#sacrament

I was brought up as a Catholic and went to church every week and took the sacraments. It never really touched the core of my being. ↗

— Sting

#brought #catholic #church #core #every

Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit. ↗

— Johannes Tauler

#cannot #day #even #good #good people

Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself! ↗

— Johannes Tauler

#comparison #devout #every #exalted #exercise

I have a profound belief in the power of the Sacraments. I believe that in a Divine way the use of them teaches the teachable their inward meaning and therefore I think we need be in no hurry to attempt to teach new converts all that we think we know about them. ↗

— Roland Allen

#attempt #belief #believe #converts #divine

Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #god #jesus-shock #protestantism #sacraments

The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#among #impure #light #like #passes

And there is a difference between the essence of a Sacrament and its use. ↗

— Martin Chemnitz

#difference #essence #sacrament #use

Christ made the bread the sacrament of his body only: wherefore as the bread is no similitude of his blood, so am I not bound or ought to affirm, that his blood is there present. ↗

— William Tyndale

#am #blood #body #bound #bread

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33) ↗

— Tim Willocks

#apple #asymmetry #atlantic #autumn #blind-man

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. ↗

— Alexander Schmemann

#eucharist #kingdom-of-god #reality #sacrament #truth