Vanessa Johnson > Recent Status Updates

"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!"

"The purple of Lent is...the color of royalty and of passion, the color announcing the love unto death of the King of the Universe.This love unto death only just peers through the clouds of Horeb and speaks out of the burning bush....Little could Moses imagine that a straight trajectory would lead from that burning bush to the burning passion of the Cross where Christ would take away our misery by making it his own."

"What might be glimpsed in serious astrology...or even LSD might well be a glimpse of something that is true at the center of things. The error lies not so much in the glimpse as in my fixing upon the glimpse as in some way salvific. The point is, hints and guesses are only hints and guesses. Flags. But to get there is the occupation for the saint. I cannot suddenly land there by popping a pill."

"Four Quartets takes Joy as seriously as did The Divine Comedy, and Saint John's Apocalypse. Joy is the very property of Reality, and it is really, truly there in the sense expressed in the carol In Dulci Jublio, whose lines culminate with 'O, that we were there, O, that we were there.'"

"I went out, leaving my sins behind me... Next day, while Ranse read the funny papers, I went to Mass and received the Body and Blood of God. All these years later, here I was again, repeating the cycle: born again, born again, born again. It was what Mother Sain had wished for me, after all. She did not consider, nor did I know, having never given birth, how long it can take or what hard work it is."

"If I had the mind of God, I would forgive all which means I would sustain rather than judge, or, better still, my very judgement would consist of forgiveness, because it would judge the misery and plight that underlies most human actions."

"To abandon myself to his love would constitute the supreme act of my freedom for it would be nothing less than soaring in the heaven of his providence, a life of permanent flight in celebration of the sheer beauty of space. The bird, which in its airborne existence is the universal symbol of freedom from constraint and care, is here made by Jesus to be the privileged symbol of divine filiation and trust."

"The 'Dark, dark, dark'...is transfigured from being the fathomless black abyss of vacuity to being the ascetical Way to the Beatific Vision. Either of these two 'darks' is wholly calamitous to my distracted self: but the one is perdition, and the other is salvation."

"It is all about death, and the overwhelming chances of our missing our cues by distraction, and about the beatitude that is in the cards if we will gird up our loins and attend to the 'hints and guesses' that adumbrate that beatitude, and also about the dark interstellar spaces into which we may tumble through mere inattention."

"We learn of God's liberality with us when, after we have proven that we seek to serve only him, he then overwhelms us with the very things we thought we had renounced forever, only raised to an infinitely higher potency of truth, perdurance, and delight."