This one here was one of my favs. my JPII friends in particular will appreciate and find resonance with this one (esp MissM)
This was the tree that the above was written on. way cool! absolutely beautiful!
Seeing some of the graffiti made me wish I had a marker to graffiti too (yeah i know its probly illegal and whatever, but there are some quotes and things that i think can really encourage people along the way, and/or give people something to think about....)...but i didnt have one :( . attempts to find a marker failed :( anyway, there were alot of things that came to mind that I would have liked to have graffitied.... Here are some other things that I would like to see/have seen grafittied on the camino path ;)
(andrew linzey)
(fr. william mcnamara)
(matthew scully)Also,
"Even for the most hardened cynic,
an aching longing remains for something
true, good, or beautiful..." (brennan manning)
"All religious experience at its roots is an
experience of an unconditional and unrestricted
being in love..." (brennan manning)
"Children drift about on the tides of their
soul like pilotless skiffs. When a child weeps,
it weeps totally. It abandons itself freely to
its own tears and cannot dam up its sadness.
It possesses no refuge in a tower to which it
can flee to escape this flood. It weeps as long as
it must, just as the heavens rain until the clouds
are empty. And when a child rejoices it transforms
itself wholly into joy. It lives its joy through and through,
without bounds or reflections. And when it is afraid,
it becomes unalloyed fear. It is not "clever" enough to
erect a glass wall between the horror and its own soul..." (Balthasar)
"Our hearts of stone become hearts of
flesh when we discover where the outcast
weeps..." (manning)
"This is the first character of compassion:
its indiscriminate character." (manning)
**These are probably too long to be camino graffiti, but i cant help mentioning the following...:
The question "Where have I come from? "
rises up and haunts me;
lingering, it floats like a flower
in the backwaters of my mind.
From Somewhere deeper than I know,
in the place where I am held to the divine breast,
the voice of God echoes in reply":
"You, my beloved little one,
were hidden in my heart
before your sun burned bright.
You were the dream of my delight
before the earth was born
of the dust of long-dead stars
Before I shaped a single star,
I nursed you for endless ages,
feeding you with the essence of my life.
"In my great lap I played with your infinite childlike form
and gazed with love upon your original face,
the mirror form of my own image.
I laughed with delight at the marvel of your being,
the flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.
"And you laughed with glee as I winked,
as the four winds sprang to life
and suns like dandelions
lit up the dark lawn of space.
"Where did you come from? o my child,
you in whom live all my hopes and loves,
you came from me" (edward hays)
"My Son, between midnight and the morning frost, when they dragged me to the second trial, i sojourned in your prison. I sat fettered to a tent-peg--lonely, beaten, disgraced--and i thought of you and of the rising day. I have tasted your prison; nothing of its bittersweet smell of decay was spared me. I have wandered through even the deepest chamber of all the prisons of all those who, in despair, have struggled against God's freedom. Down below in the lowest part of you, in the lightless disgrace of your impotence and your refusal, there have I chosen my abode. As a small root cracks the heaviest stones apart, so have I softly caused your prison walls to waver. You are still holding out against my love with the strength of your despair; but your arm is already beginning to flinch. Little by little you are yielding to my pressure.
I will not betray to you the secret by virtue of which I overcame your despair. Fatigued from his spiteful tears, the child finally falls asleep. By the following morning he has already forgotten his resistance and his disconsolate anguish. There is great magic in such extinguished memory: a new leaf is turned, a new chapter begins. Whether or not you are able is not the question at the moment. The whole point is that I have been able. When alone and locked up in yourself you brooded over your profound failure, you were strangely at variance within yourself: you were divided within yourself. Your unity--in that melancholy embrace of desire and regret--was mere illusion. Quietly, without your noticing it, I have cleaved you open and thus given you unity. ....
...... And what you have said about yourself is folly. You would not be my creature if you had not been created open. All love strives to go out of itself into the immeasurable spaces of freedom, it seeks adventure, and, in so doing, forgets itself. I do not say that you were able to free yourself, for it was for this that I have come. Nor am i saying that love's freedom lay contained within yourself, for i have given it to you. The Father has drawn you to me. ...." (Balthasar)
"Noone saw the hour of your victory. No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday's hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn. Asleep it was that we were all carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter. And noone knows how it happened to him. No one knows which hand it was caressed his cheek so that suddenly the wan world beamed with a thousand colors, and he had to smile involuntarily over the miracle that was realized in him...." (Balthasar)
Jesus, sounds like a nightmare.
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