On the Wonder of Existence:
"I am terrified by everything, from the smallest gnat to the mystery of the incarnation." �Peter Kreeft, paraphrasing Kierkegaard
�Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds may be thought of...as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy� --Aldous Huxley.
�Mythology is a search� Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who felt most directly�the images that were adventures of imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search�They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality.� �Chesterton
"The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." --Chesterton
�The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject which excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.� �C.S. Lewis
�Other grand ideas�homecoming, reunion with a beloved�similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so�well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?� --C.S. Lewis
�You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words . . . Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction . . . - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires . . . you are looking for, watching for, listening for?� --C. S. Lewis
"In speaking of this desire�which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot tell because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience." --C.S. Lewis
�...for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any states of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.� �C.S. Lewis
What God is in Himself, how He is to be conceived by philosophers, retreats continually from our knowledge. The elaborate [scientific] world-pictures which accompany religion� turn out to be only shadows. It is religion itself � prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration � which is here, in the long run, our sole avenue to the real.� �C.S. Lewis
[Christians] must not conceive spiritual joy and worth as things that need to be rescued or tenderly protected from time and place and matter and senses. Their God is the God of corn and oil and wine. He is the glad Creator. He has become Himself incarnate. The sacraments have been instituted. Certain spiritual gifts are offered to us only on condition that we perform certain bodily acts. C.S. Lewis