Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fr. Ronald Knox, on God and ‘The Love That Waits’)

“The world… does not understand the love that waits, any more than the love that weeps. It is so impressed with the feeling that this and that needs doing here and now that it cannot wait for God’s signal; cannot realize that He has His own way and His own time for doing things; and, in consequence, a great deal of activity is wasted in overlapping, and misdirected effort, and fussiness.” —English Catholic priest, theologian, radio broadcaster, and author of detective stories Ronald Knox (1888-1957), October 1936 sermon on St. Mary Magdalene, quoted in Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., “On Sitting Down and Waiting,” in Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays (1994)

Waiting: the appropriate activity for this Advent season of preparation…

Quote of the Day (Fr. Ronald Knox, on the Church as a ‘Treasure-House’)

“It is a human weakness of ours to be always crying out for complete novelty, an entire disservice from our past. Our old traditions have become so dusty with neglect, so rusted with abuse, that we are for casting them on the scrap-heap and forgetting that they ever existed. The Church conserves; she bears traces still of the Jewish atmosphere in which she was cradled; traces, too, of the old heathen civilization which she conquered. And in her own history it is the same; nothing is altogether forgotten; every age of Christianity recalls the lineaments of an earlier time. People think of her as if she kept a lumber room; it is not so; hers is a treasure-house from which she can bring forth when they are needed things old as well as new.”—English theologian, broadcaster and detective-story writer Fr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957), Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes (1940)