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What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The only human emotions that we can attribute to God.

“God delights.

God is always rejoicing and doing so with a single and simple delight.

In fact, it is appropriate to say that love and joy are the only human emotions that we can attribute literally to God.”  Thomas Aquinas

…so much more than Turkish delight.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the only human emotions that we can attribute to God.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not knowing the only restaurant with the best steak in town.

“Now your patient is his mother’s son.

While working your hardest, quite rightly, on other fronts, you must not neglect a little quiet infiltration in respect of gluttony.


Being a male, he is not so likely to be caught by the ‘All I want’ camouflage.

Males are best turned into gluttony with the help of their vanity.


They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really ‘properly cooked.

What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.”  C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

…the calamity of vanity.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not knowing the only restaurant with the best steak in town.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

‘Only’ build like Bob.


“I won’t admit without a struggle that when I speak of God ‘uttering’ or ‘inventing’ the creatures I am ‘watering down the concept of creation.’  I am trying to give it, by remote analogies, some sort of context.  

I know that to create is defined as ‘to make out of nothing’, es nihilo.

But I take that to mean ‘not out of any pre-existing material’.

It can’t mean that God makes what God has not thought of, or that He gives His creatures any powers or beauties which He Himself does not possess. Why, we think that even human work comes nearest to creation when the maker has ‘got it all out of his own head.’

This act, as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man.


For we - even our poets and musicians and inventors - never, in the ultimate sense, make.


We only build.

We always have materials to build from.


All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their creator.”  C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

…we always have materials to build from.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to ‘only’ build like Bob.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Only a need to wake up.


“If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking.

Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.”  Thomas Merton
 

Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all…








sleeping beauty.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to only a need to wake up.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Only my shadow lost.

“I learned that it was not myself but only my shadow that I had lost. 

I learned that it is better … for a proud man to fall and be humbled than to hold up his head in pride and fancied innocence.

I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.”  George MacDonald, The Loss of the Shadow

…not myself.





…my shadow.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to only my shadow lost.