Faith and reason are like
two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and
God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know
himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the
fullness of truth about themselves."
- Pope John Paul II
"Some psychologists
argue that the idea of God is a response to our emotional needs, but this
presumption is backwards. Our emotional fluctuations are a psychological
response to our lack of love for God. If
God is everything, what else could we possibly want?"
- Tarek Saab, Gut Check
"Socialism is the
religion people get when they lose their religion."
--Richard John Neuhaus
"Faith is not a
contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one
of self-surrender, if it’s all contractual, people won’t know how to
believe."
- Archbishop Francis
George
"I believe though I
do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind."
- St. Bernard
"Faith means the
fundamental response to the love that has offered itself up for me. It thus
becomes clear that faith is ordered primarily to the inconceivability of God's
love, which surpasses us and anticipates us. Love alone is credible; nothing
else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the
achievement, the work‚ of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which
nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love,
absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it."
- Fr. Hans Urs Von
Balthasar
"Reason's last step
is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond
it."
- St. Blaise Pascal
"Faith is the art of
holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing
moods."
- C.S. Lewis
"That the universe
was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that
the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious
treatise of philosophy."
--Jonathan Swift
"Truth is not
determined by a majority vote."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Faith, Reasoning, and
Suffering:
Why does it all have to be so
difficult? It drives me crazy. All you can do is
just accept the way it is or go crazy.
I read these great thoughts of the saints
and think, really? I am supposed
to really accept that this is how God wants
it? Suffer to gain happiness?
What sort of weird thinking is that? The only answer is He did it so go
with it.
He said so, so quit thinking like a man.
But I am a man!
As long as God's promises are true, then
the greatest frustration is the
devil's.
Everything he does is used for good in the end. The greatest of all
his plans, all His cruel demented twisted
crap ends up in a greater good.
All things work for God. All of this mental and physical suffering is
our
pathway.
The devil mucks it up and the muck becomes pavement
for us to get even closer to God. Then every suffering endured patiently
is
another battle won.
Job:
Life on earth is warfare.
The problem is accepting, truly accepting,
like these saints did. Can I do
this?
This seems like nonsense sometimes, but insanity is the
alternative. So God's reason must be true. God's rational mind must
trump my irrational one. As long as I cannot accept these statements
below, I am irrational.
“One cannot desire freedom
from the Cross when one is especially chosen for the cross.”
--Saint Teresa Benedicta
of the Cross (Edith Stein), who suffered the Nazi holocaust
“Apart from the cross,
there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”
--Saint Rose of Lima
“Let us fear more to be
deprived of sufferings than a miser fears to lose his treasures.”
--Saint Paul of the Cross
