If I had read this passage earlier on in my life, it would have saved me a great deal of grief and struggle, or at least put me on the road to overcoming my wrongheaded religious tendencies.

You cannot be a Christian until you understand this passage at the core of your being. I was nothing more than a Pharisee for 20 something years of my life, and still am at times, but I'm learning to live in God's love and grace and thus to Love the things He loves, or another way of saying it, to follow Him.

"The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law---a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty."

-----George MacDonald, "The Way" Unspoken Sermons Volume II

I had seven faces thought i knew which one to wear
I'm sick of spending these lonely nights training myself not to care
the subway is a porno pavements they are a mess
i know you've supported me for a long time
somehow i'm not impressed

New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

subway she is a porno and the pavements they are a mess
i know you've supported me for a long time
somehow i'm not impressed

It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
It's up to me now turn on the bright lights

New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
(got to be some more change in my life)
oh, It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
(got to be some more change in my life)


-----Interpol, "NYC"

"In a May 26, 1988, meeting, Al-Majid (Chemical Ali) described a planned gas attack against the Kurds. 'I will kill them all with chemical weapons!' he exclaimed. 'Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!'"

-----taken from Samantha Power's book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"

"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us."

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

"I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.  I preached a sermon about this.  We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right."


From a letter to his father, quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife by Greville MacDonald

"Can there be something in life that has power over us which little by little causes us to forget all that is good?. . . If this can ever be, then one must look for a cure against it. Praise be to God that such a cure exists---to quietly make a decision. A decision joins us to the eternal. It brings what is eternal into time. A decision raises us with a shock from the slumber of monotony. A decision breaks the magic spell of custom. A decision breaks the long row of weary thoughts. A decision pronounces its blessing upon even the weakest beginning, as long as it is a real beginning. Decision is the awakening to the eternal."

-----Soren Kierkegaard

I'm in tight with a demon called Deception
It's alright he's a treating me quite well
I'm in tight with a demon called Deception
He's right beside me when I fail

To whisper words like brother nothin' here is any good
See the birds they're a dropping like a star Wormwood
And all I wanted was a little patch of green
We were peasants and the cotton was our king

And in the fields till I sing a prisoner's song
Well Deception whistles right along
Right along

Charlie sang for a pocket full of pills
While Deception was a clickin' his high heels
We're in tight playing seven one night stands
And Deception made me as I am

As I am
As I am
As I am
As I am
I'm in tight
I'm in tight
I'm in tight

Truth is I'm in tight
I barely saw the light
Just as it clicked in
Something saved my skin
Something saved my skin


-----Grant Lee Buffalo

letter from Bono to his father, circa 1980. . .

"Hello Father,
Just a letter to let you know your son is well and at least learned how to write at school. I started this letter in a hotel in Birmingham. . . It's a bit of a mess. It's hard to know why people would want to live in a place like this. Even the houses look like small biscuit tins. Anyway, we're here, another stop on the motorway. I'm looking forward to tonight's concert as the tour goes on. The band are getting tighter and tighter. The nights at the Marquee are very succesful. Each Monday the crowds get bigger and bigger, a situation that hasn't occurred in the Marquee on a Monday night for a long time. We did three encores last week. The single sold a thousand copies and for the first time we are getting daytime radio play on Radio One. . . ..so as you can see, what was once a dream is now very real. But understand that underneath the gloss there is a lot of hard work ahead, and I hope a lot of fun. I miss home, you, Alison Stewart (his wife), sausages, and even the occaisional disagreement. You should be aware that at the moment three of the group are committed Christians. That means offering each day up to God, meeting in the morning for prayers, readings, and letting God work in our lives. This gives us our strength and a joy that does not depend on drink or drugs. This strength will, I believe, be the quality that will take us to the top of the music business. I hope our lives will be a testament to the people who follow us, and to the music business where never before have so many lost and sorrowful people gathered in one place pretending they're having a good time. It is our ambition to make more than good music. I know that you must find this a ludicrous ambition, but compared to the task of getting ourselves from where we were to where we are, the rest is easy. Being older and wiser I know you must find it hard to accept what I'm saying. But all God wants is a willing heart and for us to call out to Him. Being young and troublesome can be an advantage in that you start questioning things around you. The Bible says seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will be opened. As people grow older they can grow cynical. They stop asking questions... . I don't think you have stopped asking questions. Neither do I expect you to believe I have all the answers. I haven't and I keep making mistakes. . . But I am trying and God is great. Anyway, as you can see, I'm having a good time."

taken from "U2: At the End of the World" by Bill Flanagan

"Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people."

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

"Splitting off parts of the self is a psychological mechanism that occurs at an unconscious level, but its effects are felt consciously, and help shift the gaze away from the individual's direct role in evil deeds: 'That cannot be me. It was my 'trigger hand' that killed.' Distancing himself from and casting away the evil part of his body was an effort at self-preservation. But it was also an illustration of how fragmented he was---a person broken into bits struggling to achieve some sense of wholeness."

-----Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, from "A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Study in Forgiveness"

To A Stranger
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

"To say that real, big things should be considered as metaphors shows some doubt in their realness, a will to dematerialize; the moment a thing becomes a mere figure of speech, its bright noon is past. Miracles become metaphors when we no longer really believe in saints. Now that tall buildings are for the first time fragile in our memory and imagination, susceptible to a morning's doom, we fill them with feelings, and accept that they are representations of our hopes, rather than wrappers of our necessities. The new tall building books and shows in New York are, therefore, however outwardly optimistic, surely inwardly elegiac."

-----Adam Gopnik, "Higher and Higher: What Tall Buildings Do", from the New Yorker.

God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end. So I concluded that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they can. ...Whatever exists today and whatever will exist in the future has already existed in the past.

-----ecclesiastes 3

"Now---here is my secret:
I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God---that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."

-----Douglas Coupland, "Life After God"

orthodoxy affects orthopraxis . . .

"Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorising and every expression of belief is a political and moral action."

-----Alasdair MacIntyre, "After Virtue"

"I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government appraoches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordiary human passions by which like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political porgramme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme---whose highest real claim is to reasonable prudence----the sort of assent which should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication."

-----C.S. Lewis, excerpt from "A Reply to Professor Haldane" in "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories"

"Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles---even if he's paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case---he's never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discotheque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn't worried one bit about you and what you're thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn't looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he's saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they're doing."

-----Richard Ford, "The Sportswriter"

"My wish was to have been present with those who loved Christ and were with him at his passion so that I, with my own eyes, might have seen the passion which our Lord suffered for me, and so that I might have suffered with him as the others did who loved him. I never desired any other sight or revelation of God."

-----Julian of Norwich May 13, 1373

Looks like Mel Gibson is answering Julian's prayer.

"In the Christian faith, the term [conversion] takes special significance only in the new direction of a person's change. A believer shifts from loyalties that are essentially selfish to loyalties that are directed toward Christ. A Christian is converted from a self-driven life to a Christ-driven life. That is the important point."

-----Bruce L. Shelley

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15 year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims, like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy - the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring, we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really.