"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.

"There are three kinds of pipe. There is what you have, which is garbage and you can see where that's gotten you. There is brass, which is very good as long as nothing goes wrong. . . . and something always goes wrong. And then there's copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves you money."


-----Cosmo, from "Moonstruck"

"I may not always wear the right trousers but I can play that steel guitar and make you cry."


-----Daniel Lanois

Quotation for Tuesday, April 22, 2003:

"No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home, but the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us: it is the very sign of His presence."

-----C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain"

"The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything." --C.S. Lewis

"It has been well said that no [individual] ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a [person] can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him and mind the present." --George MacDonald

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

I Am Iraq
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Back in the 60's, when I marched against the war in Vietnam, I learned that it is a mistake to judge a cause by the company it makes you keep. I slogged through the streets with Trotskyites who thought America was an evil empire, and I chanted slogans under banners that called for socialist revolution in Brooklyn. I stood arm in arm with pacifists, who made me wonder whether they would have fought Hitler. Since I was anti-Communist, I actually had more in common with the liberal hawks who thought they were defending South Vietnam against advancing Communist tyranny. But I believed nothing could save the weak and corrupt South Vietnamese government. This time, over Iraq, I don't like the company I am keeping, but I think they're right on the issue. I much prefer the company on the other side, but I believe they're mistaken.

I don't like the president's domestic policies. He should be helping state and local governments maintain jobs and services, especially for the poor. His attack on affirmative action turns back decades of racial progress. The tax breaks for the rich are unjust. His deficits are mortgaging the future. It's wrong to lock up so-called unlawful combatants on Guantanamo and in military brigs, denying them due process. The president's attorney general is dangerously cavalier about the civil liberties he is supposed to protect. The bullying tone the president adopted in his diplomacy at the United Nations diminished his chances of U.N. support. But I still think the president is right when he says that Iraq and the world will be better off with Saddam disarmed, even, if necessary, through force.

A lot of my friends think that supporting the president on this issue is naive. The company you keep, they argue, matters in politics. If you can't trust him on other issues, you have no reason to trust him on this one. If he treats freedom at home so lightly, what makes you believe that he will say what he means about staying the course to create freedom in Iraq?

My friends also imply that the company I am keeping on this war is a definition of what kind of person I am. So where we all stand has become a litmus test of our moral identities. But this shouldn't be the case. Opposing the war doesn't make you an antiglobalist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, any more than supporting the war makes you a Cheney conservative or an apologist for American imperialism.

In fact, the debate over war is not so much a clash of competing moral identities as a battle within each of us to balance competing moral arguments. Sometimes it is easier to see this in the positions of the other side than in your own.

Recently, 14,000 ''writers, academics and other intellectuals'' -- many of them my friends -- published a petition against the war, at the same time condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting ''efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious Iraq.'' But since they say that ''the decision to wage war at this time is morally unacceptable,'' I wonder what their support for the Iraqi opposition amounts to. One colleague refused to sign the petition because he said it was guilty of confusion. The problem is not that overthrowing Saddam by force is ''morally unjustified.'' Who seriously believes 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown? The issue is whether it is prudent to do so, whether the risks are worth running.

Evaluating risks is not the same thing as making moral choices. It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be. Besides, even if the cost could be known, what the philosophers call ''consequential'' justifications -- that 25 million people will live better -- run smack against ''deontological'' objections, namely that good consequences cannot justify killing people. I think the consequential justifications can override the deontological ones, but only if the gains in human freedom are large and the human costs are low. But let's admit it, the risks are large: the war may be bloody, the peace may be chaotic and what might be good in the long run for Iraqis might not be so good for Americans. Success in Iraq might win America friends or it might increase the anger much of the Muslim world feels toward this country.

It would be great if moral certainty made risk assessment easier, but it doesn't actually do so. What may be desirable from a moral point of view may be so risky that we would be foolish to try. So what do we do? Isaiah Berlin used to say that we just have to ''plump'' for one option or the other in the absence of moral certainty or perfect knowledge of the future. We should also try to decide for ourselves, regardless of the company we keep, and that may include our friends, our family and our loved ones.

During Vietnam, I marched with people who thought America was the incarnation of imperial wickedness, and I marched against people who thought America was the last best hope of mankind. Just as in Vietnam, the debate over Iraq has become a referendum on American power, and what you think about Saddam seems to matter much less than what you think about America. Such positions, now as then, seem hopelessly ideological and, at the same time, narcissistic. The fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation nor the evil empire. Ideology cannot help us here.

In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not going to be about who we are or whose company we keep, or even about what we think America is or should be. The choices are about what risks are worth running when our safety depends on the answer. The real choices are going to be tougher than most of us could have ever imagined."

-----Michael Ignatieff, Harvard Professor, Human Rights Activist and NY Times Writer