If I am a son of God, nothing but God will satisfy my soul; no amount of comfort, no amount of ease, no amount of pleasure, will give me peace or rest. If I had the full cup of all the world’s joys held up to me, and could drain it to the dregs, I should still remain thirsty if I had not God.
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
– Oscar Wilde
It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.’
– Sam Levenson
The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.
– Henry Stimson
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
– Erica Jong
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
– Rita Mae Brown
[Book.]
There comes over me a strange feeling, even through all the shaking, as if a stillness penetrated all movement, all cacophony. For one moment I forget completely where I am, even that I am a body, fragile, on this earth. For several seconds it is as if I have entered a vision, am aware of a sense of infinity, and light, and love in cosmic scales. And I have gone nowhere, but I then perceive myself as if returning to mortality, back to the solidities of our world at large, the world we share. I know not if I have been gone a year or a second. But as I ground, I feel the earthquake dissipate, its energy spending its last fewest ergs, the peace returning beneath me. I am crouched prostrate on the pavement, my hands clasped, where last I was on this planet: praying. The prayer answered.
the kingdom of heaven was scrawled by children in crayon
how it was that the poor became the richest of all, in due course
they who relied on imagining had their wishes come true
I can’t sleep and I lay and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain
– The Who
There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as though it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future.
I am a dream of the dust, and to dust I shall return, upon its waking. For a few moments the universe gets to peer at itself through these eyes of mine, for some scant instances the universe gets to wonder about what it might be. It is an amazing thing, ephemeral. Even if it happens the billions of times that it does, one must not lose sight of its miracle. For never again will this thing I call “I†ever appear on this blue dot in the cosmos. Life is an experiment in uniqueness: grouped together as similar are the millions, but each one is exquisitely its own. God has blessed us all to the point where we no longer notice wonder of it all. I think it part of the plan. And those who consider why may glimpse the nature of love.
I am a traveller in the realm of the information grids, in the matrix of the magnetically defined. None of the things I touch exists, in the sense that what I touch can be said to be merely imaginary forms, a dream of the machines. I travel through pathways of electrons, arranged specifically, signals coursing through the matter, to change the configuration of their destination. But I know that I must alight back down into the lands of the breathing, to leave the phosphorescent skyworks; I am not born for the realms of scattered lightning. I will return when I have gained some strength in the solidities. But my home is yet in the dust.
Happy Easter!
My Lord is a shelter in the fiercest storms,
safe harbor from the most turbulent seas.
My Lord is guidance in the darkest night,
who leads me down the paths I need to go.
Blind, deaf, and dumb though I may be,
He makes me a champion of life, my life.
Naked and helpless I washed up on shore,
and He took me in as part of His family.
I may have nothing, but if I have His light,
no treasure in the world is worth so much.
Exiled from the world, if I have His love,
I have all the meaning that life can offer.
I have dreamed of Heaven, and I have dreamed of Hell. I have dreamed of open skies and mountains whose peaks are beyond a lifetime’s climb, and darkness so deep that it swallowed the entirety of ground. I have dreamed of love that came from nowhere, and of the incalculable machine that consumes souls as it progresses. Good and evil I have seen in my imagining, and in my imagining I have seen some of the truth behind the knowing of them, what remains of the fruit that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden. And I wondered if there could be grown the opposite, of a Tree of Forgetting of Good and Evil, that would return us to the idylls of before…. But perhaps there are too many things in the world that once seen, cannot be forgotten.
On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain
– The Who
If you believe, then you must believe this: that whatever evil, it will inevitably play into the purpose of God. This, I think, is the most difficult point to reconcile. This, I think, is the reason for many who simply cannot reconcile it, who fall away from faith entirely. For it is a deep point of faith in the greatness of God, and in His wisdom: that no matter how horrible, how horrific, that He can make it right in the end. There are too many things in the world that test this hypothesis. There are too many things that can shake this heart of belief. The true believer must be able not to turn away from the worst of the evil in the world, and still in his soul believe that God is good. Supremely good. If making us believe that the Devil does not exist is Satan’s greatest trick, surely it is his secondmost to make of the world a playground of horrors. For anyone who feels, it makes faith need to explain itself. And God seems so silent on such things.
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