Charles Williams : The New Christian Year

Let God operate in thee; hand the work over to him and do not disquiet thyself as to whether or no he is working with nature or above nature, for his are both nature and grace.

Eckhart: In Collationibus.

3rd Thursday after the Epiphany (Jan. 25th. 2007)

The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God.  The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.

St. Augustine: City of God.

Whosoever seeketh from God ought besides God, doth not seek God chastely.

St. Augustine: Sermons.

3rd Wednesday after the Epiphany (Jan. 24th, 2007)

Here you have the true reason why revenge or vengeance is not allowed to man; it is because vengeance can only work in the evil or disordered properties of fallen nature.  But man, being himself a part of fallen nature and subject to its disordered properties is not allowed to work with them, because it would be stirring up evil in himself, and that is his sin of wrath or revenge.  God therefore reserves all vengeance to Himself, not because wrathful revenge is a temper or quality that can have any place in the holy Diety, but because the holy supernatural Diety, being free from all the properties of nature, whence partial love and hatred spring, and being in Himself nothing but an infinity of love, wisdom, and goodness, He alone knows how to over-rule the disorders of nature and so to repay evil with evil, that the highest good may be promoted by it.

William Law: The Spirit of Love.

3rd Tuesday after the Epiphany (Jan. 23rd, 2007)

All men by nature hate each other.  They use their lusts as far as they can for the public good, but it is only a feint and false image of love, for at bottom there is nothing but hate.

Pascal: Pensées.

To make rapid progress and to reach the mansions we wish to enter, it is not so essential to think much as to love much: therefore you must practise whatever most excites you to this.

Saint Teresa: The Interior Castle.

3rd Monday after the Epiphany (Jan. 22nd, 2007)

In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out of Paradise, in Adam I died; how shall the Lord call me back, except He find in me Adam; guilty as I was in him, so now justified in Christ.

St. Ambrose: On the Death of Satyrus.

If you kept your body in accordance with virtue, your desires would not be of this world.

Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks.

Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Jan. 21st, 2007)

Now the reason why there are spiritual properties in all the material things of this world is only this, it is because the matter of this world is the materiality of the Kingdom of Heaven, brought down into a created state of grossness, death, and imprisonment, by occasion of the sin of those angels who first inhabited the place or extent of this material world. Now these heavenly properties which were brought into this created compaction lie in a continual desire to return to their first state of glory; and this is the groaning of the whole creation to be delivered from vanity which the Apostle speaks of.

William Law: An Appeal.

2nd Saturday after the Epiphany (Jan. 20th, 2007)

Our accesses to his presence are but his descents into us; and when we get anything by prayer, he gave us beforehand the thing and the petition.

John Donne: Letters.