I am not going to finish my post breakfast musing now that I sit waiting upon Vespers after dinner.  I will quote from ‘The Fire of Contemplation’ by Dominican Thomas Philippe.  Father Philippe is an amazing story, born within a French family of twelve brothers and sisters, seven of his siblings honored a call to the religious life.  Father Thomas, aside from his writing, is known for forming a religious community for the handicapped, mentally disabled men he lived and worked with.

Divine Love, on the contrary, is infinite in its very reality; love’s aspirations and transports are measured by the Infinite One: and as we shall show, there truly may be something of the Infinite in these utterly secret human experiences (contemplative consolations, or lack of consolations), for those manifestations take place in the deepest center of the soul.  Divine Love has the incomparable privilege of not having to express itself externally.  No poetic sublimation is necessary here; moreover we are obliged to admit that symbols and metaphors to express its hidden visitations are always infinitely short of the reality.  Mystical love, by its deepest tendency, inclines to silence; it avoids literature, it shuns poetic expressions; it is essentially recollection and adoration.  –Thomas Philippe

Marie Domnique Philippe brother to Thomas

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The waiting of the hour slips beneath the anticipation of the setting of the sun, sky painted fading,
All is good, unannounced quiet comes,
Called, be still advancing, reticence strike the tongue,
A day rolls on into eternity, the blasting of the aftermath concluding with the sound of holy water flowing, a fountain, presence pronounced with the dawn of eve,
It wasn’t so horrible when the surface tore away, tempering through the pain, something greater in patience revealing,
Tapping upon a window a multitude of windows open to the sound of their own harmonizing crescendo, the Divine Office sung as one,
Imperfections and strengths merging, an original lost within a crowd, a community hankers down upon never ending,
The silence of the Eucharist, communion encircled, the church does not crumble, the gathered maintain.

Eucharist reposed