Lectio Divina - Sixty-nine

Thomas Keating, The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living. New York: Continuum, 2007, p. 358.

The joy of Christmas is the intuition that all limitations to growth into higher consciousness have been overcome. The divine light cuts across all darkness, prejudice, preconceived ideas, prepackaged values, false expectations, phoniness and hypocrisy. It presents us with the truth. To act out of the truth is to make Christ grow not only in ourselves, but in others. Thus, the humdrum duties and events of daily live become sacramental, shot through with eternal implications.

Lectio Divina - Sixty-eight

John Jay Chapman, quoted in W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. New York: Viking, 1970, pp 192-3.

The men and women who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else. They have, perhaps, tried to be poets or painters; they have tried to be actors, scientists and musicians. But some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has left them with leisure to take an interest in the lives of others. Your ambitious man is selfish. No matter how secret his ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people -- if I may use the word in a mild benevolent sense -- the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consideration, recognition and welcome.

Lectio Divina - Sixty-seven

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Image, 1968, pp. 156-7

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness . . . My happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”