Addendum to ‘Letting God Wound You’: Quotes

But what is exact is first of all that the absence of uneasiness… is a serious symptom… We can make a generalization: a soul to which all uneasiness about oneself is foreign is a soul affected with sclerosis. (Gabriel Marcel)

[For St. Augustine], the foundation of this uneasiness resides in the radical insufficiency, in the essential want from which man suffers as a creature drawn from nothingness. “Not being self-sufficient in the order of being, he could be self-sufficient neither in the order o knowledge nor in the order of action: but this very want from which he suffers orients him towards Him who alone can satisfy him. Whence the fruitful uneasiness which unceasingly troubles man but which saves him in that, lade for God, it permits him to find in God alone peace and repose.” (St. Augustine quoted by Gabriel Marcel)

Positive uneasiness…is the disposition which allows us to detach ourselves from the vise in which daily life squeezes us, with its hundreds of cares which end up by masking the true realities. This uneasiness is the principle of self-transcendence, it is a path which we have to ascend in order to attain to true peace, to that which no dictatorship, no imperialism, has the power of distributing, for in the most precise sense peace is not of this world. (Gabriel Marcel)

If man is essentially a voyager, it is because he is en route, as one of my characters says in L’Emissaire, “towards an end which one can say at once and contradictorily that he sees and does not see.” But it is indeed uneasiness which is the inner spring of this progression, and no matter what those say about it who, in the name of a technocratic ideal, claim to prohibit it, man cannot lose this stimulus without becoming immobilized and dying. (Gabriel Marcel)

The apprehensive and bewildered soul prepares to pray to its God, always holding itself in it hands, as if to offer itself to you; it is afraid before what it knows, it is bewildered before what is new; in order to find you it is marked by the sign of the faith, but this sign cannot yet be of use to it; seeking your face, your face, Lord, it is in ignorance, in total non-recognition of what it seeks. The phantoms of its heart are an abomination to you like idols. The soul loves you, such as it knows you by faith, but the mind cannot see you. Burning with desire to see your face, to which it offers the sacrifice of its piety and its justice, its offerings and its holocausts, it becomes more flustered because it longs to see your face. And since it does not yet receive the illumination of your faith, whereas it believed itself in possession of faith, it is sometimes bewildered to the point of almost thinking that is does not believe in you, and to the point of hating itself because it seems to it that is does not love you. It does not have to fear in you, this soul is anguished by the desire which it has of you, anguished not to love you, this soul which desires you to the point of scorning everything which exists, of scorning itself! How long, Lord, how long? (William of St. Thierry)

He makes [the soul] desire Him vehemently by certain delicate means the soul itself does not understand… They proceed from very deep within the interior part of the soul… For often when a person is distracted and forgetful of God, His Majesty will waken it. His action is as quick as a falling comet. And as clearly as it hears a thunderclap, even though no sound is heard, the soul understands that it was called by God… It feels that it is wounded in the most exquisite way… It knows clearly that the wound is something precious, and it would never want to be cured… The wound satisfies it much more than the delightful and painless absorption of the prayer of quiet… a whisper so penetrating that the soul cannot but hear it…

This action of love is so powerful that the soul dissolves with desire… This pain reaches to the soul’s very depths and that when He who wounds it draws out the arrow, it indeed seems, in accord with the deep love the soul feels, that God is drawing these very depths after Him… This delightful pain – and it is not pain – is not continuous, although sometimes it lasts a long while; at other times it goes away quickly. (St. Teresa of Avila)

In the process she experiences through her whole being a wound of love that was mighty and sweet; and I would reckon myself happy if at rare moments I felt at least the prick of the point of that sword. Even if only bearing love’s slightest wound, I could say: “I am wounded with love.” (Song 2:5). How I long not only to be wounded in this manner but to be assailed again and again till the color and heat of that flesh that wars against the spirit is overcome (1 Pet. 2:11). (St. Bernard of Clairvaux)