One of the delights that begins to unfold in the process of becoming Catholic is a growing realisation of how, within the Catholic perceptive imagination, matter and spirit are infused and intermingled, and the mending of the fractured duality between spirit and matter that Enlightenment culture engendered is achieved.
The Liturgy of the Hours contains the wonderful Benedicite, omnia opera Domini – a canticle of Creation containing verses of The Song of the Three Children. St Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun, mirrors this exquisite poetry celebrating an animated universe, sentient of God’s love, joining the angelic order in hymns of praise, whether or not the human beings living at the centre of the created order either feel it or join in.
