Living In An Enchanted World
"Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and Holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace."
— The Catholic Imagination
Grace Lurks Everywhere
"Grace, then, lurks everywhere — in brickyards and back alleys, in the snow and the wind, in the sun and the stars, in the waters and the fire, in the tiny flower, and in the volcano. It is in the branches of trees, in weeds, in the chirping of birds, as well as in the roar of an elevated train, and in the desirable body of another. The environment is a sacrament, and to ruthlessly exploit it is a sacrilege. The world is a chalice of grace, and to treat it with disrespect is blasphemy. The world is grace, and not to appreciate it is ingratitude."
— The Great Mysteries
Develop Your Capacity to Be Surprised
"The Christian is curious, he wonders about tomorrow, he is intrigued by its possibilities and fundamentally unafraid of its terrors. John Shea has written that the best way a Christian can prepare for death is to develop a healthy capacity for surprise. It seems to me that that is the best description of the Christian life I have ever read. We are engaged in the business of developing our capacity for surprise. No matter how worn or weary or battered or frustrated or tired we may be, we still have an ability to wonder; we are still open, curious, expectant, waiting to be surprised. What will be around the next corner?"
— Death and Beyond
The Power of the Sexual Drive
"The power of the sexual drive propels us to intimacy, to union with another, to the formation of a community rooted in love, which becomes a model of the committed, passionate love of God. Our religious sensibility helps us appreciate this power of the sexual drive to reveal how community should be lived if it is to be truly human, if it is to be 'in the image of God.' The cosmic union that is the goal of sacramental (revelatory) sex is a model from which we learn how to live all our human relationships — those among individuals, communities, religious groups, and nations. The intimate relationship of lovers, shored up by passion and commitment, sheds light on how to overcome the mundaneness that can eventually destroy any relationship or community."
— How to Save the Catholic Church
Film As A Sacramental Art
"The film Places in the Heart, for which Sally Field won the 1985 Academy Award as the best actress of the year, ends with a Baptist communion service in a small town in Texas during the Great Depression. As the cup and wafers are passed through the congregation and the camera examines the faces of each of the communicants, we become aware that all of the characters in the story are present, the good and the bad, the venal and the heroic, the living and the dead, the killer and the victim.
"As I watched this ending, I found myself thinking, They aren't really going to try this; if they do, they're not going to get away with it. But of course, they did try it and they did get away with it — a moving and vivid portrait of the religious doctrine that Catholics call 'the communion of saints.' . . .
"After the lights went up, the film ended and everyone else left the theatre in Chicago's Water Tower Place, I sat for a few minutes staring at the blank screen reviving an old conviction: the film is a sacramental art par excellence; either as a fine or lively art nothing is quite so vivid as film for revealing the presence of God. Film in the hands of a skilled sacrament-maker is uniquely capable to make 'epiphanies' happen."
— God in Popular Culture
A Hope Renewal Experience
"Discouraged and depressed with futility of life, I wait for an endlessly delayed flight in December at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. I see a young mother holding her baby with passionate and protective adoration. In the beauty of that instant recognition of grounds for hope, my confidence in the purpose of life is revitalized and renewed. The friends who meet me at the end of the plane flight are astonished at my good spirits. Today, I tell them by way of explanation, I met a Madonna.
"The Madonna image, lurking in my memory on the threshold of consciousness, especially in December, disposes me to experience renewal in the presence of a mother with a child, shapes that actual experience, provides a pigeonhole into which I can insert my new experience, and becomes a shared symbol with which I can explain my unusual (after plane flights) cheerfulness to my friends."
— Religious Change in America
An Image of God as Woman
"The most striking image of the womanliness of God in recent years was presented in Bob Fosse's film All That Jazz, a story of Fosse's brush with death during a massive heart attack. . . .
"Demanding, sexy, a bit sinister, inescapable, tender, and passionately loving — that's what the angel of death is like, Fosse tells us. The angel may also be God. . . .
"Men who have a womanly image of God will find it easier to think of God as a lover, will pray more often and more intensely, and will be more deeply committed to the social concerns that should come from intense religious devotion. Moreover, precisely because they are involved in a love relationship with a womanly God, they should have better relationships with human women."
— The Catholic Myth
Excerpt from a Prayer Journal
"MacNeice has a lovely poem about the sound of a railroad train at night when he was young, how soothing and reassuring it was. I know the exact feeling. I have experienced it many times here at Grand Beach in the summer time, but that experience also recalls something much deeper in my own past. I would not have heard the train on Augusta Boulevard or Mayfield Avenue, so I must go back to my earliest years on Austin Boulevard before I was six years old. But the experience was the same as his — the soft rumble waking me at night and the feeling that somehow I was reassured by the sound, perhaps by the presence of the outside world beyond my dreams, perhaps also my romantic identification with trains as a gateway to adventure. Anyway trains and train noises are a sacrament to me, a sign of grace and transcendent presence in the world, this time in benign sounds and power and a hint of adventure. A love sign of Your presence in the world."
— Sacraments of Love
Saints As Stories of God's Love
"Saints are important to Catholics because their lives are stories of God's love. Like the angels, they are sacraments of God's love, of God's immediate care for humans, and of the response of some humans to that love. God hides in the lives and the images of the saints. Hence Catholics are not ashamed of the saints. In some Catholic art, like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest and Under the Sun of Satan, Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, and Nancy Savoca's Household Saints, the question of the nature of sainthood is agonized over. The nameless whisky priest is a coward in Greene's novel. Bernanos's two priests are clumsy dullards. The women in the two films (played by Emily Watson and Lili Taylor) seem to be simpleminded misfits and are arguably crazy. Bess is denied Christian burial by her church. A thoroughly modern nun-psychologist tells Teresa Santangelo's parents that the young woman is a victim of psychotic delusions and religious obsessions. Yet God vindicates all of them: the whiskey priest dies a martyr; Bernanos's priests both work miracles; bells peal in the sky in honor of Bess; and the garden in front of the mental institution where Teresa dies blooms overnight despite a snow-storm, and the scent of roses fills her death room. Saints are perhaps a bit mad. God sometimes seems to display bad taste in the choice of His special loves. But there is no accounting for tastes when it comes to love. The stories of saints, which fill Catholic churches from Koln to the Sonoran desert and beyond, tell how magical human nature can become when it is filled with God's love."
— The Catholic Imagination
