They learn to love the beauty of order and design of color, and the nuances of shade and pattern all around them. They come to marvel, with each new discovery, at the complexity and intricacy of nature's laws and habits. And so in all they confront, they learn to discover and experience the creative loving presence of God and to develop an innate sense of restraint and discipline in the presence of the vast array of gifts poured on them each moment of their lives. In using these gifts, their all pervading mode of action is "not to spoil" but to love, to love that which God is freely allowing them to share, and in return, to use their humanity in bringing all back to God. This is the kind of human formation that recognises and appreciates man's nature as created to receive in openness to God in all of reality. It manifests esteem for man's capacity freely to respond in a human way and to become conscious of this response as his relation to God. ~ Becoming a Person in the Whole Christ, McMahon/Campbell page 50-51

No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

"If you see any beauty in Christ, and say, "I desire to have that," God will work it in you." - G.V. Wigram

"God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty." - Stephen Charnock

Collage became a powerful spiritual practice for me; the drafting table is one of the places where I pray best. It provides a space between and beneath and beyond words, a thin place where memory and hope meet. The practice of collage also provides an image for understanding my work and my life. In much the same way that I sit at my drafting table and take the scraps to piece together a new creation, God does this within me. God takes everything: experiences, stories, memories, relationships, dreams, prayers — all those pieces, light and dark, rough and smooth, jagged and torn — and creates anew from them. I have learned to think of God as the consummate recycler: in God's economy, nothing is wasted. Everything – everything — can be used. Transformed. Redeemed. ~ Jan Richardson