book meme

Piggers23 2008-10-11 16:54:24 ET Grab the nearest book. * Open the book to page 56. * Find the fifth sentence. * Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions. * Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. William S. Burroughs - The Cat Inside (the following concerns the sand fox) He has eaten an egg and skittered away. The bolder ones prey on young birds all hairless in the nest. Quick and furtive, he sneaks in with a worm in his teeth and they think it's Mother there with the worm and open their little yellow mouths. He bites through the throat and sucks the blood avidly, tearing off mouthfuls of breast, his eyes shine with joy, blood on his little black snout and his little white needle teeth like a greedy schoolboy tearing into a sweet. Almost disgusting. Redeemed by beauty and innocence he belches, spewing strawberry sauce across the headmaster's shirt. "I say, I'm awfully sorry and all that rot." the next nearest book was... Thomas Ligotti - Teatro Grottesco from The Clown Puppet 'This will be the night of another visit.' In the new light (the rich reddish-gold illumination) the interior of the medicine shop took on the strange opulence of an old oil painting; everything became transformed beneath a thick veneer of gleaming obscurity. And I have always wondered how my own face appears in this new light, but at the time I can never think about such things because I know what is about to happen, and all I can do is hope that it will soon be over. After the business with the tinted illumination, only a few moments pass before there is an appearance, which means that the visit itself had begun. First the light changes to reddish-gold, then the visit begins. I have never been able to figure out the reason for this sequence, as if there might be a reason for such nonsense as these visits or any particular phase of these visits. Certainly when the light changes to a reddish-gold tint I am being forewarned that an appearance is about to occur, but this has never enabled me to witness the actual manifestation, and I had given up trying by the time of the medicine shop visit.

Statistic 2008-10-11 17:57:19 ET Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition - Jordan Aumann, O.P. “Thereby the soul attains the state of apatheis or peace of soul which is also the fruit of prayer and grace. St. Maximus classifies Christians into three groups: the beginners, who are led by fear; the advanced souls, who have the well-sounded hope of a reward and are therefore somewhat mercenary; and the perfect, who are true children of God and motivated by filial love. The perfect enjoy contemplative prayer that is activated by the gift of wisdom, which Maximus calls “the eyes of faith.” It is also through wisdom that the soul receives a knowledge of God that is called theology. It is a fruit of prayer. But the greatest of all the spiritual gifts enjoyed by the perfect is divine charity. It is charity that deifies the soul, enables it to experience its adoptive filiation, and unites it to God in the bond of mystical marriage.” The second closest to me is The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Now Benedict XVI) "This act of giving is in no way just a spiritual occurrence. It is a spiritual act that takes up the bodily into itself, that embraces the whole man; indeed, it is at the same time an act of the Son. As St. Maximus the Confessor showed so splendidly, the obedience of Jesus’ human will is inserted into the everlasting Yes of the Son to the Father. This ‘giving’ on the part of the Lord, in the passivity of his being crucified, draws the passion of human existence into the action of love, and so it embraces all the dimensions of reality - Body, Soul, Spirit, Logos. Just as the pain of the body is drawn into the pathos of the mind and becomes the Yes of obedience, so time is drawn into what reaches beyond time. The real interior act, though it does not exist without the exterior, transcends time, but since it comes from time, time can again and again be brought into it. That is how we can become contemporary with the past events of salvation.” Wow those are some long damn sentences. Both are for a class I am taking, so are naturally near by. I am supposed to be writing about the first one, and I haven't even started...it's due Monday and has to be 8 pages. I like how both of these selections referenced St. Maximus.

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