Tea at Trianon: Faith and the Faithfulness of God

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Faith and the Faithfulness of God

From Vultus Christi:

God does not refuse faith to one who asks for it. Faith, moreover, is not something obtained once and for all on the threshold of the church. One must ask for faith every day. There are hours in life when one must ask for faith ceaselessly for fear of losing altogether a spark of light in the darkness of the world. For this, there is nothing better than the beautiful prayer of the centurion: Lord, I believe, but help thou my unbelief of. (Mk 9:23) Credo, Domine; adjuva incredulitatem meam.

As faith matures, it opens onto an encounter with the faithfulness of God, that is to say with the merciful goodness of God, with that strong love of His upon which we can rely in all circumstances, even in the crucible of suffering. Faith is a child’s little hand outstretched to grasp the strong and faithful hand that God never tires of holding out to the little and the weak. It is when one encounters the faithfulness of God that one discovers what a living faith really us: a letting–go, an unconditional surrender to the faithfulness of God. There is a point at which one begins to say, «No matter what I do, no matter how low I fall, no matter how unfaithful I am, God will be faithful to me». One begins to know the faithfulness of God, as opposed to just knowing about it. (Read more.)