Spiritual Quote of the Day (The Prophet Joel, With a Thought for Lent)

“ ‘Yet even now,” says the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
     and rend your hearts and not your garments.’
Return to the Lord, your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
    and repents of evil.”—Joel 2:12-13
 
The image of Joel accompanying this post is a detail from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Michael Novak, on How God Used Love ‘To Show What He Is Made Of’)

“[L]ove is no simple thing. It is not what we might at first think it is. We spend a lifetime being instructed in its secrets. Love is shallow enough for ants to walk safely across, deep enough for elephants to drown in. Saints of great soul endure many torments being inflamed by it.

“In this vast cosmos, such as science knows it, we humans (even as an entire race, from beginning to end) are barely a speck in silent space, unimportant, less enduring than galaxies and stars—less so even than many plants, insects, and viruses—here today like the grass of the field, tomorrow gone. Yet for us in our unimportance, God wished to show what he is made of, to let us look behind the veil at the love that moves the sun and all the stars, and to draw us into acts of caritas.”—American Catholic theologian, philosopher, novelist and diplomat Michael Novak (1933-2017), “The Love That Moves the Sun,” originally published in Crisis, December 1995, reprinted in The Myth of Romantic Love and Other Essays (2017)

The image accompanying this post is “The Creation of Eve” portion of the Sistine Chapel, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).