Men Whose Sins are Forgiven Them

14 December is the Feast of John of the Cross and this year falls and bows before Gaudete Sunday. And what a day to rejoice. Honor the saint with a reading of his poetry or listen to Loreena McKennit’s rendition of “The Dark Night of the Soul.” And if you have not made confession for Advent, now is a good time to go, and thank God for His mercies. Honor to a saint (and all the saints) who interceded for a pivotal grace for me.

One day or another all young lives are stirred by an urge which seems to compel . . . not very urgently perhaps, but just strongly enough to show the little creatures a glimpse, which sometimes half-consciously he accepts, of the huge risk that salvation entails, and gives to human life all its glory.
--Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. . . . He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant . . . the whole universe had been destroyed and re-created.
--G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

Juan de la Cruz, reza por nos! And now—off to look on the world and my fellow man with new eyes. I should also go and buy something for my plain, jolly appetite.