A Mystic Being, G.K. Chesterton

Man is a mystic being who cannot do what is expected of him; but can only do more than is expected of him. He can die in torments in the trenches for a rag on a pole; but he cannot keep his temper for twenty-four hours. ~ G. K. Chesterton

Rose Round: The fourfold living signs of the soul

Signs of mystery, Theo had said, when he had seen the eagle in the north, before the hard winter and the time he had fallen off the roof. Theo wore an eagle in his ring, on his hand; it was his sign as well as St. John's, the great bird king of the air who flew unblinded towards the sun. But this bull-head was not less his, nor the lion and the man looking west, and Matt felt that they were his own too, and any man's, and in every man they lived.
But bulls are dangerous and wild, Matt thought, and lions too: they were beasts of the forest and the great plains and of desert and mountain, and were they hiding inside people, inside himself? Suppose the bull charged? The lion roared upon its prey? The eagle swooped on its victim? Suppose the man should change his face and become any or all of these, and no longer human? He was suddenly afraid; it was not only dangerous, it was terrifying to be alive, to be someone with all these unknown powers in his heart.
Then he saw Theo come through the western arch on the other side of the fountain, looking at the sun rising, and at him too.
"Theo," he said, holding on to the stone basin with his hands and looking through the falling water. "I was thinking about the bull, and the others, how dangerous they are. Suppose they got loose? I know they're not real animals, but they are sort of real inside, aren't they? Suppose they did?"
"Well, they do sometimes," said Theo, smiling. He came up to the fountain. "They get very wild. Why do you think our world is in such confusion, with nations all quarreling and fighting, and people grabbing everything they can from each other, and making silly excuses to justify themselves? The beasts inside have got loose."
"I don't like them then," said Matt. Yet he had, in fact, felt only wonder and delight when he had seen them, and a kind of awe.
"Yes, you do like them," said Theo. "They are splendid. They are all kings. They are what makes you a king too. You are a man in your mind, an eagle in your spirit, a lion in the courage of your will."
"But the bull?"
"He's in the power of love," said Theo.
Matt said, "But they do go wild, you said so."
"Yes, they go wild," said Theo. "But look at the garden: it's a square, but a square in a circle. It has a center. Don't you remember talking about it on the tower?"
"The sun," said Matt. "The sun is the center."
"The sun is the center outside," said Theo. "It is the image of the one who is inside: Lux umbra Dei."
Matt looked at the golden sun rising. "If he's in the center, all's well with the sacred beasts," said Theo. "The Phoenix is their Lord."
The sun was shining in his nest of clouds, brighter and brighter, like the Phoenix in the rose of fire. Matt looked back at the fountain, the water that sprang up and fell back for ever.
"Then why is it our Lady who is here in the middle of the garden, Theo? Why not him?"
"Because this is our world," said Theo. "He chose to come into it through her. He is too great to fit into the ring of the world, this little pattern of our sun and our hearts, except by becoming her child, and so one of us. And yet if you look at it inside out you will see that all this, the solar circle, the seasons of time, the fountain of life, the fourfold living signs of the soul, and the Lady herself who said yes to the will of love, are all in him, only in him, and we see them clearer when we look at them in him. There are some people who will only see everything in themselves, but don't be one of them. Our selves are only moons to his sun: in his light all things are revealed as they are."

What Makes Us Loyal to Christ, by Dom Vonier

We are dealing with the deepest and most incomprehensible of things when we are dealing with the human spirit, with the human mind. How can the human mind be won to truth, to faith, to loyalty to God? How is it possible for us to come to God, to surrender to him our whole intellect, our whole will? We do not even ourselves know why we are loyal to one person and alienated from another, in sympathy with one person and opposed to another. God alone knows the working of the human soul; and God, who knows, who has made us, has thought out his plan, the supreme plan, the good testimony of Christ before Pilate. In the words of Saint Peter: "Christ died for our sins, the just for the unjust." And by his death he achieved for truth its highest ascendency, an ascendency not otherwise to be obtained. Here again we see the genius of Christianity, a wonderful understanding, we might almost say, on the part of God himself, of man's real needs, man's real hunger, and thirst... The folly of the cross is a great psychological power, a great instrument of truth, which wins us and makes us loyal to Christ himself; nothing else can achieve that... We know what a Christian man ought to be. Your life, such as it is, is a pre-ordained thing, and it is for you to drink your cup even as Christ drank his. His life and his death, if they apparently were failures, were not so in reality. We also are children of that divine Father who held to the lips of his Son a beverage to drink, and so our lives have a wonderful mysterious significance. And it is in this light that we ought to look at human things and be superior to them; never letting them overpower us, as if they were some dark arrangement, as if they were the result of some malign power. No, human things are the will of the Father for us as they were the will of the Father for his divine Son.

Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B. (died 1906) was the abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England.