Authenticity
“No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.” Charles Dickens
God’s love
God’s unconditional love
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” Charles Dickens
The Sacred Heart of Jesus
Fidelity
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
Hidden fidelity
Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Advent
The present…
“Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!”
‒ H. W. Longfellow, ‘A Psalm Of Life’