"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of Orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as Orthodoxy. It was sanity, and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christentdom---that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the hevaenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."

-----G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy" (pp. 305-306)

"We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something---hence the agony---but ultimately don't want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.
They say there may be as many as a million massacred in Rwanda. The militias continue to slay the innocent and the educated. . . . Has it really cost the United States nothing?"

-----Anonymous Clinton Administration Cabinent member's journal entry. As quoted from Samantha Power's book "A Problem from Hell"

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!/ The world forgetting, by the world forgot./ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/ Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.


-----Alexander Pope, "Eloisa and Abelard"

Finally I don't mind
Worthless tries at finding something else
Best not talk too loud
You're not as smart as you require of them
Your body breaks
Your needs consume you forever
And with this lies the need
To be here together
Funny thing with blood
You try to stand but neither leg's awake
Just this side of love
Is where you'll find the confidence not to continue

-----Built To Spill, "Else"

"Why don't you just scrap this God business, says one of my bitter suffering friends. It's a rotten world, you and I have been shafted, and that's that.

I'm pinned down. When I survey this gigantic intricate world, I cannot believe that it just came about. I do not mean that I have some good arguments for its being made and that I believe in the arguments. I mean that this conviction wells up irresistibly within me when I contemplate the world. The experiment of trying to abolish it does not work. When looking at the heavens, I cannot manage to believe that they do not declare the glory of God.

When looking at the earth, I cannot bring off the attempt to believe that it does not display his handiwork. And when I read the New Testament and look into the material surrounding it, I am convinced that the man Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. In that, I see the sign that he was more than a prophet. He was the Son of God.

Faith is a footbridge that you don't know will hold you up over the chasm until you're forced to walk out onto it. I'm standing there now, over the chasm. I inspect the bridge. Am I deluded in believing that in God the question shouted out by the wounds of the world has its answer? Am I deluded in believing that someday I will know the answer? Am I deluded in believing that once I know the answer, I will see that love has conquered?

I cannot dispel the sense of conducting my inspection in the presence of the Creating/Resurrecting One."


-----Nicholas Wolterstorff, from "Lament for a Son" (professor at Yale Divinity School)

Quotations from Deidrich Bonhoeffer:

"Cheap grace is grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ. Costly grace is the gospel. It costs people their lives. It cost the life of God's son, and nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God." ----Discipleship, 1935

"Christ is really present only in the community. The Church is the presence of Christ, just as Christ is the presence of God. But our church today is bourgeois. The best proof is that the poor working classes have turned away from the church, whereas the bourgeois--the petty officials, the artisans and the merchants--have remained. When the community is split, is Christ himself divided?" -----"Sanctorum Communio", 1927

"The church is the church only when it exists for others. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not by dominating but by helping and serving." ----Outline for a book, 1944

"We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled, in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. Mere waiting and looking is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action." ----"After Ten Years: A letter to family and conspirators", 1942

"I discovered later, and am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own suffering but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith." ----"Letter to Eberhard Bethge", 1944

"Who am I? I have been told that i suffer the days of misfortune with serenity, smiles and pride, as someone accustomed to victory. Am I really what others say about me? Or am I only what I know of myself?...Bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur, fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away, weary and empty in prayer, in thinking, in doing, weak and ready to take leave of it all. Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, you know me, Oh God, you know I am yours." ----"Who Am I?", 1944

two quotations I heard recently. These are from memory and thus probably not verbatim:

"With the first religious question, sin entered the world." -----Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Non-participation in evil is as much a moral obligation as participation in good." -----Mahatma Ghandi

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