universe....or you and I at this very hour should exist!....I can never forget the reply given by a Carthusian as to why he had embraced his peculiarly radical form of Christian existence..."Someone has to thank God for the flowers!"