Somewhere in us there is a need to believe in miracles. The most cynical, the most crass: even he will get teary-eyed watching A Christmas Carol, seeing Scrooge turn from his ways and saving Tiny Tim. It is something fundamental in our souls, that we imagine that the most horrible situations can turn on a dime, that courage can suddenly assert itself on a lifelong coward, that wine can come from water and the multitude fed. On some level, we require that the immutable laws of happenstance bend, or even break, just for a little while, just for a moment, and another order impose itself upon the universe: where nothing is impossible while the spirit rests here, where all is as it was meant to be, and heaven touches down to grace us with its fantastic hand.

I think it may be that the child in us is still there, the one who always believed in magic. It is the innocence in us that never died, and I think never will, that wants to know that miracles are possible — hope against hope, that such phenomena are somehow possible. And perhaps the implicit order of a miracle: maybe it indeed need not break any law of physics; maybe it is in actuality built into such laws, and this belief we have belie not any foolishness on our parts. And really, if we look around, here and now, in every corner, there is magic all around. We don’t notice that miracles happen every day simply because they happen every day. Maybe that goes into the equation, too: to believe in the miraculous is just noticing, subconsciously, what goes on everywhere….

A basic principle in the interpretation of the Bible is that one must first ask what a given Scripture was intended to mean to the people for whom it was originally written; only then is the interpreter free to ask what meaning it has for Christians today. Failure to ask this primary question and to investigate the historical setting of Scripture have prevented many Christians from coming to a correct understanding of some parts of the Bible. Nowhere is this more true than in respect to the last book in the Bible. Here, there has been a singular lack of appreciation for the historical background of the book; the book has been interpreted as if it were primarily written for the day in which the expositor lives (which is usually thought to be the end time), rather than in terms of what it meant to the first-century Christians of the Roman province of Asia for whom it was originally written. This has resulted in all sorts of grotesque and fantastic conclusions of which the author of the Revelation and its early recipients never would have dreamed.

Where will you be at the end of the world? What will you do?
For such a time gives you no more casual moments to repent….
How in faith, though, might one be surprisingly prepared for it….

The future is here. Try not to miss it.

I am a child of the future. That is how I feel, at least sometimes: I look and see how the technology moves me, and I move the technology, how far flung the advances that have occurred even just in my lifetime have been. Interesting how, though, everyone’s yesteryear vision of the future was how outreaching that technology was going to be, and yet, how different, how inward it all went, how compactified the future turned out. No cities in space, but instead, the internet, by which you can sit anywhere and the whole world can appear on a screen. Just a little observation, this all is. Having missed the sixties, I would have to say that this is my high and beautiful wave, and I know that it is not always so high, and not always so beautiful, but it never was in the past, either. But something to ride: it’s a trip, man. Far out. Groovy and a half.

Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights

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Lord, let this fire in me not die until I forge something from its heat. Nor let it consume me, so that I have nothing left when it burns out. This fire — I know not from where it came, for I was sleeping before its flames caught hold; I remember not the days when I was not within its steady burn (before it is like a memory of another life, another world, irreal in quality and less substantial than a passing dream). This fire: may it be directed toward the good: I know my finite means of discernment cannot see all ends, so I may only ask this of you, Lord, that none are scorched along its path. And blessed Savior, may this fire not lift me to any false height, that I may think somehow I am more graced than the next human being — for there are some who have held the darkness at bay with the most meager of candles, while I, instead, have wasted much light. Let it be that I not have wasted it all; and let me not have burned in vain. Amen.

Hate is not the opposite of love — love has no opposite. Love, if anything, is the opposite of every bad thing there is.

Threshold

I have stood as if at the threshold of an arbitrary infinity,
with accelerated eyes, gazing instantaneously
at the epiphenomena of the Physics.
Dreams do not rush so, hopes are never this fast:
I race headlong against Death, and I know I shall lose in the end,
but let’s see, now, how far I may cheat him —
for he exacts the same fare of everyone, however much
or little you have paid in your living. Life, I think,
is hurried along in mostly needless fashion,
in mostly heedless fashion, in mostly
deedless fashion, much ado about the ado, and I wonder
as if I am the first one to ever wonder, and will be the last one,
then forget what I was wondering about….
Here I stand, just for this moment, deciding on eternity
by a toss of the coin — yet somehow, impossibly,
there is meaning in it all: this life is sweet
even when it is sour, and in all the racing we do
we accomplish things we are meant to. And I sleep
as if I were the first and the last ever to do so,
and then I wake, forgetting all the dreaming I have done.

It is in the deepest dark of a countryside night where one can see best the blazing of the myriad stars. Such is a lesson of life: that one must brave the black of blindness to see most clearly what the heavens above us hold. For it can be said of our frail faiths — that seem about to break under a stiff wind — there have been such saints that have been able to summon the power of an archangel with less. It just slips our thoughts so easily that the Lord is everywhere, I think, even in the darkest of the unholy places in this world. Do not forget that you are a child of God, and you do not go unarmed into the valley of the shadow of death. The will of God follows, and you, my friend, should fear no evil therefore….

Death is the one secret that is shared by everyone.

Faith is the mystery nearest to us: a breath that can move mountains.

He who understands is often himself misunderstood.

The sound of a thought sometimes makes the heart stop to listen.

He who knows nothing is one better than he who knows it all.

If life were fair, we’d complain about the monotony.

A broken heart, in love, is learning the first words of the vocabulary.

You can always ask why.

Lord of all pots and pans and things, since I’ve no time to be
A saint by doing lovely things, or watching late with Thee,
Or dreaming in the dawn-light, or storming Heaven’s gates,
Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.

Although I must have Martha’s hands, I have a Mary mind,
And when I black the boots and shoes, Thy sandals, Lord, I find.
I think of how they trod the earth, what time I scrub the floor:
Accept this meditation, Lord, I haven’t time for more.

Warm all the kitchen with Thy love, and light it with Thy peace;
Forgive me all my worrying, and make my grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give men food, in room or by the sea,
Accept this service that I do — I do it unto Thee.

– Cecily Rosemary Hallack

I have had apocalyptic visions of chocolate,
awesome revelations about the coming of the cheese pastries.
The land of milk and honey ne’er tasted such sweet prophecy….

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

It is not God, I think, whom they love who do this. And I know I am guilty of it, too: to love a concept of someone, something, not anything truly of essence like the reality. Now, I am a believer, and so I conceive that God is an actuality, even if such existence is beyond my ken. But often, He is a convenient vision in my eye, one who is always on my side, and who opposes whom I oppose. It is instead of relying on such apparitions that I must love my brother and sister, for it is here that God may oft be found — for Our Lord said that whosoever does kindness to the least of them does it to Him (see Matthew 25:40). I think it is nothing of love, that of whoever says, “I love God”, and loves none else — and I think it neither God of whom he speaks. All that remains, the “I”, is the tell of whom he truly intends when he speaks of the adoration: when he speaks in words that have no basis, that hide, instead of show, his heart.

Here the wonders we have forged dissipate into the ether, like so much mist in the mountains. Yet somehow, we remember: the face that launched a thousand ships, the life and death of a Savior, chivalric armor and honor, the Mona Lisa, the Fifth Symphony: people, things, ideas that were all in their ways mortal, carried down the paths of time upon new backs every generation. There are dreams we still dream, experiences we yet share with the first man, the first woman…. Here the wind carries off the souls of the departed, yet memory persists past the deterioration of the flesh and of the written word. Miraculous is it all, to stand with our feet rooted in the ancient, eyes raised to the starlight of what is to come — let us climb our one hundred feet of history’s vine and hand off the baton, our portion of immortality. This mass organism called civilization, being born and dying as it moves on its way: may it not stray too far from its quest ever higher.

Midnight Philosophy

Night comes, like a womb
jeweled in stars, from which
we will be born like
forms defined from the darkness.
(Anything goes, I think,
when one does not consider
that even the unlit streets
have eyes.) Strange,
in even the most unholy places
walk saints who fear
nothing but God, and I imagine
it is no bravery to believe in things
when everyone else does,
too, when it costs you nothing.
(O Lord, may I not be
too comfortable.) And dreams:
how much is one worth
plopping out, prepackaged,
from a vending machine?
I think I would rather bleed.
I think I would rather
be defeated than handed victory;
I think I would rather
die than waste life; I think
I would rather hope
for what is impossible than
gain the world and hope nothing.
(Now, wondering at what I
say….) Dawn comes soon,
and this midnight
philosophizing: shall it be
we do more in dreaming
than we do in waking?
Better that we should sleep.

If you love, the whole world loves; if you hate, the whole world hates. For in this world, all you have is you.