Throughout history (especially before books became easily
available) people kept "commonplace books". “Commonplace" is a
translation of the Latin phrase loci communes and commonplace books were
collections of quotations, ideas, observations. For years I've been keeping a
list of memorable and thought-provoking quotations and thought I'd share them
here.
“If you think life is a vending machine where you put in
virtue and get back happiness, then you’ll be disappointed.” (Maggie – Jake’s
girlfriend in HBO’s series, Six Feet
Under)
In everyone there sleeps
A Sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have been had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
Philip Larkin
"Nothing
which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate
context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do
however virtuous can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by
love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our
friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by
the final form of love which is forgiveness."
--Reinhold
Niebuhr, The Irony of American
History.
"There
is more simplicity in a man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats
Grapenuts on principle..."
--G.K.
Chesterton.
O
God, if we thank you for bread and meat, for home and family, for work and
friends, for comfort and security, and have no pain of heart, no anguish that
others are homeless, helpless and starving, then leave us without your blessing
until we learn the ways of mercy. Deliver us from the sin of indifference
and bless to us what we now enjoy by the courage and kindness with which we
share it.
--Samuel
Howard Miller.
We
thank you when we look back on our life... even for what brought us
disappointment, pain, and suffering, because we now know that it helped us to
fulfill that for which we were born. And when new disappointments take
hold of us and words of thanks die on our tongue, remind us that a day may come
when we will be ready to give thanks for the dark road on which you have led
us.
--Paul
Tillich.
So, I
come back to where I began, to that other King, one Jesus; to the Christian
notion that man's efforts to make himself personally and collectively happy in
earthly terms are doomed to failure. He must indeed, as Christ said, be
born again, be a new man, or he is nothing. So at least I have concluded,
after having failed to find in past experience, present dilemmas, and future
expectations, any alternative proposition. As far as I am concerned, it
is Christ or nothing.
--Malcolm Muggeridge
St.
Augustine: "Perfection consists not in what we give to God, but in
what we receive from him". (C. Williams, The
Descent of the Dove, p. 72.)
"All
is ordained, but man is nevertheless master of his own actions".
--Rabbi
Akiba, Ethics of the Fathers
(as
quoted in Weintraub's Disraeli,
p. 171.)
Even
in our sleep, pain we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until,
in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
--Aeschylus
Who
loves fifty people has fifty sorrows; who loves twenty people has twenty
sorrows; who loves no one has no sorrows.
--Buddha
Before
you can have a love, you must have an unrequited love.
--Jack
Miles, God: A Biography,
p. 243
St.
Therese of Lisieux. "When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust
him. When he shows us his HOme, we turn away, but when he confides to us
that he is "acquainted with Grief," we listen, for that also is an
Acquaintance of our own."
quoted
by Kathleen Norris in The
Cloister Walk, p. 27.
Sebastian
Moore, OSB. "God behaves in the Psalms in ways he is not allowed to
behave in systematic theology."
Norris, Cloister Walk, p. 91
There
are some griefs so loud
They
could bring down the sky,
and
there are griefs so still
None
knows how deep they lie.
Endured,
never expended,
There
are old griefs so proud
They
never speak a word.
May
Sarton, Collected Poems,
p. 77-78.
...I
am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and
uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common
grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens
and calling upon God. And this, even though God shold hear us not; but He
wold hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
which men go to weep in common.
Miguel Unamuno, The Tragic
Sense of Life (Dover, 1954),
p. 17.
...however
absurd it seems... [the Resurrection] is a concept of sublime courage and
optimism. [footnote: See Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter" in Telephone Poles and Other Poems...
and see the poems, each entitled "The Resurrection of the Body", by
Linda Gregerson and Eric Pankey, Poetry162
[Apr 1993), 14-15, 26.] It locates redemption there where ultimate horror
also resides -- in pain, mutilation, death, and decay. Whether or not any
of the images and answers I have surveyed in this long book carries conviction,
those who articulated them faced without flinching the most negative of all the
consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the
grave. It was this stench and fragmentation they saw lifted to glory in
resurrection. To make body crucial to personhood is to court the
possibility that (to misquote Paul) victory is swallowed up in death. But
if there is resurrection, then what is redeemed includes all the fragments that
concerned Tertullian and Athenagoras as well as the love for which Dante and
Mechtild strove. We may not find their solutions plausible, but it is
hard to feel that they got the problem wrong.
--Caroline
Walker Bynum, The Resurrection
of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, New York: Columbia
Univ Press (1995), p. 343.
Spinoza
said that if a stone could think when thrown across a river, that stone
"would believe itself to be completely free and would think that it
continued in motion solely because of its own wish".
--quoted
by William Willimon in The
Intrusive Word, p. 10.
Man
is a son of God on whom the Devil has laid his hand, not a child of the Devil
whom God is trying to steal. That is the first truth of all religion....
"We called the chess-board white, we call it black;" but it is, this
chess-board of our human life, white not black, -- black spotted on white, not
white spotted upon black.
Phillips
Brooks, "The Light of the World", p. 9, in The Light of the World (1904).
I
think my prayer unanswered when really God not merely is answering it, but has
been answering it for years, before ever it knew enough of itself to be prayed.
Brooks,
"The Silence of Christ", p. 131, in The
Light of the World (1904).
"What
a wonderful sunrise... especially for such a small place".
--friend
of E. Stanley Jones observing a sunset in India.
The
rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of
its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude
of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to
too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to
violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy
of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner
capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because
it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Thomas
Merton, Conjectures of a
Guilty Bystander, p. 86.
Music
was as vital as the church edifice itself, more deeply stirring than all the
glory of glass or stone. Many a stoic soul, doubtful of the creed, was
melted by the music, and fell on his knees before the mystery that no words
could speak.
Will
Durant.
...the
process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of
something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of
avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get
agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and
won under the banner, "I stand for consensus"?
Margaret
Thatcher
Life
is completely fair; it breaks everybody's heart.
Anonymous
From
childhood on he had seen that might makes right, that man is stronger than chicken
-- man eats chicken, not vice versa. That bothered him, for there was no
evidence that people were more important than chickens. About his
decision [to become a vegetarian], he commented, "So in a very small way,
I do a favor for the chickens.... If I will ever get a monument, chickens will
do it for me".
Isaac
Bashevis Singer
It's
often been said, boldly, that the saints in heaven rejoice over their sins,
because through them they have been brought to greater and greater
understanding of the endless endurance of God's love, to the knowledge that
beyond every failure God's creative mercy still waits.
All
we can be sure of is that whatever the deficiency and the drying-up of human
capacity to love, the killing of love by pain, there is still, at the heart of
everything, a love that cannot be killed by pain.
Rowan
Williams , A Ray of Darkness,
p. 52.
…in
the church of the resurrection, the darkness of the cross is a promise of a
love beyond our failure and cowardice and death.
Williams, A Ray of Darkness, p. 104.
A
human being is holy, not because he or she triumphs by willpower over chaos and
guilt and leads a flawless life, but because that life shows the victory of
God’s faithfulness in the
midst of disorder and
imperfection. The church is holy – and this congregation here present is
holy – not because it is a gathering of the good and the well-behaved, but
because it speaks of the triumph of grace in the coming together of strangers
and sinners who, miraculously, trust one another enough to join in common
repentance and common praise – to express a deep and elusive unity in Jesus
Christ, who is our righteousness and sanctification.
Williams, Ray of Darkness, pp. 114-115.
A
man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of
art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart
first opened.
Albert
Camus (quoted in Douglas Shand Tucci, Boston
Bohemia, p. 74.)
A
friendship will be young after the lapse of half a century; a passion is old at
the end of three months.
Arthur
Crawshay Hall, quoted in Douglas Shand-Tucci, Boston
Bohemia, p. 190.
God
is "the fellow sufferer who understands".
Alfred
North Whitehead
We
are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit
later.... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we
ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
Mary
Antin
Forgiveness
is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard
truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven
every day, every hour -- unceasingly. That is the great work of love
among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.
Henri
Nouwen
"What is sacred space? It is a place
where, as Joseph Campbell put it, wonder can be revealed."
Peg
Streep, Altars Made Easy,
p. 1.
The
way remains closed to those to whom God is less real than a "consuming
fire", to those who know answers but no wonder.
Abraham
Joshua Heschel.
Thornton
Wilder in one of his three-minute plays, The
Angel that Troubled the Waters, tells of a man who stood on a day by the
pool of Bethesda, praying in fierce agony that God would touch his tortured
soul into health. But the angel, coming, whispered in his ear saying,
"Stand back; healing is not for you. Without your wound where would
your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble
into the hearts of men. Not the angels themselves in Heaven can persuade
the wretched and blundering children of earth as can one human being broken on
the wheels of living. In
love's service only the wounded soldiers can serve". (emph added) And in that
moment the angel stepped down into the waters and troubled them. As the
lone sufferer drew back, a lame old neighbor, smiling his thanks, made his
painful way into the pool and was healed. Joyously, with a song on his
lips, he approached the other, still standing there like a statue of grief,
thinking of the things which might have been. "Perhaps", said
he, "it will be your turn next! But meanwhile come with me to my
house. My son is lost in dark thoughts. I do not understand
him. Only you have ever lifted his mood. And my daughter, since her
child died, sits in the shadow. She will not listen to us. Come
with me but an hour!" "I would make up the full sum of all that
Christ has to suffer in my person" (Colossians 1.24).
Paul
Scherer, For We Have this
Treasure, p. 54.
All
wisdom is plagiarism; only stupidity is original.
Hugh
Kerr, "Preacher, Professor, Editor", Theology Today, 45:1 (April
1988), 1.
...Gilbert
Keith Chesterton described paradox as "Truth standing on her head to
attract attention".
The
Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 19.
When
Rabbi Bunam was asked why the first of the Ten Commandments speaks of God
bringing us out of the land of Egypt, rather than of God creating heaven and
earth, he expounded: "Heaven and earth! Then man might have
said, "Heaven -- that is too much for me." So God said to
man: "I am the one who fished you out of the mud. Now you come
here and listen to me."
The
Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 21.
"One
of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a
direct experience of God". [Carl Jung]
The
Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 23.
Concepts
create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another
over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees. [St. Gregory of Nyssa]
The
Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 30.
Karl
Barth once said... that too much Christian preaching speaks about an obligation
which must be met in order to receive a gift, whereas the real message of the
New Testament is about a gift which then leads us to an obligation.
quoted
in William Willimon, The
Gospel for the Person Who Has Everything, p. 23.
"'Yes'
is all the Christian life is about."
Karl
Barth, quoted in Willimon, The
Gospel for the Person Who Has Everything, p. 25.
"There
is nothing you have to do, nothing you have to do, nothing you have to do to be in God's good graces."
Frederick
Buechner, ibid., p. 26.
...Jesus
told us about a God whose love contains no "ifs" at all.
Ibid.,
p. 27.
Only
he who is already loved can love; only he who has been trusted can trust; only
he who has been an object of devotion can give himself.
Bultmann,
quoted in Willimon, ibid., p. 69.
For
the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning.
Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I
experience my stength, my wealth, my power.... I experience myself as
overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than
receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving
lies the expression of my aliveness.
Erich
Fromm, quoted in Willimon, p. 75.
One
of the charges which the Pharisees leveled against Jesus was that he ate and
drank with sinners. Every time the church eats and drinks the Lord's
Supper, it is claiming that Jesus chooses the same kind of dinner companions
today!
Willimon,
ibid., p. 86.
In a
delightful essay, "The Shadow of Great-Grandmama's Dress", in her
book, Yes, World, Mary
Jean Irion notes that "in matters of deepest importance the church does
not proceed on the faith of our fathers, but on the faith of little old
ladies".
Willimon,
ibid., p. 87.
Both
becoming a Christian and becoming a scientist involve incorporation into a
community, sharing its accumulated knowledge and wisdom, growing into its
outlook and venerating its saints. Only when one has received a
tremendous amount can one begin to make an original contribution.
W.G.
Pollard, Physicist and
Christian (SPCK, 1962);
quoted by Christopher Bryant, The
Heart in Pilgrimage, p. 11.
No
one is as whole as he who has a broken heart.
Rabbi
Moshe Leib of Sasov (Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 61)
Act
yourselves into a new way of thinking.
William
James (Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 91.)
If
you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be sure he had a lot of help
getting there.
Anonymous
A
procession of angels pass before man and the heralds proclaim before him
saying, "Make room for the icon of God'".
Talmud,
Deut. Rabbah, Re'eh: 4 (Rabbi Joshua ben Levi)
Human
love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.
Francois
Mauriac
We
don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as
well as their qualities.
Jacques
Maritain
The
last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things
which surpass it.
Pascal
Life
is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we learn to walk.
Cyril
Connolly
There
are no wrong turns. Only wrong thinking on the turns our life has taken.
Zen
saying.
Love
listens more often than it advises.
Noah
benShea
What
a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace
but a Christian prophet within earshot.
Kenneth
Kaunda, former president of Zambia.
In
his book The Company of
Strangers, Parker Palmer defines community as "that place where the
person you least want to live with always lives!"
Quoted
by Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread
of Angels, p. 87.
You
think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one make
two. But you must also understand and.
Sufi
saying, quoted by Taylor, Bread
of Angels, p. 90.
To
have a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside
your body.
Elizabeth
Stone.
How
else but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
William
Butler Yeats
A
former principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, preached to the college once a
year and would begin his sermons in this way: "The Greek word allotrioepiskopos, as I was
saying last year..."
quoted
by Austin Farrer, in "Emptying out the sense", Farrer: The Essential Sermons.
The
more you put on externally [eg, trappings of priestly or episcopal offices],
the more you are called to take off internally through a greater intimacy with
Christ.
The
Most Rev. Frank M. Griswold
Something
is your vocation if it keeps making more of you.
Gail
Godwin (quoted by Frank Griswold)
....the
wrath of God is completely identical with His love. It is not another
aspect of God, but one and the same thing. God's love for me the publican
is His wrath for me the pharisee who tries to exclude the publican.
Harry
Williams, The True Wilderness,
p. 146.
We
have just enough religion to make us hate , but not enough to make us love one
another.
Jonathan
Swift, Thoughts on Various
Subjects (quoted in The Anglican Digest,
Transfiguration 1998, p. 45)
When
I get to heaven, if I do, I imagine I shall be surprised at three things.
First I’ll be surprised that I’m there. Second, I shall be surprised at
many of the other people who are there. Third, and most astonishing, will
be their surprise that I’m there at all.
William
Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury.
With regard to undergraduates and their religion I think
there are various mistakes which have to be avoided….Another is to imagine that
one’s attempt to cope with one’s own insecurities is a desire to bring people
to God. Pastoral lust is the most insidious form of lust because it is
the one most easily disguised as virtue.
Harry
Williams, Some Day I’ll Find
You, p. 211.
Instead
of praying, “Speak, Lord, thy servant heareth”, our prayers too often are,
“Hear, Lord, for thy servant speaketh”.
Paraphrased.
Williams, Some Day I’ll Find
You, p. 211.
"...what
is life...when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set,
infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy
blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to
whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with
running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?
"... what is man when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set,
ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz
into urine? ... But in the mean time, what has been done? A song
has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous
judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller
Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with
warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn
off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I
do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales
which I made -- they shall last."
Isak
Dinesen, "The Dreamers",
Seven Gothic Tales (Modern Library), p. 275.
I
think we have lost the old knowledge that happiness is overrated -- that, in a
way, life is overrated. We have lost, somehow, a sense of mystery --
about us, our purpose, our meaning, our role. Our ancestors believed in
two worlds, and understood this to be the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short
one. We are the first generations of man that actually expected to find
happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such --
unhappiness. the reason: If you do not believe in another, higher
world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you
believe that this is your only chance at happiness -- if that is what you
believe, then you are not disappointed when the world does not give you a good
measure of its riches, you are despairing.
In a
Catholic childhood in America, you were once given, as the answer to the big
questions: It is a mystery. As I grew older I was impatient with
this answer. Now I am probably as old, intellectually, as I am going to
get, and more and more I think: It is a mystery. I am more comfortable
with this now; it seems the only rational and scientific answer.
Forbes, 9/14/92. Peggy Noonan.
"You'd cry too if it happened to you". p. 65.
Above
all, the church must celebrate the Eucharist as the dramatic depiction, and as
the succession of tableaux, that it intrinsically is. How can we point
our lives to the Kingdom’s great Banquet, if its foretaste is spread before us
with all the beauty of a McDonald’s counter?
Robert
Jenson, “How the world lost its story”, First
Things, Oct. ’93, p. 24.
Suddenly
my youth was gone, and my heart was wild,
but
the voice at the edge of the night said,
“You
no longer need to run and climb like an aging child.
Forget
the beach, the woodland and the hill.
There
is space for speed and motion still.”
Suddenly
my sight was gone;
and
the voice in the cloudy dawn eased my pain,
telling
me, “You will see again in a new way the lengthening shadows on the lawn, the
unseen birds
that
bring you in their beaks the newborn day.”…
Suddenly
then I had no place to live
But,
“You still have much to give.”
You
will enter an unexpected door
and I
will make you see and be as never before,”
said
the voice on the edge of light.
Virginia
Hamilton Adair in The New York
Times, Nov. 1, 1998.
Men
do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ
enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G.K.
Chesterton
All
men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but
they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also
committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.
G.K.
Chesterton
Precisely
because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just
in awe. (Joan Chittister?)
There
must be always remaining in every one's life someplace for the singing of the
angels -- some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by
an inherent prerogative throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative
relatedness....
That
the commonplace is shot through with new glory -- old burdens become lighter,
deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is
placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall
enough to wear.... (Howard Thurman)
Does
anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are
children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of
TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats
and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers
should issue life preservers and signal flares: they should lash us to
our pews.
Annie
Dillard (from either Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek or Teaching a Stone to Talk)
I
would rather, I think, undergo the famous dark night of the soul than encounter
in church the dread hootenanny, but these purely personal preferences are of no
account, and maladaptive to boot.
Annie
Dillard.
Week
after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons
unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens.
Week after week, Christ washes the disciples’ dirty feet, handles their very
toes, and repeats, “It is all right, believe it or not, to be people.”
Annie
Dillard.
In a
written examination where the students are allotted four hours, it is neither
here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is
up, or uses the entire time. Here, the task is one thing, the time another.
But
when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time
is up. Suppose a man were given the task of entertaining himself for an
entire day, and he finishes as early as noon: Then his speed would not be
meritorious. So it is when life constitutes the task. To be
finished with life before life has finished with one is not to have finished
the task.
Soren
Kierkegaard, Concluding
Unscientific Postscript.
...Christianity
is about water: “Everyone that thirsteth,
come ye to the waters.” It’s about baptism... It’s about full immersion,
about falling into something elemental and wet.
Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking
good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and
fonts, you agree to do something that’s a little sloppy because at the same
time it’s also holy, and absurd. It’s about surrender, giving into all
those things we can’t control; it’s a willingness to let go of balance and
decorum and get drenched.
...in
the Christian experience of baptism, the hope is that when you go under and you
come out, maybe a little disoriented, you haven’t dragged the old day along
behind you. The hope, the belief, is that a new day is upon you
now. A day when you are emboldened to take God at God’s word about
cleanness and protection: “When you passeth through the water, I will be
with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.”
Anne
Lamott, Traveling Mercies,
pp. 231-232.
Christ
did not come to bring a Bible but a Gospel; the Bible came afterward. So,
preach the Gospel.
P.T.
Forsyth
If
Luther sounded the trumpet for reform, Calvin orchestrated the score by which
the Reformation became a part of Western civilization.
Wendell
C. Harden (student in HY101)
Last
sentence of John Donne’s last sermon.: There we leave you in that blessed
dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross.
And
the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the
risk it took to blossom.
Anais
Nin.
...for
Paul, “flesh” referred not to the whole person but to that in us which resists
God...
Countryman,
Dirt, Greed, and Sex, p. 204.
Frantic
orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not
sure that we are doubly sure.
Reinhold
Niebuhr (quoted by George Stephanopolous)
O
Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly
and sweetly movest! Shall I write,
And
not of Thee, through whom my fingers bend
To
hold my quill? Shall they not do thee right?
Of
all the creatures both in sea and land
Only
to Man thou hast made known thy wayes
And
put the penne alone into his hand,
And
made him Secretarie of thy praise...
George Herbert (as quoted by Herbert O’Driscoll in “The
View from the Hill of Mars”)
Man
is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Eugene
O’Neill (as quoted by Anne Lamott in Traveling
Mercies)
The
foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.
Evelyn
Waugh
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the
door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do
us harm.
No, no, it is the three
strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
D.H. Lawrence (quoted by
Anne Lamott)
This
is not He alone
Whom
I have known,
This is all Christs since time began
The
blood of all the dead
His
veins have shed,
For He is God and Ghost and Everyman.
George
Buttrick (quoted in The Book
of Jesus, ed., Calvin Miller, p. 79)
Christ’s
command to love God is not obeyed if it is obeyed as a command.
Augustine
(quoted by Harry Williams in The
True Wilderness, p. 119)
Baptism is the fundamental
sacrament of Christianity: "By one Spirit we were all baptised into
one body" (1 Cor. 12.13). Confirmation appropriates it, the
eucharist presupposes it; ordination authorises the expression of the
priesthood into which all the baptised are incorporated. Baptism
constitutes the ground of our unity -- the unity that exists and cries out to
be realised in shared holy communion. (p. 304)
The baptismal paradigm, as
I understand it, involves a mystical perception of that fundamental ecclesial
reality. It is response to the transcendent mystery of the God who may be
loved but not thought, asThe Cloud of Unknowing puts it. It takes that love of
God in Christ as the central Christian phenomenon, and doctrines and dogmas as
necessary and valid ways of discerning the mystery, provided we never forget
that they are human productions, essentially personal and existential
statements....Instead, through the conflictual process itself -- through
argument, criticism and attempts to understand one another on the baiss of
respect and acceptance -- beliefs may be refined and agreement perhaps
discovered. (p. 310)
We need an acceptance of
the principle (inculcated so often by the classical Anglican divines) that
there are no theological grounds for breaching communion over an issue, such as
the ordination of women to the priesthood or the episcopate, that is not itself
a condition of the church's communion. (p. 311)
All quotations from Paul
Avis, Anglicanism and the
Christian Church (Fortress,
1989)
He comes to us on Sunday
morning and leaves on Tuesday. While he is here, he tells us stories from
the Bible, sings hymns, leads us in prayer. He listens; with all his
being he listens, and does not judge. The disturbed are quieted; the
drunks are calmed; the angry begin to see that there may be ways they can help
themselves. He looks, and he sees; he listens, and he hears. This
alone is an unusual experience for most homeless people: We are used to
being either invisible or an annoyance. He brings dignity into the lives
of those who have lost it. He is like... he is like a small fire that we
warm our hands over. What else can I say?
Laurie King, To Play the Fool, pp. 122-123.
One night a woman dreamed
that she walked into shop. Much to her surprise, she found God working
behind the counter. She asked God, “What do you sell here?”
“Everything your heart desires,” God replied. It was incredible. She
was talking face to face with God. God just told her she could have
anything she desired. “I want peace of mind and love and happiness and
wisdom and freedom from fear”, she told God. Then almost as an
afterthought she added, “Not just for me, but for everyone on earth.” God
smiled, “I think you’ve got me wrong, my dear. We don’t sell fruits
here. Only seeds.”
A Western reporter
interviewed Boris Yeltsin several months ago. When asked what gave him
the courage to stand firm and help ensure the fall of communism in the former
USSR, Yeltsin credited the story he read of Lech Walesa, the electrician who
helped bring democracy to Poland. Similarly, Walesa stated that he was
inspired by reading accounts of the civil rights movement in America led by Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King indicated that he was spurred to action
when he learned of the courage of one woman, Rosa Parks, who simply refused to
sit in the back of the bus. We seldom know the potential of the seed we
sow, but is it possible that the fall of the Soviet Union was in small way
brought about by a black woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery,
Alabama, bus?
“Let
us risk the wildest places lest we go down in comfort and despair.” And “What
is death but a refusal to grow?”
From
“Magellan” a poem by Mary Oliver.
They
know everything. Unfortunately, they don’t know anything else.
Comment
made about graduates of the French hautes
ecoles. Quoted by Henry Kissinger.
Sign
in front of dry cleaners: “Thirty years on the same spot”.
Most
people don’t need discernment; they need courage. They know what to do.
Douglas
Brown, OHC.
People
don’t own what they don’t create.
Myron
Kellner Rogers
People
don’t resist change; they resist being changed.
MKR.
In
living systems the preservation of life motivates change.
MKR.
You
can’t sacrifice yourself until you have a self to sacrifice.
Guy
Lytle.
The
way real work gets done is by breaking the rules.
MKR.
“’I
did it’ says memory; ‘I couldn’t have’, says pride, and remains
relentless. Eventually memory yields.”
Nietszche
Above
me, wind does its best
To
blow leaves off the aspen
Tree
a month too soon. No use,
Wind,
all you succeed in doing
Is
making music, the noise of
failure
growing beautiful.
Bill
Holm
For
me, the Nicene Creed is not a demand for intellectual surrender to a set of
non-negotiable propositions; instead it represents the summary of insights and
experience garnered from the founding centuries of the Church’s history.
John
Polkinghorne, The Faith of a
Physicist, p. 6.
All
bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms are not worth the
least of minds, for it knows them all and itself, too, while bodies know
nothing.
Pascal.
Quoted in Polkinghorne, p. 11.
It is
those who are not seekers who must account for not being so since there are
fundamental questions concerning the existence and order of the universe that
are vitally important to how we shall live and what we shall hope for.
Diogenes
Allen, quoted in Polkinghorne, p. 15.
Man
alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope... Of all evolutionary tools
towards survival, it is the ability to use future tenses of the verb – when,
how did the psyche acquire this monstrous and liberating power? – which I take
to be foremost.
George
Steiner, quoted in Polkinghorne, p. 16.
"When
disappointment occurs, rest assured that God has not let you down.
When
things go wrong and you are disappointed, it is because God is
protecting
the birth of a greater gift for you that God is preparing to be
born."
The
Dalai Lama
There
are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are obviously
absurd, and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a
profound truth.
Niels
Bohr
If I
give food to the poor, they call me a saint. If I ask why the poor do not
have food, they call me a communist.
Archbishop
Helder Camara of Brazil
One
Christmas Eve the telephone rang in the office of the rector of the church in
Washington, DC, that President Franklin Roosevelt attended. “Tell me,”
the voice inquired, “are you holding a Christmas Eve service tonight?”
When advised that there would certainly be a service that evening, the caller
asked, “And do you expect President Roosevelt to attend your church tonight?”
“That,” explained the rector patiently, “I can’t promise. I’m not sure
about the president’s plans for this evening. But I can say that we fully
expect God to be in our church tonight, and we feel secure in the knowledge
that His attendane will attract a reasonably large congregation”.
Kierkegaard
said, “May we be preserved from the blasphemy of men who ‘without being
terrified and afraid in the presence of God... without the trembling which is
the first requirement of adoration... hope to have direct knowledge’”.
Quoted
in Polkinghorne, Faith of a
Physicist, p. 69.
Never
prophesy, especially about the future.
Sam
Goldwyn.
The
further backward you look, the further forward you can see.
Churchill
Capitalism
is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the exact opposite.
Anonymous.
Many
apparently intelligent people in Britain, France, and America felt that “The
regime that was founded in October 1917 [the USSR] was good in spite of the
disasters following its birth, whereas capitalism was bad in spite of the
riches it engendered.”
Francois
Furet, The Passing of an Illusion.
What
I saw was just the wind blowing. It was either the wind or the spirit of
the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but too old to be
surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what
we in fact create.
Michael
Cunningham, A Home at the End
of the World, p. 336.
And
as the smart ship grew
In
stature, grace, and hue,
In
shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien
they seemed to be;
No
mortal eye could see
The
intimate wedding of their later history.
Thomas
Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic”.
Even
the most radical sceptic cannot avoid the simple historical question how this
simple wandering teacher and his outwardly inglorious death exercised such a
tremendous and unique influence that it still remains unsurpassed.
Martin
Hengel, Atonement, p. 72.
The
Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic
darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the
bottom of a deep well.
George
Tyrrell
Gregory of Nazianzus:
What is not assumed is not redeemed.
Grenz explains an important
distinction between two different ways in which that death might be on our
behalf: “In exclusive substitution the suffering a person experiences in
the place of another means that the other need not suffer the same fate.
Inclusive substitution, in contrast, means that the substitute shares the
situation of the others (death in the case of Jesus) and thereby alters that
situation.” [Reason for Hope, p. 121-2] It is the latter idea of a
participatory transformation – not just of death but of alienation from God
(Mark 15.34; 2 Cor. 5.21; Gal. 3.13) –which I find most helpful. Jesus
did not pay a debt, but he redeemed an experience by sharing it.
Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, 138.
The Resurrection is not a
miracle like any other. It is a unique manifestation within this world of
the transition God makes for us out of this way of being into another.
Farrer, Saving Belief, p. 83.
...we
must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for us above, where
eternity is the measure, felicity is the state, angels are the company, the
Lamb is the light, and God is the portion and inheritance.
Jeremy
Taylor, Holy Dying, p. 478
in Selected Works of Jeremy
Taylor.
In
different terrain [Hazel Motes] sees “Jesus move from tree to tree in the back
of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning to him to turn around and come off
into the dark, where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking
on water and not know it”.
Wise
Blood by Flannery O’Connor as quoted in Bruce Modahl,
“Christ-haunted Landscape” (Christian Century, Oct. 13, 1999, p. 963).
"the difference between a believer and a hypocrite is
that a true believer
is ten times more aware of the darkness in his heart than
is a hypocrite.
the hypocrite thinks he is good; the true believer
knows that his heart is
full of darkness and sin."
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections
"Hope despairs, and yet Despair hopes at the same
time; and all that lives is the groaning that cannot be uttered wherewith the
Holy Spirit makes intercession for us, brooding over the waters shrouded in
darkness . . . This no one understands who has not tasted it."
Martin Luther on Psalm 13.
The Beauty of God is the
cause of being of all that is.
Quoted in Sara Maitland’s A Big-Enough God, p. 114.
Simple old-fashioned
intercessory prayer should not be underestimated. Ask God to make you
joyful. Joy is a virtue that we need, and a gift we must be always ready
to receive. One of the best ways of obtaining any gift is to make sure
the giver knows that you want it.... In my experience God has impeccable
manners, that out-of-date virtue of courtesy, and is unlikely to force upon us
any gift we have not made clear that we want. The best way to get any
virtue is almost certainly to pray for it. Pray continually, we are
instructed, pray without ceasing. However it is important to remember
that God has an extremely joyful sense of humor: to pray for joy with an
excess of piety, with a total absence of self-irony and humor is to ask for
trouble.
Maitland, pp. 176-177.
Anyone who believes that new benefits make men of high
station forget old injuries is deceiving himself.
Machiavelli.
Never underestimate the
power of cheap music.
Noel Coward.
A little boy
wandered from his South Dakota home some years ago. The parents couldn't find
him. State police, Boy Scouts, neighbors and others joined in the search. For
three days these hundreds of people moved through the prairie, hoping to find
the boy before he succumbed to the elements. On the morning of the fourth day,
one of the searchers said, "Let us get organized in one long line. We'll
join hands and sweep up and down the prairie until we find the boy. He can't
have gone very far. " They formed a line a quarter of a mile long. They
made an impressive sight as they began to move through the prairie holding
hands. On the third sweep they found the boy. The cold prairie nights had taken
their toll. He was lying dead, in a small ditch behind some brush. Gently the
boy's body was carried to where the mother was waiting. When they put the dead
boy in his mother's arms, there was complete silence for a moment. Then she
looked up and said: "Why didn't you join hands sooner? Why didn't you join
hands sooner?"
Last week, a couple of days after the Smithsonian released its third Hiroshima script, Elie Wiesel was speaking in Washington at the new U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was addressing 120 teenagers from five Middle Eastern countries who had spent a summer session at a Maine camp in the "Seeds of Peace" program. A Palestinian boy in the program minimized the Jews' Holocaust under the Nazis and said bitterly, thinking of his own people, "There are many holocausts!"
Last week, a couple of days after the Smithsonian released its third Hiroshima script, Elie Wiesel was speaking in Washington at the new U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was addressing 120 teenagers from five Middle Eastern countries who had spent a summer session at a Maine camp in the "Seeds of Peace" program. A Palestinian boy in the program minimized the Jews' Holocaust under the Nazis and said bitterly, thinking of his own people, "There are many holocausts!"
Elie Wiesel embraced the boy and told him, "Don't
compare! Don't compare! All suffering is intolerable."
--Lance Morrow, "Hiroshima and the Time Machine," Time, 19 September 1994, 94.
"If
we allow pain more of our attention than it requires, we miss some
opportunities for
joy."
Anonymous
Trying to teach the
meaning of "confession," a Sunday school teacher wanted to make sure
the class had understood her point. She asked, "Can anyone tell me what
you must do before you obtain forgiveness of sin?"
There was some silence, broken by a small voice piping up from the back of the room, "You gotta sin!"
There was some silence, broken by a small voice piping up from the back of the room, "You gotta sin!"
Within a few minutes
the entire community, all holding candles, rallied to keep watch with Sister
John. Their presence turned night into day, midnight sun at the end of
the earth. Nothing was said, but the message was clear: a Sister might
feel lost, but she was never alone.
When she first became a contemplative, Sister John had
envisioned a relationship to “souls in need”. The foundation of religious
life, after all, is a commitment to look beyond oneself. She prayed for
the souls of the world every day, and assumed her efforts made a
difference. When it came to her Sisters, however—who were also souls in
need, but whose troubles could not be visualized away so easily – she had been
stingier, more guarded. She had never really done anything for them that
didn’t serve her own interests.
Yet here they were, staying up all night with her so she
wouldn’t have to struggle alone. She had failed to discern God’s will in the
matter of whether or not to treat her disorder, but she had seen today how her
seizures could become a burden to her Sisters. To give up her ecstasies
for their sake would be, if not a spiritual decision, at least an honorable
one. She looked around the room and tried to etch the scene in memory,
praying that whatever her own future might be, God would reward her Sisters for
their generosity of spirit. She rose, bowed to them as a signal that her
vigil was over, and returned to the infirmary.
Mark Salzman, Lying Awake (2000), pp. 142-143.
For centuries the
Catholics have spoken of the “vocation of wedding,” the idea being, I think,
that one who undertakes an intimacy with another mortal will necessarily
confront many of the same struggles and confusions as the priest or nun who
takes a vow with God: You will be seen. You will be known, more
plainly than you can ever know yourself, and you will be ferried into regions
that offer no comfort, no hiding place. The essence of the other will now
and always be mystery – but to attend to the relationship faithfully you must
become real in it, do your most to surrender the self and its defenses; and you
will do this a dozen, two dozen, three dozen, and more times every day as you
stand naked and your shortcomings and vulnerabilities are exposed.
Religious
melancholy, love melancholy: in both cases the root of my problem was
fear, faithlessness. How could I claim trust and faith in a God who shall
remain ever unseen if I could not put trust and faith in this woman whom I saw
firsthand at all hours, and who appeared eminently trustworthy? So the
specific remedy for my love melancholy would be the same as my remedy for
religious melancholy: to have faith, and let that move me beyond my
initial, defensive impulses and reactiveness. To bear this in mind, even
as I forgot it dozens or hundreds of times each day: the self is the
least of it.
Jeffrey Smith, Where the Roots Reach for Water (1999), pp. 243-244.
"Man,
my friends is frail and foolish. We have all been told that grace is to
be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness we imagine God's
grace to be limited..."
"But we are wrong; grace is infinite. Grace
demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and
acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace makes no conditions and singles out
none of us in particular."
From
“Babette’s Feast” by Isak Dinesen
DEAR sisters, dear
brothers, two short months ago, when told of his terminal cancer, the Cardinal
was, at first, tempted to feel 'if only . . . if only I could start all over
again, I would be a much better monk, a much better abbot, a much better
bishop.
'But then I thought' - these are now his own words - 'then
I thought how much better if I can come before God when I die, not to say thank
you that I was such a good monk, good abbot, good bishop, but rather God be merciful
to me a sinner. 'For if I come empty-handed then I will be ready to receive
God's gift. God, be merciful to me a sinner.'
(The Rt. Rev. John Crowley, Bp of Middlesborough, at the
funeral of Basil Cardinal Hume.)
There's a story
about Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile, who was visiting his family's
ancestral village in Ireland. Two trustees of the local hospital found out he
was there, and managed to get in to see him. They talked Ford into giving the
hospital five thousand dollars (this was the 1930's, so five thousand dollars
was a great deal of money). The next morning, at breakfast, he opened his daily
newspaper to read the banner headline: "American Millionaire Gives Fifty
Thousand to Local Hospital." Ford wasted no time in summoning the two
hospital trustees. He waved the newspaper in their faces. "What does this
mean?" he demanded.
The trustees apologized profusely. "Dreadful
error," they said. They promised to get the editor to print a retraction
the very next day, declaring that the great Henry Ford had given not fifty
thousand, but only five. Hearing this, Ford offered them another forty-five
thousand, under one condition: that the trustees would erect a marble arch at
the new hospital entrance, and place upon it a plaque that read, "I walked
among you and you took me in." (1) The shrewdness of these two trustees
reminds me very much of the steward in today's gospel. They took an opportunity
that was presented to them and used it to their best advantage. They used the
supposed error of the newspaper headline to put Henry Ford in a position where
he did not want to look like a cheap-skate. So their quick thinking brought in
a considerable amount of extra income for the hospital. From a sermon by Deacon Sil Galvan
as received on the PRCL-L preaching list.
You are the children
of our fantasies of form,
our wish to carve a larger cave of light,
our dream to perfect the ladder of genes and climb
our wish to carve a larger cave of light,
our dream to perfect the ladder of genes and climb
its rungs to the
height of human possibility,
to a stellar efflorescence beyond all injury
and disease, with minds as bright as newborn suns
to a stellar efflorescence beyond all injury
and disease, with minds as bright as newborn suns
and bodies which
leave our breathless mirrors stunned.
Forgive us if we failed to imagine your loneliness
in the midst of all that ordinary excellence,
Forgive us if we failed to imagine your loneliness
in the midst of all that ordinary excellence,
if we failed to
understand how much harder
it would be to build the bridge of love
between such splendid selves, to find the path
it would be to build the bridge of love
between such splendid selves, to find the path
of humility among
the labyrinth of your abilities,
to be refreshed without forgetfulness,
and weave community without the threads of need.
to be refreshed without forgetfulness,
and weave community without the threads of need.
Forgive us if you
must re-invent our flaws
because we failed to guess the simple fact
that the best lives must be less than perfect.
because we failed to guess the simple fact
that the best lives must be less than perfect.
(“Letter to
genetically engineered super humans” by Fred Dings)
Looking at Stars
The God of curved
space, the dry
God is not going to help us, but the son
Whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe
God is not going to help us, but the son
Whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe
Jane Kenyon
People are often
unreasonable,
illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest
and frank,
people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years
building,
someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity
and happiness,
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do
today,
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the
best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
Anonymous
It is our task to
begin the work, not to complete it (Talmud)
"Do you not see
how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and
make it a soul?"
John Keats
(1795-1821),
At sixteen, the
adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely
knows that other beings also suffer. (Rousseau)
If God does not
exist, [then] human beings and human history can have no other purpose than the
purpose they choose to give themselves, which -- in practice -- is likely to
mean the purpose which those impose who have the power to impose it (Frederick
Copleston, SJ, from his famous BBC debate with Bertrand Russell (slightly
paraphrased))
Should it ever befall me, and it could happen today, to be a
victim of the terrorism swallowing up all foreigners here, I would like my
community, my church, my family to remember that my life was given to God and
to this country; that the unique Master of all life was no stranger to this
brutal departure and that my death is the same as so many other violent ones
consigned to the apathy of oblivion.
I’ve lived enough to know I am complicit in the evil that, alas,
prevails over the world and the evil that will smite me blindly. I could never
desire such a death; I could never feel gladdened that these people I love be
accused randomly of my murder. I know the contempt felt for the people here
indiscriminately, and I know how Islam is distorted by a certain Islamism. This
country and Islam, for me, are something different. They’re a body and a soul.
My death, of course, will quickly vindicate those who called me naïve or
idealistic, but they must know that I will be freed of a burning curiosity, and
God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with him his
children of Islam as he sees them. This thank-you which encompasses my entire
life includes you, of course, friends of yesterday and today and you, too,
friend of the last minute, who knew not what you were doing. Yes, to you, as
well, I address this thank you and this farewell, which you envisaged. May we
meet again, happy thieves in paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us
both. Amen. Inshallah.
A monk about to be killed by jihadist terrorists in the
movie, Of Gods and Men.
“Your
task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi
― Rumi
The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still
on my list.
If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.
5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.
6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in
a fruit salad.
8. Evening news is where they begin with 'Good Evening,' and then
proceed to tell you why it isn't.
9. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is
research.
10. A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train
stops. On my desk, I have a work station.
11. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted
paychecks.
12. Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, 'In
case of emergency, notify:' I put 'DOCTOR.'
13. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming
you.
14. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street
with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.
15. Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a
successful man is usually another woman.
16. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.
17. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to
skydive twice.
18. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live
with.
19. There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so
they can't get away.
20. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.
21. You're never too old to learn something stupid.
22. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you
hit the target.
23. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
24. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
25. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more
than standing in a garage makes you a car.
Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It
doesn’t work as well. (Allan Meltzer)
Old Age
The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er;
So calm are we when passions are no more.
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.
The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
So calm are we when passions are no more.
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.
The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
Edmund Waller
