Obedience to God ~ Great Quotes!

+ JMJ +

(Source)

  

The power of obedience!  The lake of Gennesareth had denied its fishes to Peter’s nets.  A whole night in vain.  Then, obedient, he lowered his net again to the water and they caught "a huge number of fish."  Believe me: the miracle is repeated each day.

~  St. Josemaria Escriva

(Source)

Obedience is an act of faith; disobedience is the result of unbelief.

~  Edwin Louis Cole

 St. Teresa of Avila
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I often thought my constitution would never endure the work I had to do, (but) the Lord said to me:  "Daughter, obedience gives strength.”

~  St. Teresa of Avila


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 On days when life is difficult and I feel overwhelmed, as I do fairly often, it helps to remember in my prayers that all God requires of me is to trust Him and be His friend. I find I can do that.

~  Bruce Larson

  Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
(Source)

Don't give in to discouragement....  If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own powers.  Never bother about people's opinions.  Be obedient to truth.  For with humble obedience, you will never be disturbed.

  ~  Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

If we want the Word of God to have authority in our life, there is only one way - obey it. If we want the Holy Spirit to have authority in our life, there is only one way - Obey Him. If we always obey impulses of fear or doubt or resentment, what will have authority over our minds?  Fear, and doubt and resentment.

~  Tom Marshall

   Blessed John Henry Newman
 (Source)

God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission - I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

~  Blessed John Henry Newman

(Source)

I may no longer depend on pleasant impulses to bring me before the Lord. I must rather respond to principles I know to be right, whether I feel them to be enjoyable or not.

~ Jim Elliot

Apparition of the Virgin to St. Albert the Great, 1660

by Vicente Salvador Gomez

Valencia, Spain

(Source)

He that is truly obedient does not wait for a command, but as soon as he knows what his superior wishes to have done immediately sets himself to work, without expecting an order.

~  Saint Albert the Great, Doctor of the Church

(Source)

One needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure.

~ C. S. Lewis 

Obedience has a price, too - death to our own ways - but it also promises a great reward: the commendation of the Father. So lay aside all your excuses. Then take hold of His plan for your life, and watch Him do mighty works through you.

~  Joy Strang

 St. John Climacus
(Source)

Just as trees swayed by the winds drive their roots deeply into the earth, so those who live in obedience get strong and unshakable souls.

~ St. John Climacus

 (Source)

The consequence of disobedience to the clearly revealed will of God is that the time will come when we will no longer be able to hear God speaking to us.

~  Selwyn Hughes

 

 Madame Jeanne Guyon

(Source)

God must be sought and seen in His providences; it is not our actions in themselves considered which please Him, but the spirit in which they are done, more especially the constant ready obedience to every discovery of His will, even in the minutest things, and with such a suppleness and flexibility of mind as not to adhere to anything, but to turn and move in any direction where He shall call.

~  Madame Jeanne Guyon

(Source)

There's some task which the God of all the universe, the great Creator, your redeemer in Jesus Christ has for you to do, and which will remain undone and incomplete until by faith and obedience you step into the will of God.

~  Alan Redpath

Thomas a Kempis
 (Source)

Whoever strives to withdraw from obedience, withdraws from grace.

~  Thomas a Kempis

(Source)

"What's in it for me?" man says about obeying God. In this context how selfish and sinful that question is. The living God has spoken, and that is enough. The Saviour who shed his blood to save us from hell has told us how we should live, and that is enough. The loving Holy Spirit who made us alive has moved holy men to speak a word to us, and that is enough. We obey God because that glorifies God and there is nothing more than that.

~  Geoff Thomas 

(Source) 

Today I will face my problems, unwrap them and seek to understand their component parts, spread them out before the Lord, thank Him in advance for what He's going to do, follow orders for what I am to do, and stand by to watch His miracles.

~  Anonymous

 Saint Ignatius Loyola
(Source)

There are three sorts of obedience; the first, obedience when a strict obligation is imposed upon us, and this is good; the second when the simple word of the superior, without any strict command, suffices for us, and this is better; the third, when a thing is done without waiting for an express command, from a knowledge that it will be pleasing to the superior, and this is the best of all.

~  Saint Ignatius, Father of the Church

Helping Others - Great Quotes!

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In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.

~  Flora Edwards

If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.

~  Bob Hope

 

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground. 

~  Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you're too busy to give your neighbor a helping hand, then you're just too darned busy.

~  Marie T. Freeman

 

~  Audrey Hepburn

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.

~  Chinese Proverb

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

~  Albert Schweitzer

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

~  Napoleon Hill

 

If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking him if there's anything you can do. Think of something appropriate and do it.

~  E. W. Howe

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path.

~  Buddhist saying

National Gallery of Art: Sculpture Garden

+ JMJ +

We visited the Sculpture Garden last May 5, 2012.  It was a breezy afternoon, a perfect time to reintroduce Muddee to the works in the Garden since he was much younger when we had last visited.

"The National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden is the most recent addition to the National Gallery of Art.  Completed and opened to the public on May 23, 1999, the location provides an outdoor setting for exhibiting a number of pieces from the Museum's contemporary sculpture collection."  (Source)

"It was designed to offer year-round enjoyment to the public in one of the preeminent locations on the National Mall (right across the National Archives) .  It  includes seventeen works from the Gallery's growing collection."  (Source)

 The reflecting pool and fountain refresh visitors from Spring through Fall.  In the winter, it becomes an Ice Rink.

Here are some of the works we saw:

Sol LeWitt
American, born 1928
Four-Sided Pyramid, 1999
Concrete Blocks and Mortar

"From the early 1960s to the present, Sol LeWitt has been at the forefront of minimal and conceptual art.  LeWitt's 'structures' (a term he prefers to sculpture) are generally composed with modular, quasi-architectural forms. For many of his works, LeWitt creates a plan and a set of instructions to be executed by others.

Four-Sided Pyramid was constructed on this site by a team of engineers and stone masons in collaboration with the artist. The terraced pyramid, first employed by LeWitt in the 1960s, relates to the setback design that had long been characteristic of New York City skyscrapers. Its geometric structure also alludes to the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia."  (Source)

 Roy Lichtenstein
American, 1923-1997
House I, 1996/1998
Fabricated and Painted Aluminum

"Roy Lichtenstein is best known for the pop paintings based on advertisements and comic strips that he made in the 1960s. He also produced a significant body of sculpture, including large-scale works designed for the outdoors. House I incorporates the hallmarks of the artist's style: crisp, elemental drawing, heavy black outlines, and a palette based on primary colors. 

Whereas most of the artist's sculpture approximates freestanding paintings in relief rather than volumetric structures in the round, some of his late sculpture, such as House I, exploits the illusionistic effects of a third dimension. The side of the house at once projects toward the viewer while appearing to recede into space." (Source)

Tony Smith
American, 1912-1980
Moondog, 1964/1998-1999
Painted Aluminum
 

"Smith's work is related to the simplified geometric forms in the minimalist art of the 1960s, but was also strongly influenced by the artist's early career as an architect. The structure of Moondog is based on the lattice motif that Smith used as the building block for a spare yet complex formal and expressive language.  Indeed, while Moondog is a logical geometric configuration (fifteen extended octahedrons plus ten tetrahedrons), from certain viewpoints it has a startling tilt, conveying an impression of instability. 

Smith compared this sculpture to a variety of forms, including a Japanese lantern and a human pelvic bone. The title itself derives from two sources: Moondog was the name of a blind poet and folk musician who lived in New York City, and Smith has also likened this sculpture to Dog Barking at the Moon, a painting by Joan Miró.  He first created Moondog in 1964 as a 33-inch cardboard model, intending to 'cast the piece in bronze as a garden sculpture,' which he did in 1970.  Smith himself planned the large scale edition of Moondog, although it was not produced in his lifetime."  (Source)

Roxy Paine
American, born 1966
Graft, 2008-2009

Stainless steel

"At 45 feet high by 45 feet wide, American sculptor Roxy Paine’s newly installed sculpture, Graft (2008–2009), stands out among the trees in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, one-half mile from the U.S. Capitol on the National Mall. The Gallery commissioned Paine to make a Dendroid, as the artist calls his series of treelike sculptures, for the Sculpture Garden. The resulting work is the first by Paine to enter the collection, as well as the first contemporary sculpture to be installed in the Sculpture Garden in the ten years since it opened.

Graft presents two fictive but distinct species of trees—one gnarled, twisting, and irregular, the other smooth, elegant, and rhythmic—joined to the same trunk. Among its rich associations, this sculpture evokes the persistent human desire to alter and recombine elements of nature, as well as the ever–present tension between order and chaos."  (Source)

National Gallery of Art: West Building ~ May 5, 2012

+ JMJ +

On a breezy Saturday last May,  Robs, the boys and I went to the National Gallery of Art to see a special exhibit on Picasso's early drawings from 1890-1921.  It was very interesting to see how talented he was even at such a young age.  (For more on the exhibit, see this post.)

Here's a picture of Robs and the boys at the side entrance of the NGA's West Building, with a poster of Picasso's self-portrait as a young man, above the door.

After the Picasso Exhibit, we went to see the Sculpture Galleries on the West Building's ground floor.  It had been some time since we were last there.  Muddee had been a baby, so he was seeing everything with new eyes.  We saw ...

The Thinker (Le Penseur) 

by Auguste Rodin 

French, 1840 - 1917

Rodin's "Thinker" exists today in many casts and sizes. More than fifty are known in this size—which is the size of Rodin's original handmade clay model.  (Source)

A smaller sculpture of Rodin's famous "The Kiss" (Le Baiser).  The original bronze sculpture (almost three feet high) was reproduced in bronze and marble, in both enlarged and reduced versions. The National Gallery's diminutive golden bronze work (under ten inches) is one of sixty-nine versions of this size.   

(Source)

 Edgar Degas's original wax statuette of the 
"Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen" (1878 - 1881), 
one of the best-loved sculptures of all time.   
(Source)  

The boys recognized it right away, having first 

seen one of its bronze castings at the 

Musee' D'Orsay in Paris during our 2004 trip.

At the West Building's rotunda in front of the statue of Mercury.

One of the modern sculptures outside of the National Gallery of Art.

In front of the National Gallery's stately Mall entrance.

 

On the broad staircase leading to the colonnaded porch and the building's main entrance.  (The Gallery had just closed for the day.)  It's always so nice to visit this beautiful museum and its collection of great art.

Afterwards, we went to the Sculpture Garden nearby, since the last time we were there, Muddee was so small.  To see that post, go here.