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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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You lost me here; what does this mean? This sounds even more banal than eating at restaurants and going to parties.

The short answer is: Love.

The Beatific Vision is inexhaustible because it can never be fully known or totally comprehended even by an immortal intellect. Only God can fully know God. But we love that which is the best and highest, and we are loved, and love is never satisfied by any amount of enjoyment:

Thus all my mind, absorbed,

was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent,

becoming more enraptured in its gazing.

He who beholds that Light is so enthralled

that he would never willingly consent

to turn away from it for any other sight,

because the good that is the object of the will

is held and gathered in perfection there

that elsewhere would imperfect show.

Now my words will come far short

of what I still remember, like a babe's

who at his mother's breast still wets his tongue.

Not that the living Light at which I gazed

took on other than a single aspect --

for It is always what It was before --

but that my sight was gaining strength, even as I gazed

at that sole semblance and, as I changed,

it too was being, in my eyes, transformed.

In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light

there appeared to me three circles

having three colors but the same extent,

and each one seemed reflected by the other

as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,

equally breathed forth by one and by the other.

O how scant is speech, too weak to frame my thoughts.

Compared to what I still recall my words are faint --

to call them little is to praise them much.

O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,

knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself

and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!

That circling which, thus conceived,

appeared in you as light's reflection,

once my eyes had gazed on it a while, seemed,

within itself and in its very color,

to be painted with our likeness,

so that my sight was all absorbed in it.

Like the geometer who fully applies himself

to square the circle and, for all his thought,

cannot discover the principle he lacks,

such was I at that strange new sight.

I tried to see how the image fit the circle

and how it found its where in it.

But my wings had not sufficed for that

had not my mind been struck by a bolt

of lightning that granted what I asked.

Here my exalted vision lost its power.

But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving

with an even motion, were turning with

the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

I don't believe in a God whose ultimate purpose for his children is for us to become lotus-eaters, regardless of how tasty the lotus is.

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