"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine."

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

"I heard a guy, Shane Claiborne, speak one time and he was talking about how so many Christians say their lives were a mess and then they met Jesus and everything is all better now. He said that his life was ruined when he met Jesus because all the hopes and dreams he had of making a bunch of money and being successful were dashed in an instant. I was struck by that then, and I’ve been chewing on it a lot since I’ve been back from my trip. How did this trip change my life? I don’t know, and honestly, I’m a little scared to find out . . ."

-----my friend Brad's closing thoughts on his recent trip to Africa with World Vision

"If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday."

-----Isaiah 58:9b-10

if you don't like Bono, like Johnny T, then go here: World Vision

Bono gave the commencement speech at Penn a short time ago. It's moderately long, but worth a read.

Read the article HERE

The Palace


Rudyard Kipling

When I was a King and a Mason-a master proven and skilled-
I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build.
I decreed and cut down to my levels, and presently, under the silt,
I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.


There was no worth in the fashion-there was no wit in the plan-
Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran-
Masonry, brute, mishandled; but carven on every stone:
"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I, too, have known."


Swift to my use in my trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew,
I tumbled his quoins and ashlars, and cut and reset them anew.
Lime I milled of his marbles ; burned it, slacked it and spread;
Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.


Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet as we wrenched them apart,
I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder's heart.
As though he had risen and pleaded, so did I understand
The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned.


When I was King and a Mason-in the open noon of my pride,
They sent me a Word from the Darkness-They whispered and called me aside.
They said-"The end is forbidden." They said-"Thy use is fulfilled,
"And thy Palace shall stand as that other's-the spoil of a King who shall build. "


I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves and my sheers.
All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
Only I cut on the timber-only I carved on the stone:
"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I, too, have known."

The Hand that Signed the Paper Felled a City
by: Dylan Thomas

 

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

"It's a dog eat dog world and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."

-----Norm, from Cheers

My friend Don, who is a 60 something professor of political philosophy at Cal State Fullerton, had this advice for me as we ran this morning:

1) Never play poker with a guy named "Doc."
2) Never eat at a place called "Mom's"
3) Never go to bed with a woman that has more problems than you do.

Good advice Don. I'll keep that in mind. Old guys rule.

Bernstein: "How can you keep going at something past the point when you believe it?"
Woodward: "You just have to start over again."

----- "All the President's Men"

"Now, friends, you who want to be good, to be just, to be faithful, where lies your hope of deliverance? I do not speak to you-as a motive-of a hell, for I do not think you need it. But, do you know, I think from the extreme of the old-fashioned teaching that God made men on purpose to damn them, some modern theologians are much exposed to the going over to a very dangerous opposite extreme, and teaching that God will not damn men at all! I do not seek to drive you towards goodness with this fear of God's damnation, but let the man who persists in hardness and impenitence, and who goes on and on and out of the world scorning and neglecting the mercy of our Heavenly Father, be sure that there will be for him a future condemnation terrible to bear. But you, who are tender-hearted, and who want to be true, and are trying to be, learn these two things from our text: never to be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here, and never to fail to do daily that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord! Be charitable in view of it. Be earnest in the faith of it. God can afford to wait, why cannot we-since we have Him to fall back upon! Let patience have her perfect work, and bring forth her celestial fruits. Trust God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern show it not yet. When God's people are able and willing thus to labour and to wait, remembering that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, the grand harvest of the ages shall come to its reaping, and the day shall broaden itself to a thousand years, and the thousand years shall show themselves as a perfect and finished day!"

-----George MacDonald, "Sermons from the Pulpit"

"Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me."

-----Psalms 66:20

"You are what you love, not what loves you."

-----Charlie Kaufmann, "Adaptation"

"In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something deeper---namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Thomas Nagel, "The Last Word"

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-----C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.


-----T.S. Eliot, "Gerontion" lines 33-47

"Philosophical questions can and should give way and be subsumed to human questions, for in the end we are a society of people and not of ideas, a fragile web of interdependent humans, not of stances."

-----Pumla Gobodo-Madikezela, "A Human Being Died That Night"

"I have read all of Chekhov now. He is so great, and his letters and his life and what people remember of him is greater. Yet it is consoling that if he did not know all about cruelty, gluttony, cowardice, coldness in himself, he could not have written about them. Great men feel and know everything that mean men feel, even more clearly, but they seem to have made some kind of an ascension, and these evil feelings, though they still understand them sympathetically, no longer exert any power over them."


-----Brenda Ueland, "If You Want to Write"

on loving one's neighbor. . .

"---to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not."

-----Mere Christianity

"I had a friend, who died. She thought she could control everything. See? The story creeps up whether we want it to or not."

-----Madeleine L'Engle, as quoted in an interview in the New Yorker, April 12, 2004