Levavi oculos meos in montes

 The poet James Matthew Wilson says in an interview:    A steady focus of my work over the years—and I am not alone in this—has been the contemplation of things in their being, existence, mystery, and meaning: the way in which, not only Scripture and poetry are polysemous, but the multiple meanings of things in general help us understand human activity and also the natural order of the world. It is a three-step theme. Seeing things as they are and discovering that, when seen in this way, their depths open up. They reveal their connections to other things. These connections in turn lead us not only to see the natural order with all its parts, its congeries of beings. As Thomas Aquinas says in the introduction to his  Commentary on the Divine Names  of Pseudo-Dionysius, they lead us up to the creator of all things, God himself. This attempt to perceive the intrinsic being and goodness of things is part of the general literary quest. It is not particular to me. It ...

Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.   George MacDonald  This is a day in our lives from almost 20 years ago .   How gradually things change and how little one knows what to expect in the future!  Twenty years before that day in 2006, we were waiting for our firstborn child to arrive, and twenty years before that, the Vatican Council was still going on. I was typing search terms into Duck Duck Go this morning, for the purpose of changing the blog's title.    I searched "splintered light" and "hourbook" and "scriptorium" and "Logres".     Splintered light comes from a Tolkien poem expressing a theme about storywriting process that he often returned to in his life and work:   “Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannie...

Finally, the student should be invited to contemplate the text in the manner one would contemplate Scripture in lectio divina: by putting the mind at rest and allowing the text to reveal its meaning. This can be encouraged through activities like florilegia, that great monastic literary genre, in which excerpts and phrases from literature are collected in a journal without commentary or analysis, and over time committed to memory more like a lyric from a song than a text to be studied. Through receptive contemplation, literature becomes a means by which the Holy Spirit moves the student to the love and apprehension of wisdom, thereby integrating what one reads with how one lives. For, as Augustine demonstrates, the object of literature is not merely information or even formation, but transformation.  Lectio Divina's Transformation of the Art of Reading Last January   I revived this blog.   And apparently, two years before , I started it .    January is...