"Love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered." Bono on the grace of Advent

Bono’s thoughts on Advent from an extended interview he did in 2004:

I remember coming back from a very long tour.  I hadn’t been at home for months.  Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin.  Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it’s lit up, it’s like a Carnival in the cold. 

On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  I had done school there for a year.  It’s where Jonathan Swift was Dean.  Anyway, some of my Church of Ireland friends were going.  It’s kind of a tradition on Christmas Eve to go, but I’d never been.  I went to this place, sat.  I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars.  I couldn’t see anything.  I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo or somewhere like that.  I went for the singing, because I love choral singing.  Community arts, a specialty!  But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off since I couldn’t see a thing. 

Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page.  It dawned on me for the first time, really.  It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story.  The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough.  That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in poverty, in shit and straw…a child…I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry…unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable.  There it was. 

I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, the utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. You see, love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered.  To me, it makes sense.  It’s actually logical.  It’s pure logic.  Essence has to manifest itself.  It’s inevitable.  Love has to become an action or something concrete.  It would have to happen.  There must be an incarnation.  Love must be made flesh.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.  Christ taught that God is love.  What does that mean?  What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ.  Love here describes itself as a child born in raw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor.  I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.  I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is.  God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion.  Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love.  Now, that’s not easy.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ.  The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.  I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery.  The children of God are running amok, wayward.  Maybe that’s why they’re so relatable. 

But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend.  When you’re a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules.  But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship.  The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the Universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma. I really believe we have moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma.  You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or opposite one.  It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe.  I’m absolutely sure of it. 

And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so will you sow” stuff.  Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.  I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge.  I’d be in deep shit.  It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace.  I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

(From Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas, copyright 2006, Riverhead Books)

Pi's ponderings on Jesus

This is one of my most choice excerpts from Yann Martel’s novel, The Life of Pi. Twelve-year-old Piscine, or “Pi” for short, was raised Hindu by his mother, but also trained to have a skeptical mind by his atheist father. This sequence takes place while he and his family are on vacation in the northern part of India. His older brother dares him to enter a small Catholic cathedral…which no one in their family had ever done before.

I dared to enter the church.  My stomach was in knots.  I was terrified I would meet a Christian who would shout at me, “What are you doing here? How dare you enter this sacred place, you defiler!  Get out, right now!”

There was no one.  And little to be understood. I advanced and observed the inner sanctum.  There was a painting. Was this the murti? Something about a human sacrifice. An angry god who had to be appeased with blood.  Dazed women staring up in the air and fat babies with tiny wings flying about. A charismatic bird.  Which one was the god?  To the side of the sanctum was a painted wooden sculpture.  The victim again, bruised and bleeding in bold colors.  I stared at his knees.  They were badly scraped. The pink skin was peeled back and looked like the petals of a flower, revealing kneecaps that were fire-engine red.  It was hard to connect this torture with the peaceful priest I had seen from a distance in the rectory the day before.

Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily. My experience with Father Martin was not like that. He was very kind.  He served me tea and biscuits in a tea set that tinkled and rattled at every touch; he treated me like a grown-up; and he told me a story.  Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief.  What? Humanity sins but its God’s Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, “Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas.  Yesterday another one killed a black buck.  Last week to of them ate the camel.  The week before it was painted storks and grey herons.  And who’s to say for sure who snacked on the golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done.  I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them.”

“Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do.  Give me a moment to wash up.”

“Hallelujah, my son.”

“Hallelujah, Father.”

What a downright weird story.  What a peculiar psychology.

I asked for another story, one that I might find more satisfying.  Surely this religion had more than one story in its bag—religions abound with stories.  But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it—and there were many—were simply prologue to the Christians.  Their religion had one Story, and to it they came back again and again, over and over. It was story enough for them.

I was quiet that evening at the hotel.

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand.  The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers, and usurpers.  What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes.  Reversals in fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to being stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets, and, to top it off, crucified at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Brahman Revealed did not go for death. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions—that’s what they were there for. Matter, too, fell away.  But divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong…

Why would God wish this upon himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what was beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

Love.  That was Father Marin’s answer.

And what about this Son’s deportment?  Why did he give himself up? Hindu gods never did that. No spindly cross would’ve kept them down.  When push came to shove, they transcended any human frame with strength no man could have and weapons no man could handle.

That is God as God should be.  With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil.

This Son, on the other hand, who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect Him—what kind of god is that? It’s a god on too human a scale, that’s what. There are miracles, yes mostly of a medical nature, a few to satisfy hungry stomachs; at best a storm is tempered, water is briefly walked upon…any Hindu god can do a hundred times better.

This Son is a god who spent most of his time telling stories, talking. This Son is a god who walked, a pedestrian god—and in a hot place, at that—with a stride like any human stride; and when he splurged on transportation, it was a regular donkey. This Son is a god who died in three hours, with moans, gasps, and laments.  What kind of god is that? What is there to inspire in this Son?

Love, said Father Martin.

And this Son appears only once, long ago, far away? Among some obscure tribe in a backwater strip of West Asia on in the confines of a long-vanished empire? Is done away with before He has a single grey hair on His head? Leaves not a single descendant, only scattered, partial testimony, His complete works doodles in the dirt? …What can justify such divine stinginess?

Love, repeated Father Martin.

I’ll stick to my Krishna, thank you very much.  I find his divinity utterly compelling.  You can keep your sweaty, chatty Son to yourself.  That was how I met that troublesome rabbi of long ago: with disbelief and annoyance.

I had tea with Father Martin three days in a row.  Each time, as teacup rattled against saucer, as spoon tinkled against edge of cup, I asked questions.

The answer was always the same.

He bothered me, this Son.  Every day I burned with greater indignation against Him, found more flaws to Him…but I couldn’t get Him out of my head.  Still can’t.  I spent three solid days thinking about Him.  The more He bothered me, the less I could forget Him.  And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.

On our last day, a few hours before we were to leave Munnar, I hurried up the hill to the cathedral on more time…. short of breath I said, “Father, I would like to be a Christian, please.”

He smiled. “You already are, Piscine—in your heart.  Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ.”

He patted me on the head.  It was more of a thump, actually. I thought I would explode with joy.

“When you come back, we’ll have tea again, my son.”

“Yes, Father.”

It was a good smile he gave me. The smile of Christ.

I entered the sanctuary, without fear this time, for it was now my house too. I offered prayers to Christ, who is alive. 

(from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, 2001, Random House)

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld," and other St. Augustine Quotes

Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) is one of my favorite ancient mystics, and is one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity. In Roman Catholicism and the Anglican Communion, he is a saint and pre-eminent Doctor of the Church, and the patron of the Augustinian religious order. Many Protestants consider him to be one of the theological fountainheads of Reformation teaching on salvation and grace. In Orthodox Churches he is considered blessed or even a saint.

Born in Africa, he lived a hedonistic lifestyle as a youth, and developed a relationship with a young woman who would be his concubine for over fifteen years. During this period he had a son with this young woman. His education and early career was in philosophy and rhetoric, the art of persuasion and public speaking.  He was educated in Carthage and Rome.

At age thirty, Augustine had won the most visible academic chair in the Latin world, at a time when such posts gave ready access to political careers. However, he felt the tensions of life at an imperial court, lamenting one day as he rode in his carriage to deliver a grand speech before the emperor, that a drunken beggar he passed on the street had a less careworn existence than he did.   

After a flirtation with skepticism, he began his spiritual quest in earnest during his early 30’s.  In the summer of 386, after having read an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert which greatly inspired him, Augustine underwent a profound personal crisis and decided to convert to Christianity. He abandoned his career in rhetoric, quit his teaching position in Milan, gave up any ideas of marriage, and devoted himself entirely to serving God and the practices of priesthood.  He eventually relocated back to northern Africa.  

His works—including The Confessions, which is often called the first Western autobiography—are still read around the world.  They include The City of God, Free Choice of the Will, and On Christian Doctrine, which are all seminal and influential on much Christian thought that followed.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Augustine…let me know which ones you like:

Heart speaks to heart.

Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love.

To sing once is to pray twice.

Lord, you have seduced me and I let myself be seduced.

Love, and do what you will.

God, oh Lord, grant me the power to overcome sin. For sin is that which you gave to us when you granted us free choice of will. If I choose wrongly, then I shall be justly punished for it. Is that not true, my Lord, of whom I indebted for my temporal existence. Thank you, Lord, for granting me the power to will my self not to sin.

Christ is the teacher within us.

Hear the other side.

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

He that is jealous is not in love.

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.''

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.

Love, and do what you like.

Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

No eulogy is due to him who simply does his duty and nothing more.

O Holy Spirit, descend plentifully into my heart. Enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling and scatter there Thy cheerful beams.

Love the sinner and hate the sin.

Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

There is no possible source of evil except good.

There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.

To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

We cannot pass our guardian angel's bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

Once again, let me know the ones that resonate with you…or perhaps any that I haven’t listed.  : )

We often never see the Strong Hand of Love hidden in the shadows

Another honest insight from one of the best songwriters of our time, Mark Heard:  

Down peppers the rain from a clear blue sky

Down trickles a tear on a youthful face

Feeling in haste and wondering why

Up struggles the sun from a wounded night

Out venture our hearts from their silent shrouds

Trying to ignite but wondering how

We can laugh and we can cry

And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows

We can dance and we can sigh

And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows

Young dreamers explode like popped balloons

Some kind of emotional rodeo

Learning too slow and acting too soon

Time marches away like a lost platoon

We gracefully age as we feel the weight

Of loving too late and leaving too soon

We can laugh and we can cry

And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows

We can dance and we can sigh

And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows

Written by Mark Heard © 1990 Ideola Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGZN7vJ2fOM&feature=related

My Friend Brennan

I was fortunate to have Brennan Manning a friend over the past 25 years.  With his passing a few days ago at age 78, I've been searching for the right words to help deal with this loss.  I went looking in my library for all my favorite books by him, and realized that I have loaned nearly all of them out to others, who, like me, needed to read “good news for the bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out;” fresh cups of grace to many who were tired of fellow Christians’ legalism and judgment. This piece written by Philip Yancey several years ago at the release of Brennan's final book, sums up well my thoughts on this humble, broken, and forgiven man who was much more interested in being a pioneer than a settler.

Brennan Manning has written a memoir titled All Is Grace that will be published this year by David C. Cook Publishing.  I wrote the Foreword, and include excerpts here about my friend.

I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track.  Brennan seemed dazzled by the spectacle, and like a color commentator kept trying to explain the subtleties of evangelicalism to his wife Roslyn, a cradle Catholic who lacked Brennan’s experience with the subculture.

We did not see each other often over the years, but each time our paths crossed we went deeper, rather than tilling the same ground of friendship.  When he visited a monastery in Colorado for spiritual retreats, he would sometimes get a temporary dispensation from the rule of silence and meet my wife and me at an ice cream parlor (one addiction he doesn’t disclose in these pages).  Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different— Southern fundamentalism vs. Northeastern Catholic—and yet by different routes we had both stumbled upon an Artesian well of grace and have been gulping it ever since.  One glorious fall afternoon we hiked on a carpet of golden Aspen leaves along a mountain stream and I heard the details of Brennan’s life: his loveless childhood, his marathon search for God, his marriage and divorce, his lies and coverups, his continuing struggles with alcohol addiction.

As you read this memoir you may be tempted, as I am, to think “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t given into drink.”  I urge you to reframe the thought to, “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t discovered grace.”  More than once I have watched this leprechaun of an Irish Catholic hold spellbound an audience of thousands by telling in a new and personal way the story that all of us want to hear: that the Maker of all things loves and forgives us.  Brennan knows well that love and especially the forgiveness.  Like “Christian,” the everyman character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones.  (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners).

At one point Brennan likens himself to Samson, that flawed superman whom God somehow found a way to use right up to the day of his death.  Reading such stories in the Old Testament, I’ve come up with a simple principle to explain how God can use the likes of such imperfect men and women: “God uses the talent pool available.”  Again and again, Brennan made himself available.  In the last few years, nearly blind, subject to illness and falls, at an age when he should have been enjoying retirement on a beach in Florida, he kept getting on airplanes and flying places to proclaim a Gospel he believed with all his heart but could not always live.

“All is grace,” Brennan concludes, looking back on a rich but stained life.  He has placed his trust in that foundational truth of the universe, which he has proclaimed faithfully and eloquently.

As a writer, I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a book than edit a life.  When I write about what I believe and how I should live, it sounds neat and orderly.  When I try to live it out, all hell breaks loose.  Reading Brennan’s memoir, I see something of the reverse pattern.  By focusing on the flaws, he leaves out many of the triumphs.  I keep wanting him to tell the stories that put him in a good light, and there are many.  Choosing full disclosure over a narrative that might burnish his reputation, Brennan presents himself as the Apostle Paul once did, as a “clay jar,” a disposable container made of baked dirt.  We must look to his other books for a full picture of the treasure that lay inside.

A poem by Leonard Cohen says it well:

Ring the bells that still can ring.


Forget your perfect offering.


There is a crack in everything.


That’s how the light gets in.

"Goodness has never been a guarantee of safety," and more Madelein L'Engle quotes (Part 2)

Madelein L’Engle (1918-2007) authored over 40 books, including A Wrinkle In Time and all of its sequels.  I still recall my 3^rd grade teacher reading those to us, and being mesmerized by the way they stimulated my imagination.  Her writing reflected her deep Christian faith, a love of science, and a curiosity to ask many questions. I was privileged to hear her give the Commencement Address to my graduating class at Wheaton College in 1977.  Here is Part 2 of my favorite quotes from her writings.  Let me know which ones resonate with you.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.

And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.

You and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

Goodness has never been a guarantee of safety.

One of the most pusillanimous things we of the female sex have done throughout the centuries is to have allowed the male sex to assume that mankind is masculine. It is not. It takes both male and female to make the image of God. The proper understanding of mankind is that it is only a poor, broken thing if either male or female is excluded.

The joys of love...last only a moment. The sorrows of love last all the life long.

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.

Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.

If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it's always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars. The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, 'Our Lord said *feed* my sheep, not count them!' I often feel that I'm being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry.

  

No! Alike and equal are not the same thing at all!”

If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.

You're going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.

She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

Two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is; I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities; I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who today can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another"?”

It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.

If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.

Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from.

We human beings grow through our failures, not our virtues.

No wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and they are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology, neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God.

Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter words? ...We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any real meaning for us. ...When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been turned to marshmallows. ...We no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis. 'Help!' we bleat. And no one hears us. 'Help' is another of those four-letter words that don't mean anything any more.

How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well.

Thoughts?