From Thomas Merton’s journal, February 4, 1958 –

Beauty of the sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and white carnations and green leaves on the altar in the novitiate chapel. The light and the shade of red, especially the darkness in the fresh crinkled flower and the light warm red around the darkness, the same color as blood but not “red as blood,” utterly unlike blood. Red as a carnation. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence = Dominus est, eternity! Best because the flower is itself and the light is itself and the silence is itself and I am myself – all, perhaps, an illusion, but no matter, for illusion is nevertheless the shadow of reality and reality is the grace that underlies these lights, these colors, and this silence.

The “simplicity” that would have kept those flowers off the altar is, to my mind, less simple than the simplicity that enjoys them there, but does not need them to be there.

Winter Psalm
BY Richard Hoffman

Boston snowbound, Logan closed, snowplows
and salt-trucks flashing yellow, drifts
tall as a man some places, visibility poor,
I sit by the window and watch the snow

blow sideways north-northeast, hot cup
in hand, robe over pajamas.
You have made me to seek refuge
and charged me to care for my brothers.

How cruel. That could be You out there
howling, cracking the trees, burying everything.
What could I possibly want from You
that would not undo the whole world as it is?

The whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature could by itself. 
-Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 47, 1