Quotes of the Day for February 13, 2026 – Thoughts on how we see and experience the world, nature, and creation
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“When it comes down to it, this non-iconographic way of seeing the world is by nature unfaithfulness. When I look at creation and I don’t see God, it is like looking at the physical body of a woman in loveless lust and not seeing the fullness.” (Andrew Williams)
“The Enlightenment comes directly out of Scholastic theology and the medieval notion that there is a nature that is all right on its own, to which grace is then added. That is totally heretical, just nuts….no existing thing would exist for even the tiniest moment were it not sustained by uncreated grace. The Enlightenment sciences…take the medieval notion of nature a step farther and say, “Ok, let’s look only at the nature and leave grace to the clergy.”…this wouldn’t make sense. We won’t completely understand anything in nature unless we also see it as an icon and as existing because God’s grace sustains and permeates it.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“We are thinking matter, made of the same stuff as everything around us…though we can say much about the activities of our brain, we cannot…actually translate or even correlate that activity with the thing we experience as thought. It is thought itself that we have mythologized and mis-imagined. With this same failure of imagination, we do not understand the fundamental communion of all created things, nor the utterly cosmic nature of the statement that God “became flesh and dwelt among us.” We hear our own voices but do not recognize their kinship to every other sound around us. The sound of my voice and the sound of the river belong to the same class of event. Fantasy novels often do a better job of imagining. Trees speak and animals discuss among themselves. We think to ourselves, “What if trees could actually speak?” But we never seem to think, “What if we actually knew how to listen?” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“These patterns, these descriptions of hierarchies of beings and of angels and of the mountain, of paradise, of temples—all of these descriptions that have been with us since the beginning of known history, that’s really how reality works. Right now is actually an aberration. The modern world is an aberration on that pattern. You could call it the end of that pattern or moving out into the wild of that pattern, but the real pattern is going to come back. It has to, because that’s actually how reality works. So in a way there’s a despair, because we see that everything is falling apart and everything, that society is fragmenting and people are at each other’s throats, not literally yet, thank God, but it seems like that, at some point, will be the case again. So I think there’s a kind of sadness to see that happen, but there’s also hope to know that when it’s really dark and you light a candle, then you will see the candle. I think that that’s also part of it, that the meaning will shine brighter for a lot of people because of the darkness around. And many will ignore it, but some people will… Those that see it will see it. It may be even more than in a world where these patterns are completely traditional and just a forgotten part of how reality works and it just kind of functions like a clock almost. Whereas now people who want to recover an enchanted world have to fight for it. They have to fight in their own lives. They have to fight in their communities to kind of get things going, to get a sense of community, to get a sense of meaning going. But since it is the real pattern, it’s going to shine.” (Jonathan Pageau)
“The medieval man looked at the night sky and wept, feeling himself enclosed in the double darkness of his physical and moral separation from God. But he also believed that the stars were holes in the floor of heaven: that light was streaming in from that world of endless day where all things danced in the delight of creatureliness, were radiant in the changeless light of God.” (Sisters of St. Xenia Skete)