The Peace of Submerged Dragons
A gay, bright, glorious day and a very fine Easter such as I do not remember for a long time. The Vigil was tremendous for me and the glory of Christ was in it. There has been splendor in everything (including the emptiness of Good Friday morning, when rain came down in torrents and I stayed in the hermitage).
Yesterday--reading bits of Dame Julian of Norwich and today I began Gregory of Nyssa's homilies on the Canticle.
"There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interest," say Huizinga. What about the present? An even greater error.
Fr. Sylvanus was in town to go to the doctor and brought back a newspaper story about a man in the Kentucky mountains, a former coal miner, who for thirteen years has been living as a hermit, with a dog, in a pitiful little shack without even a chimney and the an old car seat for a bed. "Because of all these wars." A real desert father, and probably not too sure why.
The hills are suddenly dark blue. Very green alfalfa in the bottoms. Yellow or mustard or sienna sage grass in my own field. Here there is no impatience. I am a submerged dragon. The peace of the Easter Alleluias.
April 2 and 7, 1961, IV.105-6
No idea what he means by "submerged dragon," but it's a neat image.
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