My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. Like so many others! We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can't do anything about it.
... the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can't see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice it, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine it doesn't even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and your hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go. And so people are "always on the go." Perhaps the answer would be that the world has long been familiar with boredom, that such is the true condition of man. No doubt the seed was scattered all over life, and here and there found fertile soil to take root; but I wonder if man has ever before him experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some ways like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay.
The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old.
It is hard to be alone, and harder still to share your solitude with indifferent or ungrateful people. ... Well, I've had my troubles like everyone else. The worst of it is nobody understands you. To the outside world you are just a little democratic parson, vain, and pretentious. ... How hard it is to avoid offending somebody! And however hard you try, people seem less inclined to use goodwill to their advantage than unconsciously eager to set one goodwill against another. Inconceivable sterility of souls - what is the cause of it? "Truly, man is always at enmity with himself - a secret sly kind of hostility. Tares, scattered no matter where, will almost certainly take root. Whereas the smallest seed of good needs more than ordinary good fortune, needs prodigious luck, not to be stifled.
The modern world may deny its Master, but it's been redeemed just the same; present-day society is no longer content merely to administer our common patrimony, so whether it wants to or doesn't, it's got to set out and seek the Kingdom. And that Kingdom is not of this world. Which means they'll never find it. Yet they'll never be able to give up the search. "Save yourself or die," there's no getting way from it.
Blessed be he who has saved a child's heart from despair.
The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it 'ud go picking it us with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren't get hold of it with both hands.
I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.
Keep marching to the end, and try to land up quietly at the road-side without shedding your equipment.
The poor you have always with you, just because there will always be rich, that is to say there will always be hard and grasping men out for power more than possession. .... Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. .... If some of these business men wee ever to take it into their heads to follow strict theological precepts on the subject of lawful profit, they would certainly end up in the bankruptcy court. ... The rich man wants to be well thought of, and the richer he is the more he wants it. .... If a poor man really is the living image of Jesus - Jesus Himself - it's awkward to have him sitting there in the front row, displaying his obscene misery, his face from which in two thousand years you haven't yet been able to wipe the spittle. Because first and foremost the social problem is a matter of honor; it is the unjust humiliation of poor men that make you pauper. ... The poor man lives by charity.
How little we know what a human life really is - even our own. To judge us by what we call our actions is probably as futile as to judge us by our dreams. God's justice chooses from this dark conglomeration of thoughts and act, and that which is raised towards the Father shines with a sudden burst of light, displayed in glory like the sun.
You can't go offering the truth to human beings as though it were a sort of insurance policy, or a dose of salts. It's the Way and the Life. God's truth is the Life. We only look as though we wre brining it to mankind; really it bring us, my lad.
I know of course, that the wish to pray is a prayer in itself, that God can ask no more than that of us. ... I needed prayer as much as I needed air to draw my breath or oxygen to fill my blood.
I wanted to have God to myself. He did not come to me.
... many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.
The sin against hope - the deadliest sin and perhaps also the most cherished, the most indulged.
I have lost neither Faith, Hope, nor Charity ... But in this life, what use to mortal man are eternal goods? What counts is the longing to possess them. I feel I have ceased to long for them.
There are always saints. And by saints I mean those who have been given more than others. Rich men! I've always had a secret kind of notion that if we could take a god's-eye view of human societies, we'd have the key to a good many things we can't understand. After all, God made man in His image; when man tries to build a social order to suit himself he's bound to make a clumsy copy of the other, the true society ..... Our division into rich and poor must be based on some great law of the universe. In the eyes of the church the rich man is here to shield the poor, like his elder brother. Well, of course, he often does it without even wanting to, by the sheer action of economic force, as they say. A millionaire goes smash and thousands are chucked out into the streets. So you can just imagine what happens in the invisible world when one of those rich men I've been talking about, a steward of divine grace, turns tail! The solvency of the mediocre is nothing. Whereas the solvency of a saint! What a scandal if he should happen to fail! You've got to be crazy to refuse to see that the sole justification of inequality in the supernatural order is its risk. Our risk! Both yours and mine.
No, I have not lost my faith. The expression "to lose one's faith," as one might a purse or a ring of keys, have always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked too much. Faith is not a thing which one "loses," we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather at teh very source of its life!
I no longer believe, because I have no wish to believe. You no longer wish to know yourself. This profound truth, has ceased to interest you. .... You no longer want to possess yourself. You no longer desire your own joy. You can only love yourself through God. You no longer love yourself, and you will never love yourself again either in this world or hereafter - through all eternity.
In my soul nothing. god is silent. Silence.
The world of sin confronts the world of grace like the reflected picture of a landscape in the blackness of very still, deep waters. There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners. In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; one day in the eyes of Eternal God they will be no more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly. Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes apart of it, espouses it. You hate this woman and feel yourself far removed from her, when you hate and her sin are as two branches of the same tree.
That supreme grace has got to be earned like any other, and I no doubt had ceased to merit it. And so at last God has withdrawn himself from me - of this at any rate I am sure.
I am no longer fit to guide a parish. I have neither prudence, nor judgment, nor common sense, nor real humility. God has punished me. Send me back to my seminary, I am a danger to souls.
The world of evil is so far beyond our understanding! Nor can I really succeed in picturing hell as a world, a universe. It is nothing, never will be anything but a half-formed shape, the hideous shape of an abortion, a stunted thing on the very verge of all existence. I think of sullen, translucent patches on the sea.
Yet historians, moralists, even philosophers refuse to see anything but the criminal; they re-create evil in the image and likeness of humanity. They form no idea of essential evil, that vast yearning for the void, for emptiness, since if ever our species is to perish it will die of boredom, of stale disgust. Humanity will have been slowly eaten up as a beam by invisible fungi.
All the wounds of the soul give out pus, madame.
I have had the impression that my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice ....
You may bid Christ welcome but what do you do to Him when He comes? He was also welcomed by Caiaphas.
Blessed would be the sins that left any shame in you. God grant you may despise yourself.
There's no greater danger in the world than rich men's hypocrisy.
Power is built on nothing except the illusions of poor men -
Nothing, either in this world or the next, can separate us from what we've love more than ourselves, more than life, more than getting into heaven.
God is love itself .... If you want to love don't place yourself beyond love's reach.
Hate is indifference and contempt.
But at least I can assure you of this: there are not two separate kingdoms, one for the living, and one for the dead. There is only God's kingdom and, living and dead, we are all therein.
I seem to be standing there alone between God and this tortured human being.
But you known that our God came to be among us. Shake your fist at Him, spit on His face, scourage Him, and finally, crucify Him: what does it matter? My daughter, it's already been done to Him.
Hell is - not to love any more.
Hell is not to love anymore. As long as we remain in this life we can still deceive ourselves, think that we love by our own will, that we love independently of God. But we're like madmen stretching our hands to clasp tthe moon reflected in water. I'm sorry: I express it so clumsily.
Do you take God for an executioner? God wants us to be merciful with ourselves. And besides, our sorrows are not our own. He takes them on Himself, into His heart.
Our Lord has need of a witness, and I was chosen, doubtless for lack of anyone better, as one calls in a passer-by. I should be crazy indeed to imagine that I had a part, a real part in it. Already it is too much that God should have given me the grace to be present when a soul became reconciled to hope again - those solemn nuptials.
Oh, miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!
Lord, I am stripped bare of all things, as You alone can strip us bare. Whose fearful care nothing escapes, nor Your terrible love!
... the first duty of the church is to preserve the family and society, to condemn indulgence, to stand for order and moderation in all things.
A priest's like a lawyer - 'e's there if you be needin' 'I'm. E don't ned to go meddlin' with folk. But look here ... a lawyer works for himself, I work for the Lord. People don't often come to God all on their own.
More and more firmly am I convinced that what we call sadness, anguish, despair, as though to persuade ourselves that these are only states of the Spirit, are the Spirit itself. I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him nor within him can he perceive anything except in the form of agony.
The question of vocation. We're all called to the priesthood. I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off by taking each one of us back where he belongs in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o' thousand years younger, but what of it? Time doesn't worry our Lord. He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born - from a 'human' point of view - Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee - anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me and so we were called, each in his own particular way, according to the time, place, and circumstances. This isn't theology, I'm preaching ... It's simply my own imagination, what I think, what I dream. It amounts to this: If the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers eternally, could yank its wretched body back across the centuries up this huge slope of two thousand years, we should be taken back to that very spot where - Now, what's wrong? What on earth's the matter? I hadn't realized there were tears on my face, I wasn't even thinking of it.
Our Lady knew neither triumph nor miracle. Her Son preserved her from the least tip-touch of the savage wing of human glory.
You don't know what loneliness is ... No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
I'm sad ... because God isn't loved enough.
One day you'll see that prayer is just that way of crying, the only tears that aren't soft.
My prayer, like the village, has no more weight to it, flies away ...
I was never young, because I never dared to be young. .... I was never young because no one want to be young with me.
Joy! A kind of pride, a gaiety, an absurd hope, entirely carnal, the carnal form of hope.
The habit of prayer, as I see it, would mean a continual anxiety with regard to prayer, a fight, a struggle. It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man. Your face - you don't mind if I tell you? looks worn by prayer; it reminds me of a very old missal or even one of those half-rubbed-away engravings on ancient tombstones.
My heart is with those on the front lines, with those who throw away their lives. Soldiers, missionaries.
I think you are always waving your arms to prevent other people from seeing the reality of you, or perhaps to hide it from yourself.
... the mission of the Church is to rediscover the source of lost joy.
I was crying without a sob .... it was life, again, passing out of me.
At my age, death seems so far away that the daily experience of our own mediocrity does not as yet convince us.
My death is here, a death like any other, and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man.
Yet I would have wished to be once, just once, magnificently generous to you!
I have always know that I possessed the spirit of poverty. The spirit of childhood is much akin.
I believe in one thing only: complete honesty toward oneself and towards otehrs.
She finished it for me in a voice which many would not have understood, but I know it well, and it awakens in me so many memories: the ageless voice, the voice both brave and resigned, which soothes drunkards, scolds naughty brats, lulls naked babes, argues with relentless tradesmen, beseeches bailiffs, comforts the dying - the voice of the working-woman which goes on through time probably never changing, the voice which holds out against all the miseries of the world ....
I know now that youth is a gift of God, and like all His gifts, carries no regret. They alone shall be young, really young, whom he has chosen never to survive their youth, I belong to such a race of men. ... There is no old man in me.
... for human agony is beyond all an act of love.
How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity - as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.
I know of course, that the wish to pray is a prayer in itself, that God can ask no more than that of us. ... I needed prayer as much as I needed air to draw my breath or oxygen to fill my blood.
I wanted to have God to myself. He did not come to me.
... many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.
The sin against hope - the deadliest sin and perhaps also the most cherished, the most indulged.
I have lost neither Faith, Hope, nor Charity ... But in this life, what use to mortal man are eternal goods? What counts is the longing to possess them. I feel I have ceased to long for them.
There are always saints. And by saints I mean those who have been given more than others. Rich men! I've always had a secret kind of notion that if we could take a god's-eye view of human societies, we'd have the key to a good many things we can't understand. After all, God made man in His image; when man tries to build a social order to suit himself he's bound to make a clumsy copy of the other, the true society ..... Our division into rich and poor must be based on some great law of the universe. In the eyes of the church the rich man is here to shield the poor, like his elder brother. Well, of course, he often does it without even wanting to, by the sheer action of economic force, as they say. A millionaire goes smash and thousands are chucked out into the streets. So you can just imagine what happens in the invisible world when one of those rich men I've been talking about, a steward of divine grace, turns tail! The solvency of the mediocre is nothing. Whereas the solvency of a saint! What a scandal if he should happen to fail! You've got to be crazy to refuse to see that the sole justification of inequality in the supernatural order is its risk. Our risk! Both yours and mine.
No, I have not lost my faith. The expression "to lose one's faith," as one might a purse or a ring of keys, have always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked too much. Faith is not a thing which one "loses," we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather at teh very source of its life!
I no longer believe, because I have no wish to believe. You no longer wish to know yourself. This profound truth, has ceased to interest you. .... You no longer want to possess yourself. You no longer desire your own joy. You can only love yourself through God. You no longer love yourself, and you will never love yourself again either in this world or hereafter - through all eternity.
In my soul nothing. god is silent. Silence.
The world of sin confronts the world of grace like the reflected picture of a landscape in the blackness of very still, deep waters. There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners. In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; one day in the eyes of Eternal God they will be no more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly. Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes apart of it, espouses it. You hate this woman and feel yourself far removed from her, when you hate and her sin are as two branches of the same tree.
That supreme grace has got to be earned like any other, and I no doubt had ceased to merit it. And so at last God has withdrawn himself from me - of this at any rate I am sure.
I am no longer fit to guide a parish. I have neither prudence, nor judgment, nor common sense, nor real humility. God has punished me. Send me back to my seminary, I am a danger to souls.
The world of evil is so far beyond our understanding! Nor can I really succeed in picturing hell as a world, a universe. It is nothing, never will be anything but a half-formed shape, the hideous shape of an abortion, a stunted thing on the very verge of all existence. I think of sullen, translucent patches on the sea.
Yet historians, moralists, even philosophers refuse to see anything but the criminal; they re-create evil in the image and likeness of humanity. They form no idea of essential evil, that vast yearning for the void, for emptiness, since if ever our species is to perish it will die of boredom, of stale disgust. Humanity will have been slowly eaten up as a beam by invisible fungi.
All the wounds of the soul give out pus, madame.
I have had the impression that my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice ....
You may bid Christ welcome but what do you do to Him when He comes? He was also welcomed by Caiaphas.
Blessed would be the sins that left any shame in you. God grant you may despise yourself.
There's no greater danger in the world than rich men's hypocrisy.
Power is built on nothing except the illusions of poor men -
Nothing, either in this world or the next, can separate us from what we've love more than ourselves, more than life, more than getting into heaven.
God is love itself .... If you want to love don't place yourself beyond love's reach.
Hate is indifference and contempt.
But at least I can assure you of this: there are not two separate kingdoms, one for the living, and one for the dead. There is only God's kingdom and, living and dead, we are all therein.
I seem to be standing there alone between God and this tortured human being.
But you known that our God came to be among us. Shake your fist at Him, spit on His face, scourage Him, and finally, crucify Him: what does it matter? My daughter, it's already been done to Him.
Hell is - not to love any more.
Hell is not to love anymore. As long as we remain in this life we can still deceive ourselves, think that we love by our own will, that we love independently of God. But we're like madmen stretching our hands to clasp tthe moon reflected in water. I'm sorry: I express it so clumsily.
Do you take God for an executioner? God wants us to be merciful with ourselves. And besides, our sorrows are not our own. He takes them on Himself, into His heart.
Our Lord has need of a witness, and I was chosen, doubtless for lack of anyone better, as one calls in a passer-by. I should be crazy indeed to imagine that I had a part, a real part in it. Already it is too much that God should have given me the grace to be present when a soul became reconciled to hope again - those solemn nuptials.
Oh, miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!
Lord, I am stripped bare of all things, as You alone can strip us bare. Whose fearful care nothing escapes, nor Your terrible love!
... the first duty of the church is to preserve the family and society, to condemn indulgence, to stand for order and moderation in all things.
A priest's like a lawyer - 'e's there if you be needin' 'I'm. E don't ned to go meddlin' with folk. But look here ... a lawyer works for himself, I work for the Lord. People don't often come to God all on their own.
More and more firmly am I convinced that what we call sadness, anguish, despair, as though to persuade ourselves that these are only states of the Spirit, are the Spirit itself. I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him nor within him can he perceive anything except in the form of agony.
The question of vocation. We're all called to the priesthood. I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off by taking each one of us back where he belongs in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o' thousand years younger, but what of it? Time doesn't worry our Lord. He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born - from a 'human' point of view - Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee - anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me and so we were called, each in his own particular way, according to the time, place, and circumstances. This isn't theology, I'm preaching ... It's simply my own imagination, what I think, what I dream. It amounts to this: If the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers eternally, could yank its wretched body back across the centuries up this huge slope of two thousand years, we should be taken back to that very spot where - Now, what's wrong? What on earth's the matter? I hadn't realized there were tears on my face, I wasn't even thinking of it.
Our Lady knew neither triumph nor miracle. Her Son preserved her from the least tip-touch of the savage wing of human glory.
You don't know what loneliness is ... No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
I'm sad ... because God isn't loved enough.
One day you'll see that prayer is just that way of crying, the only tears that aren't soft.
My prayer, like the village, has no more weight to it, flies away ...
I was never young, because I never dared to be young. .... I was never young because no one want to be young with me.
Joy! A kind of pride, a gaiety, an absurd hope, entirely carnal, the carnal form of hope.
The habit of prayer, as I see it, would mean a continual anxiety with regard to prayer, a fight, a struggle. It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man. Your face - you don't mind if I tell you? looks worn by prayer; it reminds me of a very old missal or even one of those half-rubbed-away engravings on ancient tombstones.
My heart is with those on the front lines, with those who throw away their lives. Soldiers, missionaries.
I think you are always waving your arms to prevent other people from seeing the reality of you, or perhaps to hide it from yourself.
... the mission of the Church is to rediscover the source of lost joy.
I was crying without a sob .... it was life, again, passing out of me.
At my age, death seems so far away that the daily experience of our own mediocrity does not as yet convince us.
My death is here, a death like any other, and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man.
Yet I would have wished to be once, just once, magnificently generous to you!
I have always know that I possessed the spirit of poverty. The spirit of childhood is much akin.
I believe in one thing only: complete honesty toward oneself and towards otehrs.
She finished it for me in a voice which many would not have understood, but I know it well, and it awakens in me so many memories: the ageless voice, the voice both brave and resigned, which soothes drunkards, scolds naughty brats, lulls naked babes, argues with relentless tradesmen, beseeches bailiffs, comforts the dying - the voice of the working-woman which goes on through time probably never changing, the voice which holds out against all the miseries of the world ....
I know now that youth is a gift of God, and like all His gifts, carries no regret. They alone shall be young, really young, whom he has chosen never to survive their youth, I belong to such a race of men. ... There is no old man in me.
... for human agony is beyond all an act of love.
How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity - as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.
Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, 1937
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