I went to the beach this afternoon to read and watch the sun set. It was wonderful and shocking. What was wonderful about it was the grace that comes through in a beach sunset. The changing hues of the atmosphere, the thunderous yet calming break of the waves, the strange carefree lives of birds; all of them speak to me of a story much larger than my own. What was shocking to me is that for almost 2 hours while the sun went down, I was virtually alone. If it weren't for another man sitting in his reclining beach chair about two stations away from me, I would have been completely alone on the beach. For a moment I thought how sad it was that here was this marvelous act of communication, and only two souls were there to join in with it and offer praise back. But then I just relaxed and let it wash over me. Sometimes it's better not to think too much upon these things.

"Photography need no longer bide its time, or bite its nails, in underground dens or unvisited wings of the major museums; it is right there in the throne rooms, and in order to reach Avedon's Groucho, say---balding, black sweatered, solemnly dreaming of something off-camera---you have to stride through a vista of Rodins."

----"Head On: A Richard Avedon Retrospective", as quoted from Anthony Lane in this week's New Yorker.

LATE SEPTEMBER

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretendng to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

----Charles Simic

"Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, [one] is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all the sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

-----C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

"Man's original sin was a lust after self-sufficient knowledge, a craving to shake off all EXTERNAL (emphasis mine) authority and work things out for himself (cf. Gen 3:5-6); and God deliberately presents saving truth to sinnners in such a way that their acceptance of it involves an act of intellectual repentance, whereby they humble themselves and submit once more to be taught by Him. Thus they renounce their calamitous search after a self-made wisdom (cf. Rom 1:22; 1 Cor. 1:19-25) in order to regain the kind of knowledge for which they were made, that which comes from taking their Creator's word. So as to make this renunciation clear-cut, God has ensured that no single article of faith should be demonstrable as, say a geometrical theorem is, nor free from unsolved mystery. Man must be content to know by faith, and to know, in this world at any rate, in part."


----J.I. Packer, from an essay entitled "Revelation and Inspiration" (c. 1954)