What happened before the Big Bang?

'Here hangs a man discarded' by Brian Wren

A Hymn by Brian Wren to the tune 'Kocher' Here hangs a man discarded, a scarecrow hoisted high, a nonsense pointing nowhere to all who hurry by. Can such a clown of sorrows still bring a useful word when faith and hope seem phantoms and every hope absurd? Yet here is help and comfort for lives by comfort bound, when drums of dazzling progress give strangely hollow sound: Life, emptied of all meaning, drained out in bleak distress, can share in broken silence our deepest emptiness; And love that freely entered the pit of life's despair, can name our hidden darkness and suffer with us there. Christ, in our darkness risen, help all who long for light to hold the hand of promise, till faith receives its sight.

'The Coming' by R.S. Thomas

And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows: a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. Many people Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said.

Aquinas

University of Naples, 6 December 1273. A Dominican friar and scholar is working on the final section of his life's culminating work. He is about 48 years old, and has written many biblical and philosophical commentaries and theological treatises. He goes to celebrate mass, and there he experiences a crisis – a mystical experience, or possibly a stroke. "All I have written seems as straw compared to what I have experienced," he says, and he abandons his masterpiece unfinished. A few months later, he falls ill on a journey to a church council in Lyons, and he dies at the monastery at Fossanova on 7 March 1274. The man is Thomas d'Aquino, known to us as Aquinas, and the work is his Summa Theologiae. The 13th century was a turbulent era of crusades, religious conflicts and power struggles. Two of Aquinas's brothers were caught up in wars between Emperor Frederick II and the papacy, and one was executed for treason. Wars were fought in the name of religion, such...

Fides Quaerens Albus

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