About saints, poets and nature

"Transcendence", by Michael D. O'Brien.

"It means that the world is radiant with signs. Heaven is pouring out continual messages, but we can hardly read them, you see, because we are blind and deaf and do not know who we really are. The signs in the earth, inanimate and organic, living and dead, are not divine in themselves, but they are creations of the divine, and this sense is being lost because we -"

He pauses to catch his breath.

"Lost, Josip? Perhaps mankind has never really found it?"

"Some have found it. Some - the great saints like Sveti Franjo - Saint Francis of Assisi".

"And John of the Cross", she adds with a smile, enjoying her guest's expressiveness, which in her experience of him is a rare outburst.

"Yes, and the great poets too!" Josip goes on. "And when a saint is also a poet, we have an amplification of the power of language".

"And if a poet is also a saint?"

"The same, but a true saint is first and foremost alter Christus, a kind of Christ living among us. He is never first and foremost a poet who happens to be a saint".

"Aren't you make a false  distinction, Josip? If man is not a collection of components, his poetry will always be the language of his love for Christ, don't you think?"

"Yes, of course" Josip nods, "I said it badly. But, Miriam, is it not wonderful! Is it not splendid! We live and move and have our being within a vast masterpiece. Nature itself is speaking or, rather, God is speaking through nature -"

"Yes, everything speaks because it is given by the Creator of all things".

"His hand is upon it all, the damaged and the undamaged. We must learn to see the original intention even in the damaged".

(from "Island of the world" by Michael D. O'Brien, Ignatius Press, pag. 628 - 629. Found in the highest bookshelf of one of the huge aisle of Strand's bookshop, near Union Square, my last night in NYC, summer 2010 )