February 2012
21 posts
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There is so much truth in these words:
“The mystery of God’s presence can be touched only by a deep awareness of his absence. It is in the center of our longing for the absent God that we discover his footprints and realize that our desire to love God is born out of the love with which he has touched us. In the patient waiting for the loved one, we discover how much he has filled our...
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“You do not write the best you can for the sake of art, but for the sake of...”
– Flannery O’Connor (via invisibleforeigner)
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“You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack...”
– Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love
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Everything is Waiting For You
rabbit-light:
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish...
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“It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As...”
– Lauren Winner, Still
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“I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison
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Seven Stanzas At Easter
invisibleforeigner:
By John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged...
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Ordeal by Nina Cassian
whenwetalkaboutlove:
I promise to make you more alive than you’ve ever been. For the first time you’ll see your pores opening like the gills of fish and you’ll hear the noise of blood in galleries and feel light gliding on your corneas like the dragging of a dress across the floor. For the first time, you’ll note gravity’s prick like a thorn in your heel, and your shoulder blades will hurt from...
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“Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether,...”
– Lauren Winner, Still (via invisibleforeigner)
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godthings:
“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Five,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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Over the past week, I’ve been making my way through Frederick Buechner’s Stories in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. Today I read a chapter called “The Two Stories,” which quickly became a favorite due to passages like these: “The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light. It is a story that hides more than it reveals. It is the story of a mystery we must...
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“Not Knowing” by Gary Soto
By then, by the time my brother Was getting married, weeks before the old Apartment was pulled down, The evenings were warm and the sound of Freight trains absorbed by three oleanders, Whipped by wind and iron clanging. By then, by the time I was nineteen And the crickets were hauling their armor Into the weeds and dusty bushes, I was thinking that I would...
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“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says,...”
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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“They who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a...
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“If we think the purpose of Jesus’s stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as the moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw the story itself away like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice. Is that true? How about other people’s stories? What is the point of A Midsummer...
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“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of...”
– Jane Austen (via thatkindofwoman)
Love.
(via invisibleforeigner)
I’ve never been able to make it through a whole Austen novel; now I want to give her another try.