Song of Prayer and Hope for the New Year

Eric Clapton and Pavarotti - Holy Mother

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9uYu4R2nk8&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0wa5hYGq6pu9sx6hk51c4eoOJTjoFGz1avgLucuKqHbFqGbDRgGLRbfE8

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St. Thomas Aquinas -- how his mystical experience changed everything for him

St. Thomas Aquinas reportedly had a mystical vision at the end of his life, after which, despite the pleading of his friends, he did not write another word. It was told that on his death bed he waved his hands at shelves filled with his speculative theological, philosophical writings and said, "It is all straw."

On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Aquinas was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald's (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, "The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me." When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, "I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw."

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Happy New Year: Einstein quotes

A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the "Universe." He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage is the only object of true religion. Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace.

--Albert Einstein

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties – this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.

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