Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 17

"How many faces of Reality does he (the mystic) see?"

"Holy Spirit within...Transcendent Spirit without"

"...life as perceived by the human minds shows an inveterate tendency to arrange itself in triads;"

"...Pythagoras call Three the number of God..."

"Man, that 'thing of threes,' of body, soul and spirit..."

Christopher Hervey:

"The whole world round is not enough to fill
The heart's three corners, but it craveth still.
Only the Trinity that made it can
Suffice the vast triangled heart of Man."

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 11

My Art of Confession and Witness

The work of writing can be for me, or very close to, the simple job of being: by creative reflection and awareness to help life itself live in me, to give its esse an existent, or to find a place, rather, in esse by action, intelligence, and love. For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. This testimony of love remains necessary. Not to reassure myself that I am ("I write, therefore I am"), but simply to pay my debt to life, to the world, to other men. To speak out with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts, and the announcement of punishments. Bad because it implies a lack of love, good insofar as there may yet have been some love in it. The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness.

April 14, 1966, VI.371