Tuesday, first week of Lent

Station:  St. Anastasia.  Only church with perpetual Adoration in Rome.  (Though now some other parishes have instituted more adoration.)  This is also the station church for Christmas day.

Quote, from Jacques Maritain's Approches de Dieu:

Suddenly I come back to myself; a reflection is awakened in me which seems to me quite incongruous, altogether unreasonable, but whose evidence takes possession of me, in my very perception of my act of thought: how is it possible that I was born?

...

Where I am now in the act of intellection and of consciousness of my thought, was there once nothing?  That is impossible; it is not possible that at a certain moment what is now thinking was not at all, was a pure nothing.  How could this have been born to existence?

...

Yet I know quite well that I was born.  True, I know it by hearsay, but I do know it with an absolute certainty, and besides, I remember my childhood.  The certitude of having been born, common to all men, represses in us the blossoming forth--when the natural spirituality of intelligence is activated in us--of another certitude, that of the impossibility that our existence as thinking minds ever began or followed upon the nothingness of itself, and it prevents that other certitude from reaching our consciousness.

The context here is Maritain's 6th Way to demonstrate God's existence.