We always fall short, always remain other, and yet are always on the way. I am always on the way, it seems, on this pilgrimage, to having eyes according to God’s eyes, to having a heart according to God’s heart. My wandering eyes, my divided heart makes me realize the truth of Van Gogh’s words, ‘’I cannot dispense with something greater than myself.’’ Hen can dispense with God on the side of the object, as a theme of painting, but he cannot dispense with God on the side of the subject, as ‘’the power of creating.’’ I see pitfall here, nevertheless, for myself and for secular modernity, wanting to dispense with God as the Light, with God as the beloved, and to have God only as eyes and heart. Somehow I have to go beyond the vision of secular modernity, the vision that stops at the reality of human existence in time, and use God’s eyes and heart to see the glory, like the makers of icons, to see ‘’that something of the eternal,’’ as Van Gogh calls it, to see time as ‘’a changing image of eternity.’’

The House of Wisdom  John S. Dunne  University of Notre Dame Press 1993 (page 157)