i felt a cleaving in my mind

The Lost Thought

I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.

[Emily Dickinson]

the cure for apathy

"Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension."

[John Dos Passos]

i am not afraid of the truth

"There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered."

[Robert Louis Stevenson, Learning to Write 134 (1888; repr. 1920).]

no matter how many waverings you may have

“Trust him. And when you have done that, you are living the life of grace. No matter what happens to you in the course of that trusting - no matter how many waverings you may have, no matter how many suspicions that you have bought a poke with no pig in it, no matter how much heaviness and sadness your lapses, vices, indispositions, and bratty whining may cause you - you believe simply that Somebody Else, by his death and resurrection, has made it all right, and you just say thank you and shut up. The whole slop-closet full of mildewed performances (which is all you have to offer) is simply your death; it is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn't going to flunk you because your faith isn't so hot. You can fail utterly, therefore, and still live the life of grace. You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.” 

[Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace]

cast your deadly doing down

Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing; all was done
Long, long ago.
Till to Jesus’ work you cling
By a simple faith,
“Doing” is a deadly thing—
“Doing” ends in death.
Cast your deadly “doing” down—
Down at Jesus’ feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete. 

[James Proctor]

crucial eccentricity

"A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do.  There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do." 

[Frederick Buechner]

she must and shall go free

Mercy speaks by Jesus' blood
Hear and sing, ye sons of God
Justice satisfied indeed
Christ has full atonement made
Jesus' blood speaks loud and sweet
Here all deity can meet
And without a jarring voice
Welcome Zion to rejoice
All her debts were cast on me
And she must and shall go free
Peace of conscience, peace with God
We obtain through Jesus' blood
Jesus' blood speaks solid rest
We believe and we are blessed
All her debts were cast on me
And she must and shall go free
Should the law against her roar
Jesus' blood still speaks with power
All her debts were cast on me
And she must and shall go free
All her debts were cast on me
And she must and shall go free

[Derek Webb, "Mercy Speaks"]

no maverick molecule

"There is no maverick molecule meandering outside God's control anywhere in the universe..." 

[from Proof: Finding Freedom through the Intoxicating Joy of Irresistible Grace by Daniel Montgomery & Timothy Paul Jones]

unforgiving, unforgiven

"An unforgiving heart is an unforgiven heart." 

[Timothy Keller]

idolorum fabricam

"Hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam."

"Human nature is, so to speak, a workshop that's continually crafting idols."

[John Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis, 1:11:8)

do you think that i count the days?

"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk." 

Jean-Paul Sartre

never finished

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." 

[Italo Calvino]

comforting judgment

Q&A 52 from the Heidelberg Catechism

Q. How does Christ's return "to judge the living and the dead" comfort you?
A. In all distress and persecution, with uplifted head I confidently await the very judge who has already offered himself to the judgment of God in my place and removed the whole curse from me.

1 Luke 21:28; Rom. 8:22-25; Phil. 3:20-21; Titus 2:13-14

Beautiful Scotland

Beautiful Scotland from John Duncan on Vimeo.

I want to go.

absorbing and voluptuous

"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought." 

[Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Gossip on Romance", 1882]

To breathe freely in the open air! Oh, what joy!

This one song from Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, makes it worth it.

"To breathe freely in the open air!
Oh, what joy!
Up here, up here alone is life;
the dungeon is a tomb."

everyone who believes thinks

“No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable… Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought…. Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking.” 

[Augustine]

no corrupting talk

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear."  

[Ephesians 4:29]

to speak a few reasonable words

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

the overflow of joy

"Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others."  

[John Piper, Desiring God]

making mud pies in a slum

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and to earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I suggest that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

 [C.S. Lewis in a 1941 sermon]

when i think i might fall apart

But Frank put it best when he said,

"You can't plan on the heart"

Those words keep me on my feet

when I think I might just fall apart

Oh, there's nothing more to it
I just get through it

[First Aid Kit, "To a Poet"]

gifted or insane

"Hence, the poetic art belongs either to a naturally gifted person or an insane one..."

[Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 17, Section 1455a]

some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing

"I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing."

[T.S. Eliot, "Preludes IV"]

it's a question of making your fortune in this world, or in the next

"If you dream of paying court to men of power, your eternal damnation is guaranteed. You could make a fortune, but you'd have to tread on the poor, flatter the deputy governor of the district, and the mayor, and all other men of substance, and assist them in their passions. For a layman, such conduct, which the world calls knowing how to live, is not incompatible with salvation. But with the likes of us, a choice has to be made: it's a question of making your fortune in this world, or in the next. There's no middle ground."

[Father Chélan in The Red and the Black]

you yourself

"It is a painful thing
to look at your own trouble and known
that you yourself and no one else has made it."

[Tecmessa in Sophocles' Ajax]

love endures all things

you can never please a false god

"You can never please a false god."

[Timothy Keller from "The Church Before the Watching World" sermon]

and that's a bad thing?

"'Really,' [Father Pirard] thought, 'here is exactly that fatal tendency to Protestantism, for which I've always scolded Chélan: deep, deep knowledge --almost too deep -- of the Scriptures.'"

[from Stendhal's The Red and the Black]

boredom grows and grows

"Boredom grows and grows. The only pleasures left are reading and farming."

[Stendhal, The Red and the Black]

prone to wander, Lord, I feel it

"Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.
Prone to leave the God I love."

[Robert Robinson, "Come Thou Fount"]

which one among our men are fakes?

"O Zeus, you've given us the clear criteria to test
if gold is counterfeit: so why is there no stamp of guarantee
marked on the human body to discriminate which ones
among our men are fakes?"

[Medea in Euripides' Medea]

the turbid ebb and flow of human misery

In tutorial class today we spent about an hour discussing this poem, dissecting it. I fell in 

love with it.

Now, back to Stendhal and a margarita.

--

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

rather in things done

"It is not in words
that I should wish my life to be distinguished,
but rather in things done." 

[Theseus to Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus]

no old age for a man's anger

"There is no old age for a man's anger."

[Creon to Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus in Colonus]

sing, o barren one, who did not bear

"Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;
break forth into singing and cry aloud,
you who have not been in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than the children of her who is married," says the LORD...
Fear not, for you will not be ashamed;
be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced;
for you will forget the shame of your youth,
and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.
For your Maker is your husband,
the LORD of hosts is his name;
and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
The God of the whole earth he is called.
For the LORD has called you
like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit,
like a wife of youth when she is cast off,
says your God.
For a brief moment I deserted you,
but with great compassion I will gather you.
In overflowing anger for a moment
I hid my face from you,
but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,"
says the LORD, your Redeemer. 

[from Isaiah 54]

arctic swell

I shall have to try this in August. I jokes...

i rest my weary soul in Thee

O Love that will not let me go

I rest my weary soul in Thee;

I give Thee back the life I owe,

That in Thine ocean depths its flow

May richer, fuller be.

nothing almost sees miracles but misery

"Nothing almost sees miracles
But misery."  

[Kent in King Lear, Act II, Scene 2]

love, and be silent

George William Joy's Cordelia

"What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent."

[Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear]

you have overstepped your bounds

"O law! You would climb up into the kingdom of my conscience, and there reign and condemn me for sin, and would take from me the joy of my heart which I have by faith in Christ, and drive me to desperation, that I might be without hope. You have overstepped your bounds. Know your place! You are a guide for my behavior, but you are not Savior and Lord of my heart. For I am baptized, and through the Gospel am called to receive righteousness and eternal life…So trouble me not! For I will not allow you, so intolerable a tyrant and tormentor, to reign in my heart and conscience—for they are the seat and temple of Christ the Son of God, who is the king of righteousness and peace, and my most sweet savior and mediator. He shall keep my conscience joyful and quiet in the sound and pure doctrine of the Gospel, through the knowledge of this passive and heavenly righteousness." 

[Martin Luther]

this persuasion is not from him who calls you

"You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you."  

[Galatians 5:7-8]

well! I've got to dance.

"Since I'm a mere woman, no different from the others, well! I've got to dance." 

[the character Mathilde de La Mole in Stendhal's The Red and the Black]

beat at this gate

"O Lear, Lear, Lear!
(strikes his head)
Beat at this gate that let thy folly in
And thy dear judgment out!"

[King Lear in Shakespeare's King Lear, Act I, Scene 4]

love creates equalities

"Love creates equalities; it doesn't search for them."

[Corneille, as quoted in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Part I, Chapter 14]

for such as we are made of

"Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we:
For such as we are made of, such we be." 

[Shakespeare, Twelfth Night]

woe to anyone who touches it

"The present age, oh Lord! It's like the Ark of the Covenant. Woe to anyone who touches it."  

[Diderot, as quoted in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Part I, Chapter 27]

nothing but itself

"Real passion always thinks of nothing but itself."  

[from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Part II, Chapter 1]

change into a tree

"Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone." 

[Czesław Miłosz]

freends everych oother moot obeye, if they wol longe holden compaignye

"For o thyng, sires, saufly dar I seye,
That freendes everych oother moot (must) obeye,
If they wol longe holden compaignye.
Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye.
Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon
Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon!
Love is a thyng as any spirit free.
Wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee,
And nat to been constreyned as a thral (slave);
And so doon men, if I sooth seyen shal.
Looke who that is moost pacient in love,
He is at his avantage al above.
Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn,
For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn,
Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne.
For every word men may nat chide or pleyne.
Lerneth to suffre, or elles, so moot I goon (I swear),

Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wole or noon;
For in this world, certein, ther no wight is
That he ne dooth or seith somtyme amys.
Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun,
Wyn, wo, or chaungynge of complexioun
Causeth ful ofte to doon amys or speken.
On every wrong a man may nat be wreken (avenged).
After the tyme moste be temperaunce
To every wight (person) that kan on governaunce (knows about governance)."

[from Chaucher's The Canterbury Tales, The Franklin's Tale)

The tongue of man is a twisty thing

But come, let us know longer stand here talking of these things like children, here in the space between the advancing armies. For there are harsh things enough that could be spoken against us both, a ship of hundred locks could not carry the burden. The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind, the range of words is wide and their variance. The sort of thing you say is the thing that will be said to you. 

[Aineias to Achilleus in The Iliad by Homer]

when two go together

"When two go together, one of them at least looks forward

to see what is best; a man by himself, though he be careful, 

still has less mind in him than two, and his wits have less weight."

[from Homer's The Iliad, Diomedes speaks about the need for a co-spy in his  assigned task / Book X, lines 224-226]

expose thyself to feel what wretches feel

During a storm, King Lear: 

"This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in...
Poor naked wretches, whereso'ever you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From such seasons as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may's shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just." 

[from Shakespeare's King Lear, Act III, Lines 27-41]

the generation of leaves on the ground

"As is the generation of leaves on the ground, so is that of humanity." 

[Glaukos to Diomedes on the battlefield near Troy, from Homer's The Iliad, Book VI, Line 146]

licking honey off a thorn

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”

[Louis Adamic]

the reader's soul

"A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sounds is the reader's soul."

[Marie-Henri Beyle / Stendahl]

brief and bitter / few and evil

"Then Joseph brought in Jacob his father and stood him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said to Jacob, "how many are the days of the years of your life?" And Jacob said to Pharaoh, "The days of the years of my sojourning are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life..." 

[Genesis 47:7-9]

"Thetis answered [Apollo] then letting the tears fall: "Ah me, my child. Your birth was bitterness. Why did I raise you? If only you could sit by your ships untroubled, not weeping, since indeed your lifetime is to be short, of no length. Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter beyond all men's." 

[from The Iliad by Homer (Book I:413-418)]

breaks the spirit

"A gentle tongue is a tree of life,
but perverseness in it breaks the spirit." 

[Proverbs 15:4]

to gray hairs I will carry you

"In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall be justified and shall glory...
Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been born by me from before your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save." 

[Isaiah 45:25; 46:3-4]

to win us to our harm

"And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths..."

[Lord Banquo in Shakespeare's Macbeth]

Biscuit by Jane Kenyon

The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
like a priest offering the host.

I can't bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.

[Jane Kenyon]

it's worse to judge

"In our day it’s worse to judge evil than to do evil." (Os Guinness)

anything less

"O my soul, thou art capable of enjoying God; woe to thee if thou art contented with anything less than God."  

[Frances de Sales]

a divine choice

"Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are...a divine choice."  

[Henry Nouwen]

become smaller

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it!"

[G.K. Chesterton]

more outstanding, more praised

"If you want to experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation, pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself." 

[Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines]

carrying on with your conspiracies, filling the room with a sense of unease

If you come to find me affable
Build a replica for me
Would the idea to you be laughable
Of a pale facsimile?

So will you come to burn an effigy?
It should keep the flies away
And when you long to burn this effigy
It should be of the hours that slip away, slip away

It could be you, it could be me
Working the door, drinking for free
Carrying on with your conspiracies
Filling the room with a sense of unease

Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone
Like the words of a man who's spent a little too much time alone
When one has spent too much time alone

So will you come to burn my effigy?
It should keep the flies away
If you long to burn an effigy
It should be of a man whose has lost his way, slips away

It could be you, it could be me
Working the door, drinking for free
Carrying on with your conspiracies
Filling the room with a sense of unease

Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone
Like the words of a man who's spent a little too much time alone
When one has spent too much time alone

[Andrew Bird, "Effigy"]

like waifs clustering around a blazing fire

"Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about [the Bible], holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God." 

[Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place]

Christ in the parent, in the child

"Christ incarnated in the parent is the only hope of incarnating Christ in the child..." - Ann Voskamp

what you do with your solitude

"Your religion is what you do with your solitude." 

[William Temple]

it's either a reality or a sham

"How can you cope with the end a world and the beginning of another one? How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube, or the sea into a bottle? How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that the fire has become flesh, that life itself came to life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the more devastating disclosure of the deepest reality in the world, or it’s a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful play-acting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between..."

- N.T. Wright

a sprinting, shoving age

"Our age is not the age of the meditative man. It's a sprinting, shoving age. Daily, new antidotes for contemplation spring into being and leap out from store counters."  

[Norman Cousins]

but behold, bloodshed

"For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!"

Isaiah 5:7

act as if you are living in a temple

"To be reverent is to act as if you are living in a temple."

good in conversation

"If you want to become brilliant in prayer, you have to become really good in conversation with people. You have to care about people. You have to chat to people. You have to connect with people in the messy place where their life is. And it's in those times when you give yourself to those conversations that compassion can rise up and take hold of you, and your compassion will cause you to pray properly over someone."

[Graham Cooke] 

they've got the right idea, that lot

"Never says no, that Alyoshka [the Baptist], whatever you ask him to do. If everybody in the world was like him, I'd be the same. Help anybody who asked me. Why not? They've got the right idea, that lot." 

[from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]

debate about art in the Gulag

"'Yes, but art isn't what you do, it's how you do it.' 

Kh-123 reared up and chopped at the table with his hand. 

'I don't give a damn how you do it if it doesn't awaken good feelings in me!'"

[from Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]

for I, except you entrall me, never shall be free

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 

[John Donne]

like bitter sweets we suck on endlessly

"Most of us have half-a-dozen or so favorite anxieties, like bitter sweets we suck on endlessly. We would be frightened to be deprived of them. Jesus challenges us to go beyond the fear of letting go of anxiety, the fear we have of peace itself." 

[Laurence Freeman]

contagious Christ-focus

"Your goal is always to make your Christ-focus contagious – to just one person."

[Ann Voskamp, from "The Real Truth about Boring Men -- and the Women Who Live with Them: Redefining Boring"]

through what he suffered

"Although [Jesus] was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered." 

Hebrews 5:8

the dark chaos of our inner being

"In the morning I will stand and see my God, who sheds the light of salvation on my face, who will breathe life even into our mortal bodies through the Spirit who dwells in us and has been mercifully hovering over the dark chaos of our inner being."  

[Augustine, Confessions, Book XIII]

Our true place is where we find rest.

...Why only of [the Holy Spirit] who alone is said to be your Gift? Because, I think, in your Gift we find rest, and there we enjoy you. Our true place is where we find rest. We are borne toward it by love, and it is your good Spirit who lifts up our sunken nature from the gates of death. In goodness of will is our peace. A body gravitates to its proper place by its own weight. This weight does not necessarily drag it downward, but pulls it tot he place proper to it: thus fire tends upward, a stone downward. Drawn by their weight, things seek their rightful places. If oil is poured into water, it will rise to the surface, but if water is poured onto oil it will sink below the oil; drawn by their weight, things seek their rightful places. They are not at rest as long as they are disordered, but once brought to order they find their rest. Now, my weight is my love, and wherever I am carried, it is this weight that carries me. Your Gift sets us afire and we are borne upward; we catch his flame and up we go. In our hearts we climb those upward paths, singing the songs of ascent. By your fire, your beneficent fire, are we inflamed, because we are making our way up to the peace of Jerusalem. For I rejoiced when I was told, 'We are going to the Lord's house.' There shall a good will find us a place, that we may have no other desire but to abide there for ever."  

[Augustine, Confessions]

choice, not chance

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” 

[Aristotle]

I the LORD have created it.

"Shower, O heavens, from above,
and let the clouds rain down righteousness;
let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit;
let the earth cause them both to sprout;
I the LORD have created it."

Isaiah 45:8

what we would prefer not to talk about

 I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

[Rick Moody]

value grief, sacrifice, weakness, and exclusion

they never lose a minute

“Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

[V.S. Pritchett]

10 Resolutions for Mental Health

Andy Goldsworthy

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me. 

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: "There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing." 

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood. 

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do. 

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work. 

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic" existence. 

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder." 

8. I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music. 

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now. 

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

 [Ten Resolutions from a lecture by Dr. Clyde Kirby, Source: Desiring God]

the huge solace of thinking that...we are not going to be judged

"Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder, we are not going to be judged." 

[Czeslaw Milosz]

what I am seeking is a life of happiness

Bookmark by my amazingly talented friend Amanda Tanner.

Check out her Etsy shop at Let's All Make Believe.

your maker is your husband

"As we have been saying all month the natural tendency of the human heart is to take good things into ultimate things, and in ancient cultures and nonwestern traditional cultures of today the family thing is the ultimate thing. it is what we have been calling, essentially, an idol. and therefore, women who don't have children because they aren't married or can't have children because of some physical impediment felt worthless and were regarded as worthless. so if you want to further the example of that you can go into the book of Genesis where Rachel the wife of Jacob is seeking to have children and can't have children and she says, 'Give me children, or I will die!' And that about sums it up in those cultures. Now some of you saying,  I know about this: those ancient cultures really oppressed women. And you're right, but I'm glad you brought that up actually... Why do you think that in those cultures women were not troubled with eating disorders at all? The point is that all cultures are fallen. And that all cultures oppress because here is what they do: every single culture put in front of men and women certain objects and says, 'You don't have them you don't have worth! You don't have them, you don't have significance! If you don't have them, your existence isn't justified! You must have them!' Ancient and traditional cultures have collective idols: you have to have a family.  

Modern western culture has individualistic idols. Modern cultures say that your worth is completely dependent upon your individual assets: looks, career, money. If you don't have that, you're nothing. When Rachel says, 'Give me children, or I die!' she is saying childlessness means psychological and social death. It's very telling. If you build your identity on anything more than God, and you fail to get it, it's psychological and social death. And every culture that ever existed and and exists today is telling you to build your identity on something. Therefore, every culture is going to oppress you and crush you into the ground because every culture is cooperating with a part of our heart that wants to be its on Savior and Lord and to justify itself. And it's almost impossible when everybody else is going after these objects to not go along with them and to not be just as enslaved and crushed as everyone else in the culture. I say almost impossible because God says there's a way out. There's a way to emotional and inner freedom and cultural freedom.... He says, Your maker is your husband. Your maker is your husband. Your maker is your husband." 

- Tim Keller

other ways to proclaim the good news

"The Bible does clearly teach the right of property, but both the Old Testament and the New Testament put a tremendous stress on the compassionate use of that property. If at each place where the employer was a Bible-believing Christian the world could see that less profit was being taken so that the workers would have appreciably more than the 'going rate' of pay, the gospel would have been better proclaimed throughout the whole world than if the profits were the same as the world took and then large endowments were given to Christian schools, missions, and other projects. This is not to minimize the centrality of preaching the gospel to the whole world, nor to minimize missions; it is to say that the other is also a way to proclaim the good news." 

[Francis Schaeffer]

My sin has been erased. I'll never be the same.

[Citizens, "Made Alive"]

only men sit down to think about what is important and not urgent

"In the first place, [men] think about problems that there is absolutely no need for them to solve so far as their biological needs, their struggle for survival, are concerned: the problems of mathematics, the problems of philosophy, the problems of any of the theoretical or speculative sciences. And in the second place, the manner in which they think about those problems is quite different. An animal, when thinking about or solving a problem, is active. He uses his senses, uses his limbs, runs around. But a man thinks in a different manner. You all I’m sure have the image of the human thinker. It is given us by that statue of Rodin’s which is here in San Francisco, Le Penseur. If you think about that famous statue, I want you to notice something. There is the posture of human thought. And what you see about that posture is intense bodily inactivity. Only men sit down to think about what is important and not urgent."

[Mortimer Adler, How to Think about the Great Ideas] 

Aristotle

faster than death

"It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death." - Socrates, Apology

many sacred veils

"We cannot be enlightened by the divine rays except they be hidden within the covering of many sacred veils." - Dionysius

the tree of life to all, but onely me

"O all ye who passe by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;
The tree of life to all, but onely me..." 

[George Herbert]

in the morning it's always Leah

"Most people if they really learn to look into their own heart would know that they do want and want acutely something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love or first think of some foreign country or first take up some subject that excites us are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can ever really satisfy. I am not speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or failures of holidays and so on. I’m speaking of the very best possible ones. There is always something we have grasped at. There’s always something in that first moment of longing but fades away in the reality. The spouse may be a good spouse. The scenery has been excellent. It turned out to be a good job. But it’s evaded us. In the morning it’s always Leah."  

[C.S. Lewis]