The person who loves never abandons contemplation. On the contrary, s/he alone thirsts for it in the right spirit ... God gives Love to those in prayer, and the more s/he loves others, the better s/he can understand. Being filled with God's love, one is capable of a new love for one another -- a joyful and self-forgetting love. Love brings contemplation itself into the mystery of change. It is no longer a neutral point from which the transformations of love are beheld; it is carried away in the flood of the love which is ever the same and ever new, forever changing.
at day's end
we notice our salted skin
(how it clings and crusts as silt deposits)
touch lightly the tomato-red sheen in that space just below the eyes.
Wearied bodies. Sticking flesh. Warmed and weighted eyes. The smell of ourselves.
We are caked with the soil that draws up seeds to plants
and the dampnesses that quench them.
The water runs off us, coffee rich against the porcelain sink.
Who was it that likened sin to dirt? Who declared purity a vast white void?
Who never noticed the gospel of a body
in the summer
at day's end?