Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

. . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally?

When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints - people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical.