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I Want To Overhear Passionate Arguments About What We Are And What We Are Doing And What We Ought To Do. I Want To Feel That Art Is An Utterance Made In Good Faith By One Human Being To Another. I Want To Believe There Are Geniuses Scheming To Astonish The Rest Of Us, Just For The Pleasure Of It.

-Marilynne Robinson

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I Want To Overhear

Marilynne Robinson

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I Want To Overhear Passionate Arguments About What We Are And What We Are Doing And What We Ought To Do. I Want To Feel That Art Is An Utterance Made In Good Faith By One Human Being To Another. I Want To Believe There Are Geniuses Scheming To Astonish The Rest Of Us, Just For The Pleasure Of It.

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It Felt Very Good To Have Him Walking Beside Her. Good Like Rest And Quiet, Like Something You Could Live Without But You Needed Anyway. That You Had To Learn How To Miss, And Then You'd Never Stop Missing It.

Anybody Who Has Read Any Biblical Scholarship Knows That Every Scholar Struggles Over Completely Intractable Problems With The Original Texts, Or What They Have To Work From. It's One Of The Great, Powerful, Mysterious Objects That Have Come Down Through History. This Does Not Translate Into Literal Interpretation For Me.

I Like A Book To Be Full Of The Memory Of What It Is, A Voice In An Endless Conversation, And Yet At The Same Time To Be New.

Everything That Falls Upon The Eye Is Apparition, A Sheet Dropped Over The World's True Workings. The Nerves And The Brain Are Tricked, And One Is Left With Dreams That These Specters Loose Their Hands From Ours And Walk Away, The Curve Of The Back And The Swing Of The Coat So Familiar As To Imply That They Should Be Permanent Fixtures Of The World, When In Fact Nothing Is More Perishable.

Weary Or Bitter Of Bewildered As We May Be, God Is Faithful. He Lets Us Wander So We Will Know What It Means To Come Home.

Protestantism, Of Course, Is Much More Explicitly Divided Into Different Traditions - The Pentecostals, The Anglicans. But There Is The Main Tradition Of Protestantism That Comes Out Of The Reformation And That Produced People Like Kant And Hegel And So On, Who Are Not Normally Thought Of As Being People Writing In A Theological Tradition, Although Hegel, Of Course, Wrote Theology His Whole Life.

I Am Grateful For All Those Dark Years, Even Though In Retrospect They Seem Like A Long, Bitter Prayer That Was Answered Finally.

I'm Really Disturbed By The Degree To Which I Don't Hear People Saying, "are We Leaving The World Better Than We Found It?" I Think We Are A Generation That Perhaps Could Not Answer In The Affirmative, And It Is The Evasion Of The Larger Responsibility Of Being Only One Generation In What One Hopes Will Be An Infinite Series Of Fruitful Generations. There Is A Selfishness In Refusing To Understand That We Are Passing Through; Others Will Come, And They Deserve Certain Courtesies And Certain Considerations From Us.

I Have Spent My Life Watching, Not To See Beyond The World, Merely To See, Great Mystery, What Is Plainly Before My Eyes. I Think The Concept Of Transcendence Is Based On A Misreading Of Creation. With All Respect To Heaven, The Scene Of The Miracle Is Here, Among Us. The Eternal As An Idea Is Much Less Preposterous Than Time, And This Very Fact Should Seize Our Attention.

The Mind Has A Complex Life That Can Seem Quite Autonomous - Dreams, Obsessions, Unwilled Memory Are All Instances Of This.

It Is A Good Thing To Know What It Is To Be Poor, And A Better Thing If You Can Do It In Company.

There Was Some Sort Of Maze-learning Experiment Involved In My Final Grade And Since I Remember The Rat Who Was My Colleague As Uncooperative, Or Perhaps Merely Incompetent At Being A Rat, Or Tired Of The Whole Thing, I Don't Remember How I Passed.

Light Is Constant, We Just Turn Over In It.

You Build Your Mind, So Make It Into Something You Want To Live With.

I Do Assume That A Character Or A Place Is Inexhaustible And Will Always Reward Further Attention.

To Recognize Our Bias Toward Error Should Teach Us Modesty And Reflection, And To Forgive It Should Help Us Avoid The Inhumanity Of Thinking We Ourselves Are Not As Fallible As Those Who, In Any Instance, Seem Most At Fault. Science Can Give Us Knowledge, But It Cannot Give Us Wisdom. Nor Can Religion, Until It Puts Aside Nonsense And Distraction And Becomes Itself Again.

The Lord Is More Constant And Far More Extravagant Than It Seems To Imply. Wherever You Turn Your Eyes The World Can Shine Like Transfiguration. You Don't Have To Bring A Thing To It Except A Little Willingness To See. Only, Who Could Have The Courage To See It?

It Is Hardship That Makes Clear Who The "fighters" Are.

I Want To Feel That Art Is An Utterance Made In Good Faith By One Human Being To Another.

I Got Four Volumes Of The Letters And Speeches Of Oliver Cromwell. He Is Prominent Among The Great Unread, And Treated So Oddly By History That I Wanted To Hear His Side Of Things.

...not Deciding To Act Would Be Identical With Deciding Not To Act.

He [christ] Even Restored The Severed Ear Of The Soldier Who Came To Arrest Him - A Fact That Allows Us To Hope The Resurrection Will Reflect A Considerable Attention To Detail.

When My Mother Left Me Waiting For Her, [she] Established In Me The Habit Of Waiting And Expectation Which Makes Any Present Moment Most Significant For What It Does Not Contain.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

She Closed One Eye And Looked At Me And Said, "i Know There Is A Blessing In This Somewhere." It Is Worth Living Long Enough To Outlast Whatever Sense Of Grievance You May Acquire. Another Reason Why You Must Be Careful Of Your Health.

Often, When I Want To Read Something That Is Satisfying To Me As Theology, What I Actually Read Is String Theory, Or Something Like That - Popularizations, Inevitably, Of Scientific Cosmologies - Because Their Description Of The Scale Of Things And The Intrinsic, Astonishing Character Of Reality Coincides Very Beautifully With The Most Ambitious Theology. It Is Thinking At That Scale, And It Is Thinking That Is Invested With Meaning In A Humanly Evocative Form. That's Theology.

Every Single One Of Us Is A Little Civilization Built On The Ruins Of Any Number Of Preceding Civilizations, But With Our Own Variant Notions Of What Is Beautiful And What Is Acceptable - Which, I Haste To Add, We Generally Do Not Satisfy And By Which We Struggle To Live.

I Think The Essence Of Family Is That You Have To Agree To It, And Then Supply, Out Of Your Imagination And Capacity For Loyalty, The Contents Of It.

Having A Sister Or A Friend Is Like Sitting At Night In A Lighted House. Those Outside Can Watch You If They Want, But You Need Not See Them. You Simply Say, "here Are The Perimeters Of Our Attention. If You Prowl Around Under The Windows Till The Crickets Go Silent, We Will Pull The Shades. If You Wish Us To Suffer Your Envious Curiosity, You Must Permit Us Not To Notice It." Anyone With One Solid Human Bond Is That Smug, And It Is The Smugness As Much As The Comfort And Safety That Lonely People Covet And Admire.

It Is Possible To Know The Great Truths Without Feeling The Truth Of Them.

A Letter Makes Ordinary Things Seem Important.

I Can’t Believe We Will Forget Our Sorrows Altogether. That Would Mean Forgetting That We Had Lived, Humanly Speaking. Sorrow Seems To Me To Be A Great Part Of The Substance Of Human Life.

I Did Go Through Graduate School And I Like To Do Research, To Create Something That Has A Certain Objective Solidity. The Same Thing Influences My Fiction To Some Degree, Because, You Know, My Fiction Is Often Based On History That I've Read.

I Hated Waiting. If I Had One Particular Complaint, It Was That My Life Seemed Composed Entirely Of Expectation.

It Seems To Me People Tend To Forget That We Are To Love Our Enemies, Not To Satisfy Some Standard Of Righteousness But Because God Their Father Loves Them.

There Are Several Sources For My Appreciation Of Pastors And The Way They Are Described In This Book. One Of Them Is Reading History And Realizing That They Had A Profound Creative Impact On The Middle West And The Settlement Of The Middle West.

We Have Opted For Petty Determinisms - Childhood Trauma, Genetic Inheritance, Social Conditioning, Etc. - That Have Made Us Comparatively Passive. We Seem To Prefer To Find Excuses - Which Are Really Nothing More Than The Embrace Of Determinism, A Sort Of Stockholm Syndrome Relative To Whatever We Can Claim As Limitation. I Am Fascinated By The More Enabling Self-understanding. It Has Helped Me To Find My Way Out Of The Cloying Comforts That Are Offered By Prevalent Psychological Models.

There Is So Little To Remember Of Anyone - An Anecdote, A Conversation At A Table. But Every Memory Is Turned Over And Over Again, Every Word, However Chance, Written In The Heart In The Hope That Memory Will Fulfill Itself, And Become Flesh, And That The Wanderers Will Find A Way Home, And The Perished, Whose Lack We Always Feel, Will Step Through The Door Finally And Stroke Our Hair With Dreaming Habitual Fondness Not Having Meant To Keep Us Waiting Long.

I've Developed A Great Reputation For Wisdom By Ordering More Books Than I Ever Had Time To Read, And Reading More Books, By Far, Than I Learned Anything Useful From, Except, Of Course, That Some Very Tedious Gentlemen Have Written Books.

When Things Are Taking Their Ordinary Course, It Is Hard To Remember What Matters. There Are So Many Things You Would Never Think To Tell Anyone. And I Believe They May Be The Things That Mean Most To You, And That Even Your Own Child Would Have To Know In Order To Know You Well At All.

My Politics, And My Religion As Well, Are Based Entirely On The Loveliness And Value Of Ordinary Human Lives. The Creaky Apparatus Called Politics Shelters Or Oppresses Or Threatens These Lives, And Is Therefore Of Interest.

We [americans] Inherited British Law, Which Is Like The New "reforms" That Are Being Made Now, In The Sense That People Are Permanently Entrapped In Debt, If They Once Fall Into Bankruptcy. The Reason That The Law Was Changed In American History - The Whole Early Period Of The Formation Of The Country Was Moving Away From British Law Into A Law That Is Generated Here And That Conforms To The Sense Of What Is Appropriate Here.

It All Means More Than I Can Tell You. So You Must Not Judge What I Know By What I Find Words For.

It Is Diversity That Makes Any Natural System Robust, And Diversity That Stabilizes Culture Against The Eccentricity And Arrogance That Have So Often Called Themselves Reason And Science.

To Think That Only Faultless People Are Worthwhile Seems Like An Incredible Exclusion Of Almost Everything Of Deep Value In The Human Saga. Sometimes I Can't Believe The Narrowness That Has Been Attributed To God In Terms Of What He Would Approve And Disapprove.

I Wrote Almost All Of It In The Deepest Hope And Conviction. Sifting My Thoughts And Choosing My Words. Trying To Say What Was True. And I'll Tell You Frankly, That Was Wonderful.

There Is More Beauty Than Our Eyes Can Bear, Precious Things Have Been Put Into Our Hands And To Do Nothing To Honor Them Is To Do Great Harm.

For Our Purposes As Human Beings, The Mind Is The Center Of Everything.

I Would Advise You Against Defensiveness On Priciple. It Precludes The Best Eventualities Along With The Worst. At The Most Basic Level It Expresses A Lack Of Faith.

Every Spirit Passing Through The World Fingers The Tangible And Mars The Mutable, And Finally Has Come To Look And Not To Buy.

There Are A Thousand Thousand Reasons To Live This Life, Everyone Of Them Sufficient

I Listen To Bach A Great Deal. In General I Like To Listen To Hymns And Liturgical Music.

Nothing True Can Be Said About God From A Posture Of Defense.

Generosity Is Also An Act Of Freedom, A Casting Off Of The Constraints Of Prudence And Self-interest.

Isaac Watts, Of Course, Is A Hymn Writer In The Tradition Of Congregationalism Who Lived In The Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth Century. He Is Very Interesting And Important Because He Was Also A Metaphysician. He Knew A Great Deal About What Was, For Him, Contemporary Science. He Was Very Much Influenced By Isaac Newton, For Example. There Are Planets And Meteors And So On Showing Up In His Hymns Very Often. But, Again, The Scale Of His Religious Imagination Corresponds To A Very Generously Scaled Scientific Imagination.

That Is How Life Goes--we Send Our Children Into The Wilderness. Some Of Them On The Day They Are Born, It Seems, For All The Help We Can Give Them. Some Of Them Seem To Be A Kind Of Wilderness Unto Themselves. But There Must Be Angels There, Too, And Springs Of Water. Even That Wilderness, The Very Habitation Of Jackals, Is The Lord's.

Now That I Look Back, It Seems To Me That In All That Deep Darkness A Miracle Was Preparing. So I Am Right To Remember It As A Blessed Time, And Myself As Waiting In Confidence, Even If I Had No Idea What I Was Waiting For.

The Force Behind The Movement Of Time Is A Mourning That Will Not Be Comforted. That Is Why The First Event Is Known To Have Been An Expulsion, And The Last Is Hoped To Be A Reconciliation And Return. So Memory Pulls Us Forward, So Prophecy Is Only Brilliant Memory - There Will Be A Garden Where All Of Us As One Child Will Sleep In Our Mother Eve, Hooped In Her Ribs And Staved By Her Spine.

Boughton Says He Has More Ideas About Heaven Every Day. He Said, "mainly I Just Think About The Splendors Of The World And Multiply By Two. I'd Multiply By Ten Or Twelve If I Had The Energy.

One Of The Things That Is Nice About These Old Pastors - They Were Young At The Time - Who Went Into The Middle West Is That They Were Real Humanists. They Were Often Linguists, For Example, And The Schools That They Established Were Then, As They Are Now, Real Liberal Arts Colleges Where People Studied The Humanities In A Very Broad Sense. I Think That Should Be Reflected In His Mind; Appropriately, It Is.

Rejoice With Those Who Rejoice." I Have Found That Difficult Too Often. I Was Much Better At Weeping With Those Who Weep.

There Is A Saying That To Understand Is To Forgive, But That Is An Error, So Papa Used To Say. You Must Forgive In Order To Understand. Until You Forgive, You Defend Yourself Against The Possibility Of Understanding. ... If You Forgive, He Would Say, You May Indeed Still Not Understand, But You Will Be Ready To Understand, And That Is The Posture Of Grace.

People Talk About How Wonderful The World Seems To Children, And That's True Enough. But Children Think They Will Grow Into It And Understand It, And I Know Very Well That I Will Not, And Would Not If I Had A Dozen Lives.

People Don't Acknowledge Loneliness In Themselves, And Don't Appreciate Its Benefits, The Reflection And Attentiveness That Come With It, The Deepened Acquaintance With Oneself.

The Idea That The Universe Itself Is Physically Structured Around Hierarchy Was Sort Of An Integration Of Earlier Science And Theology That Was Made By People Like Thomas Aquinas, That Was Assumed Doctrinally In That Tradition. The Reformation Rejected That Model Of Reality And Created A Highly Individualistic Metaphysics In The Sense That It Located Everything Normative That Can Be Said About Reality In Human Perception, There Being, Of Course, No Other Avenue Of Knowing. There Is Scripture, There Is Conscience, There Is Perception Itself.

Vision Sometimes Comes In A Memory.

We Have Demythologized Prematurely, That We've Actually Lost The Vocabulary For Discussing Reality At Its Largest Scales. The Idea That Myth Is The Opposite Of Knowledge, Or The Opposite Of Truth, Is Simply To Disallow It. It Is Like Saying Poetry Is The Opposite Of Truth.

Then There Is The Matter Of My Mother's Abandonment Of Me. Again, This Is The Common Experience. They Walk Ahead Of Us, And Walk Too Fast, And Forget Us, They Are So Lost In Thoughts Of Their Own, And Soon Or Late They Disappear. The Only Mystery Is That We Expect It To Be Otherwise.

Common Experience

Theologians Talk About A Prevenient Grace That Precedes Grace Itself And Allows Us To Accept It. I Think There Must Also Be A Prevenient Courage That Allows Us To Be Brave - That Is, To Acknowledge That There Is More Beauty Than Our Eyes Can Bear, That Precious Things Have Been Put Into Our Hands And To Do Nothing To Honor Them Is To Do Great Harm. And Therefore, This Courage Allows Us, As The Old Men Said, To Make Ourselves Useful. It Allows Us To Be Generous, Which Is Another Way Of Saying Exactly The Same Thing.

The Great Truth That Is Too Often Forgotten Is That It Is In The Nature Of People To Do Good To One Another.

Every Spirit Passing Through The World Fingers The Tangible And Mars The Mutable And Finally Has Come To Look And Not To Buy. So Shoes Are Worn And Hassocks Are Sat Upon And Finally Everything Is Left Where It Was And The Spirit Passes On, Just As The Wind In The Orchard Picks Up The Leaves From The Ground As If There Were No Other Pleasure In The World But Brown Leaves, As If It Would Deck, Clothe, Flesh Itself In Flourishes Of Dusty Brown Apple Leaves And Then Drops Them All In A Heap At The Side Of The House And Goes On.

Fiction That Does Not Acknowledge This At Least Tacitly Is Not True.

It Seems To Me Some People Just Go Around Lookin' To Get Their Faith Unsettled. That Has Been The Fashion For The Last Hundred Years Or So.

Characters More Or Less Present Themselves To Me. I Don't Know Their Origins. I Think If I Did, If I Seemed To Myself To Fabricate Them, I Could Not Induce Suspension Of Disbelief In Myself In The Way Writing Fiction Requires.

[john] Calvin Treats Experience As Essentially Visionary And Revelatory From Moment To Moment, Addressed To The Individual Perceiver, The Individual Soul. Where This Is Assumed Preconceptions Can Only Distract And Obscure, Though, Of Course, As Human Beings We Can Never Wholly Free Ourselves Of Them.

People Who Feel Any Sort Of Regret Where You Are Concerned Will Suppose You Are Angry, And They Will See Anger In What You Do, Even If You're Just Quietly Going About A Life Of Your Own Choosing. They Will Make You Doubt Yourself, Which, Depending On Cases, Can Be A Severe Distraction And A Waste Of Time. This Is A Thing I Wish I Had Understood Much Earlier Than I Did.

He Will Wipe The Tears From All Faces.' It Takes Nothing From The Loveliness Of The Verse To Say That Is Exactly What Will Be Required

I Have Found That The Characters In My Novels Stay With Me After A Book Has Ended. I Know Them In Some Sense. I Never Map Anything Out. I Just Think Until I Am Secure In The Voice Of One Of Them, And Then Let The Character Unfold.

The Model For Our Early Bankruptcy Laws Was Deuteronomy, The Idea That, Under Certain Circumstances - In Deuteronomy, It Is Simply The Passage Of Seven Years' Time - People Are Released From Debt, Simply Because They Are Released From Debt. No More Debt. You Start Over Again. This Has Been A Very Powerful Model In This Country. It's Being Destroyed Now. People Talk About How Much New Employment, New Wealth, And So On Are Continuously Generated In This Country.

Over My Life As A Teacher, Women Have Been Too Quiet. I'm Quiet Myself. I Don't Think I Said Three Words The Whole Of Graduate School.

. . . There Is An Absolute Disjunction Between Our Father's Love And Our Deserving.

I Want To Overhear Passionate Arguments About What We Are And What We Are Doing And What We Ought To Do. I Want To Feel That Art Is An Utterance Made In Good Faith By One Human Being To Another. I Want To Believe There Are Geniuses Scheming To Astonish The Rest Of Us, Just For The Pleasure Of It.

I Don't Know Exactly What Covetous Is, But In My Experience It Is Not So Much Desiring Someone Else's Virtue Or Happiness As Rejecting It, Taking Offense At The Beauty Of It.

Memory Can Make A Thing Seem To Have Been Much More Than It Was.

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.

A Man Can Know His Father, Or His Son, And There Might Still Be Nothing Between Them But Loyalty And Love And Mutual Incomprehension.

I Believe That Reality Is Vastly Richer Than The Cursory Attention We Usually Give It Permits Us To Understand. I Like To Write Through A Consciousness That Allows Me To Suggest Something Of This Richness.

When You Encounter Another Person, When You Have Dealings With Anyone At All, It Is As If A Question Is Being Put To You. So You Must Think, What Is The Lord Asking Of Me In This Moment, In This Situation?

I Wish I Could Leave You Certain Of The Images In My Mind, Because They Are So Beautiful That I Hate To Think They Will Be Extinguished When I Am. Well, But Again, This Life Has Its Own Mortal Loveliness. And Memory Is Not Strictly Mortal In Its Nature, Either. It Is A Strange Thing, After All, To Be Able To Return To A Moment, When It Can Hardly Be Said To Have Any Reality At All, Even In Its Passing. A Moment Is Such A Slight Thing. I Mean, That Its Abiding Is A Most Gracious Reprieve.

I Think I Am Like Most People In Letting Myself Worry About Things That Didn't Matter. Concepts Like Quotidian And Humdrum Prevented Me For Years From Really Absorbing The Miraculous Strangeness Of Bombing Around A Star On A Tottering Planet, Of Watching The World Unfold In Time.

These People Who Can See Right Through You Never Quite Do You Justice, Because They Never Give You Credit For The Effort You're Making To Be Better Than You Actually Are, Which Is Difficult And Well Meant And Deserving Of Some Little Notice.

I Was Read To As A Small Child, I Read On My Own As Soon As I Could, And I Recall Being More Or Less Overwhelmed Again And Again - If Not By What The Books Actually Said, By What They Suggested, What They Helped Me To Imagine.

When The Reformation Became Established, One Of The Things That Was A Question Between Catholicism And The Reformation Traditions Was Whether There Was A Hierarchy Of Being. If You Look At Thomas Aquinas, For Example, You Have Hierarchies Of Angels And All The Rest Of It, And Hierarchies Even Of Saints And Then Subsaints - People Who Aren't Quite There, That Sort Of Thing. The Reformation Rejected All Of That And Created A New Metaphysics, In Effect, That Is Not Hierarchical.

The Classic Theology Of My Tradition Comes From The French Renaissance. [william] Shakespeare Was Born In 1564, The Year [john] Calvin Died, And That Theology Was Very Influential In England In His Lifetime. I Think Shakespeare Was Attentive To Questions Raised By It, About Human Nature, History, Reality Itself. I Find The Two Literatures To Be Mutually Illuminating.

It's Not A Man's Working Hours That Is Important, It Is How He Spends His Leisure Time.

You Never Know When You Might Be Seeing Someone For The Last Time.

She Knew That Was Not An Honest Prayer, And She Did Not Linger Over It. The Right Prayer Would Have Been, Lord . . . I Am Miserable And Bitter At Heart, And Old Fears Are Rising Up In Me So That Everything I Do Makes Everything Worse.

Many Times When I Stop Working On A Problem Consciously, My Mind Continues To Work On It Below The Surface. Often Solutions Come On Me Quite By Surprise. I've Learned Over Time To Allow That To Happen, Rather Than To Feel That I Can Simply Solve The Problem By Continuous, Grueling Effort.

There Is No Justice In Love, No Proportion In It, And There Need Not Be, Because In Any Specific Instance It Is Only A Glimpse Or Parable Of An Embracing, Incomprehensible Reality. It Makes No Sense At All Because It Is The Eternal Breaking In On The Temporal. So How Could It Subordinate Itself To Cause Or Consequence?

If You Had To Summarize The Old Testament, The Summary Would Be: Stop Doing This To Yourselves.

I Think To The Degree Writers Are Serious, There Is A Greater Tendency For Them To Write To Themselves, Because They're Trying To Compose Their Own Thoughts. They Are Trying To Find Out What Is In Their Minds, Which Is The Great Mystery. Finding Out Who You Are, What Is In Your Head, And What Kind Of Companion You Are To Yourself In The Course Of Life. I Do Think People Have Very Profound Lives Of Which They Say Virtually Nothing.

God Does Not Need Our Worship. We Worship To Enlarge Our Sense Of Holy, So That We Can Feel And Know The Presense Of The Lord, Who Is With Us Always. He Said, Love Is What It Amounts To, A Loftier Love, And Pleasure In A Loving Presence.

It Is One Of The Best Traits Of Good People That They Love Where They Pity. And This Is Truer Of Women Than Of Men.

Memory Is The Sense Of Loss, And Loss Pulls Us After It.

A Sermon Is A Valuable Thing Now And So Impressive When You Do Hear A Good One - And There Is A Lot Of Failure In The Attempt; It's A Difficult Form - Is Because It's So Seldom True Now That You Hear People Speak Under Circumstances Where They Assume They Are Obliged To Speak Seriously And In Good Faith, And The People Who Hear Them Are Assumed To Be Listening Seriously And In Good Faith.

We Are Part Of A Mystery, A Splendid Mystery Within Which We Must Attempt To Orient Ourselves If We Are To Have A Sense Of Our Own Nature.

We Experience Pain And Difficulty As Failure Instead Of Saying, I Will Pass Through This, Everyone I Have Ever Admired Has Passed Through This, Music Has Come Out Of It, Literature Has Come Out Of It. We Should Think Of Our Humanity As A Privilege.

Ascension Seemed At Such Times A Natural Law. If One Added To It A Law Of Completion - That Everything Must Finally Be Made Comprehensible - Then Some General Rescue Of The Sort I Imagined My Aunt To Have Undertaken Would Be Inevitable. For Why Do Our Thoughts Turn To Some Gesture Of A Hand, The Fall Of A Sleeve, Some Corner Of A Room On A Particular Anonymous Afternoon, Even When We Are Asleep, And Even When We Are So Old That Our Thoughts Have Abandoned Other Business? What Are All These Fragments For , If Not To Be Knit Up Finally?

I Am Interested In Scripture And Theology. This Is An Interest That I Can Assume I Would Share With A Pastor, So That Makes Me A Little Bit Prone To Use That Kind Of Character, Perhaps, Just At The Moment. Then There Is Also The Fact That, Having Been A Church Member For Many Years, I Am Very Aware Of How Much Pastors Enrich People's Experience, People For Whom They Are Significant. I Know That It's A Kind Of Custom Of American Literature And Culture To Slang Them. I Don't Think There Is Any Reason Why That Needs To Be Persisted In.

Christianity Is A Life, Not A Doctrine . . . I'm Not Saying Never Doubt Or Question. The Lord Gave You A Mind So That You Would Make Honest Use Of It. I'm Saying You Must Be Sure That The Doubts And Questions Are Your Own.

Love Is Holy Because It Is Like Grace--the Worthiness Of Its Object Is Never Really What Matters.

Salvation Was Universally Considered To Be Much More Becoming In Women Than In Men.

Two Questions I Can't Really Answer About Fiction Are 1) Where It Comes From, And 2) Why We Need It. But That We Do Create It And Also Crave It Is Beyond Dispute.

More Generally, People Who Lived In A Period When Maternal, Infant And Childhood Mortality Were Still High Would Have Been Tougher Than Most Of Us Can Imagine.

It Is An Amazing Thing To Watch People Laugh, The Way It Sort Of Takes Them Over. Sometimes They Really Do Struggle With It . . . So I Wonder What It Is And Where It Comes From, And I Wonder What It Expends Out Of Your System, So That You Have To Do It Till You're Done, Like Crying In A Way, I Suppose, Except That Laughter Is Much More Easily Spent.

I Experience Religious Dread Whenever I Find Myself Thinking That I Know The Limits Of God’s Grace, Since I Am Utterly Certain It Exceeds Any Imagination A Human Being Might Have Of It. God Does, After All, So Love The World.

I Really Don't Know Why People Have So Much Trouble Now Writing About Religious Faith. It Is True That Clichés Can Override More Interesting Impulses. But The Desire To Find Meaning, To Be Generous, To Live Well In An Ethical And Spiritual Sense, Is So Widespread That It Should Not Seem Alien To People When It Is Expressed In The Terms Of Traditional Religion.

Ordinary Things Have Always Seemed Numinous To Me

Ordinary Things

The Best Essays Come From The Moment In Which People Really Need To Work Something Out.

I Hated Waiting. If I Had One Particular Complaint, It Was That My Life Seemed Composed Entirely Of Expectation. I Expected — An Arrival, An Explanation, An Apology. There Had Never Been One, A Fact I Could Have Accepted, Were It Not True That, Just When I Had Got Used To The Limits And Dimensions Of One Moment, I Was Expelled Into The Next And Made To Wonder Again If Any Shapes Hid In Its Shadows.

Because, Once Alone, It Is Impossible To Believe That One Could Ever Have Been Otherwise. Loneliness Is An Absolute Discovery.

There Are Two Occasions When The Sacred Beauty Of Creation Becomes Dazzlingly Apparent, And They Occur Together. One Is When We Feel Our Mortal Insufficiency To The World, And The Other Is When We Feel The World's Mortal Insufficiency To Us.

I Am Delighted If People Find That Kind Of Sustenance In Novels, But Perhaps It's Because They Don't Read The Scripture That They Are Comparing It To, Which Would Perhaps Provide Deeper Sustenance Than Many Contemporary Novels.

The Twinkling Of An Eye. That Is The Most Wonderful Expression. I've Thought From Time To Time It Was The Best Thing In Life, That Little Incandescence You See In People When The Charm Of A Thing Strikes Them, Or The Humor Of It. 'the Light Of The Eyes Rejoiceth The Heart.' That's A Fact.

When We Did Not Move Or Speak, There Was No Proof That We Were There At All.

Of My Conception I Know Only What You Know Of Yours. It Occurred In Darkness And I Was Unconsenting... By Some Bleak Alchemy What Had Been Mere Unbeing Becomes Death When Life Is Mingled With It.

--"there Is No Justice In Love...it Is Only The Glimpse Or Parable Of An Incomprehensible Reality... The Eternal Breaking In On The The Temporal.

For Me Writing Has Always Felt Like Praying Even When I Wasn't Writing Prayers.

Fiction May Be, Whatever Else, An Exercise In The Capacity For Imaginative Love, Or Sympathy, Or Identification.

I Sometimes Am Discouraged By What Seems To Be A Sort Of Conventional Disparagement Of Humankind. I Think Often People Feel That They Are Doing Something Moral When They Are Doing That, But That's Not How I Understand Morality. I Much Prefer The "everyone Is Sacred, And Everybody Errs" Model Of Reality.

Science Can Give Us Knowledge, But It Cannot Give Us Wisdom. Nor Can Religion, Until It Puts Aside Nonsense And Distraction And Becomes Itself Again.

To Crave And To Have Are As Like As A Thing And Its Shadow. For When Does A Berry Break Upon The Tongue As Sweetly As When One Longs To Taste It, And When Is The Taste Refracted Into So Many Hues And Savors Of Ripeness And Earth, And When Do Our Senses Know Any Thing So Utterly As When We Lack It? And Here Again Is A Foreshadowing - The World Will Be Made Whole. For To Wish For A Hand On One's Hair Is All But To Feel It. So Whatever We May Lose, Very Craving Gives It Back To Us Again.

It Saddens Me That Christians Need To Be Reminded That Awe Is Owed Also To Those Who Disagree With Them, Who Believe Otherwise Than They Do.

When Something Ought To Be True Then It Proves To Be A Very Powerful Truth.

Oddly Enough, My Favorite Genre Is Not Fiction. I'm Attracted By Primary Sources That Are Relevant To Historical Questions Of Interest To Me, By Famous Old Books On Philosophy Or Theology That I Want To See With My Own Eyes, By Essays On Contemporary Science, By The Literatures Of Antiquity.

If These Laws [in The Bible] Belonged To Any Other Ancient Culture We Would Approach Them Very Differently. We Need Not Bother To Reject The Code Of Hammurabi. Presumably It Is Because Moses Is Still Felt To Make Some Claim On Us That This Project Of Discrediting His Law Is Persisted In With Such Energy. The Unscholarly Character Of The Project May Derive From The Supposed Familiarity Of The Subject.

I Think Hope Is The Worst Thing In The World. I Really Do. It Makes A Fool Of You While It Lasts. And Then When It's Gone, It's Like There's Nothing Left Of You At All . . . Except What You Can't Be Rid Of.

She Conceived Of Life As A Road Down Which One Traveled, An Easy Enough Road Through A Broad Country, And That One's Destination Was There From The Very Beginning, A Measured Distance Away, Standing In The Ordinary Light Like Some Plain House Where One Went In And Was Greeted By Respectable People And Was Shown To A Room Where Everything One Had Ever Lost Or Put Aside Was Gathered Together, Waiting.

One Of The Things That Is Wonderful About Hymns Is That They Are A Sort Of Universally Shared Poetry, At Least Among Certain Populations. There Isn't Much Of That Anymore Either. There Are Very Few Poems People Can Recite, But There Are Quite A Few Hymns That, If You Hum A Few Bars, People Can At Least Come Up With Two Verses. Many Of The Older Hymns Are Very Beautiful.

I Have Always Liked The Phrase "nursing A Grudge " Because Many People Are Tender Of Their Resentments As Of The Thing Nearest Their Hearts.

Limitation Is A Good Discipline Because It Discourages Inappropriate Generalization, Which Distracts Attention From The Profound, Particular Complexity That Characterizes Anything At All.

Of Course, Mysticism Is Very Hard To Isolate Because, Given The Kind Of Consciousness That I Was Sort Of Instructed In As Religious Consciousness; That Borders On Mysticism So Closely That It's Hard To Know Whether You Qualify Or Not, Or Whether Mysticism Is Artificially Isolated When It Is Treated As A Separate Thing From Experience. Obviously, Mysticism Can Be A Form Of Madness, But Then Consciousness Can Be A Form Of Madness.

What An Embarrassment That Was, Being Somewhere Because There Was Nowhere Else For You To Be.

...if You Ever Wonder What You've Done In Your Life, And Everyone Does Wonder Sooner Or Later, You Have Been God's Grace To Me, A Miracle, Something More Than A Miracle.

The Only Obligation I Recognize Is To Say What I Believe To Be True [ ] And To Say It With Kindness. I Believe That Is How A Christian Conversation Should Proceed.

I Think The Attempt To Defend Belief Can Unsettle It, In Fact, Because There Is Always An Inadequacy In Argument About Ultimate Things.

And Often Enough, When We Think We Are Protecting Ourselves, We Are Struggling Against Our Rescuer.

Grace Has A Grand Laughter In It.

This Is Not To Say That Joy Is A Compensation For Loss, But That Each Of Them, Joy And Loss, Exists In Its Own Right And Must Be Recognised For What It Is ... So Joy Can Be Joy And Sorrow Can Be Sorrow, With Neither Of Them Casting Either Light Or Shadow On The Other.

When Things Are Taking Their Ordinary Course, It Is Hard To Remember What Matters.

The Moon Looks Wonderful In This Warm Evening Light, Just As A Candle Flame Looks Beautiful In The Light Of Morning. Light Within Light...it Seems To Me To Be A Metaphor For The Human Soul, The Singular Light Within That Great General Light Of Existence.

It Was A Source Of Both Terror And Comfort To Me Then That I Often Seemed Invisible - Incompletely And Minimally Existent, In Fact. It Seemed To Me That I Made No Impact On The World, And That In Exchange I Was Privileged To Watch It Unawares.

I Think The Connection Between Poetry And Theology, Which Is Profound In Western Tradition - There Is A Great Deal Of Wonderful Religious Poetry - Both Poetry And Theology Push Conventional Definitions And Explore Perceptions That Might Be Ignored Or Passed Off As Conventional, But When They Are Pressed Yield Much Larger Meanings, Seem To Be Part Of A Much Larger System Of Reality.

The Old Man Always Said We Should Attend To The Things We Have Some Hope Of Understanding, And Eternity Isn't One Of Them. Well, This World Isn't One Either.

Any Human Face Is A Claim On You, Because You Can't Help But Understand The Singularity Of It, The Courage And Loneliness Of It. But This Is Truest Of The Face Of An Infant. I Consider That To Be One Kind Of Vision, As Mystical As Any.

I Had Been Reading About [john] Calvin For Years And Had Been Studying The English Renaissance For Many More Years, And It Had Never Occurred To Me To Think Of Them Together. I Learned That Calvin Was The Most Widely Read Writer In England In Shakespeare's Lifetime. He Was Translated And Published In Many Editions.

In Eternity This World Will Be Like Troy, I Believe, And All That Has Passed Here Will Be The Epic Of The Universe, The Ballad They Sing In The Streets.

Faith Takes A Great Many Forms, Suited To A Variety Of Sensibilities, And Mine Happens To Suit Me Very Well.

This Is An Interesting Planet. It Deserves All The Attention You Can Give It.

That's The Strangest Thing About This Life, About Being In The Ministry. People Change The Subject When They See You Coming. And Then Sometimes Those Very Same People Come Into Your Study And Tell You The Most Remarkable Things. There's A Lot Under The Surface Of Life, Everyone Knows That. A Lot Of Malice And Dread And Guilt, And So Much Loneliness, Where You Wouldn't Really Expect To Find It, Either.

You Have To Live With Your Mind Your Whole Life.

You See How It Is Godlike To Love The Being Of Someone. Your Existence Is A Delight To Us. I Hope You Never Have To Long For A Child As I Did, But Oh, What A Splendid Thing It Has Been That You Came Finally, And What A Blessing To Enjoy You Now For Almost Seven Years.

Sometimes My Doubt Seems Intuitive, But Most Likely It Derives From An Implausibility Or A Logical Problem I May At First Find Difficult To Identify And Articulate. It Is Interesting To Me To Work Through Questions That Arise In This Way.

Never, Ever Condescend To The Reader. Assume You Are Writing For Someone Better And Smarter Than You Are. This Will Protect You From Conventionalism, Faddishness, And Cliché.

That's One Good Thing About The Way Life Is, That No One Can Know You If You Don't Let Them.

There's So Much To Be Grateful For, Words Are Poor Things.

The Attention Of The Congregation Is A Major Part Of The Attention That The Pastor Gives To His Or Her Utterance. It's Very Exceptional. I Don't Know Anyone Who Doesn't Enjoy A Good Sermon. People Who Are Completely Nonreligious Know A Good Sermon When They Hear One.

Any Father…must Finally Give His Child Up To The Wilderness And Trust To The Providence Of God. It Seems Almost A Cruelty For One Generation To Beget Another When Parents Can Secure So Little For Their Children, So Little Safety, Even In The Best Circumstances. Great Faith Is Required To Give The Child Up, Trusting God To Honor The Parents’ Love For Him By Assuring That There Will Indeed Be Angels In That Wilderness.

There Are Worries That Seem To Me Sustained By The Love Of Worry. For Example, That People Are Reading From Screens, Or Listening To Recorded Books. Why Scold The Impulse To Enjoy Language And Narrative In Whatever Form It Takes?

I Don't Think I Would Worry About An Oversaturation Of Information If It Was Indeed Information. It Is The Slovenly, Hasty Traffic In Cliché And Sensationalism And Bad Reasoning That Bothers Me. I Love Finding Arcane Primary Texts On The Web. The People Who Think To Put Them Up Are Heroes Of Mine.

That Odd Capacity For Destitution, As If By Nature We Ought To Have So Much More Than Nature Gives Us. As If We Are Shockingly Unclothed When We Lack The Complacencies Of Ordinary Life. In Destitution, Even Of Feeling Or Purpose, A Human Being Is More Hauntingly Human And Vulnerable To Kindnesses Because There Is The Sense That Things Should Be Otherwise, And Then The Thought Of What Is Wanting And What Alleviation Would Be, And How The Soul Could Be Put At Ease, Restored. At Home. But The Soul Finds Its Own Home If It Ever Has A Home At All.

The Locus Of The Human Mystery Is Perception Of This World. From It Proceeds Every Thought, Every Art.

This Morning The World By Moonlight Seemed To Be An Immemorial Acquaintance I Had Always Meant To Befriend. If There Was Ever A Chance, It Had Passed. Strange To Say, I Feel A Little That Way About Myself.

I Really Can't Claim Ever To Have Had An Exceptionally Close Relationship With A Minister. I'm Always There. I Pay My Pledge. I Listen And Observe With Interest. I'm Very Sympathetic With The Rigor And The Aesthetic Quality Of What They Do. Aside From That, I Don't Have A Kind Of Personal Experience With Any Of Them That I Could Consider Privileged, So To Speak.

Well, But You Two Are Dancing Around In Your Iridescent Little Downpour, Whooping And Stomping As Sane People Ought To Do When They Encounter A Thing So Miraculous As Water.

A Narrow Pond Would Form In The Orchard, Water Clear As Air Covering Grass And Black Leaves And Fallen Branches, All Around It Black Leaves And Drenched Grass And Fallen Branches, And On It, Slight As An Image In An Eye, Sky, Clouds, Trees, Our Hovering Faces And Our Cold Hands.

A Little Too Much Anger, Too Often Or At The Wrong Time, Can Destroy More Than You Would Ever Imagine.

If You Read Calvin, For Example, He Says, How Do We Know That We Are Godlike, In The Image Of God? Well, Look At How Brilliant We Are. Look How We Can Solve Problems Even Dreaming, Which I Think Is True, Which I've Done Myself. So Instead Of Having An Externalized Model Of Reality With An Objective Structure, It Has A Model Of Reality That Is Basically Continuously Renegotiated In Human Perception. I Think That View Of Things Is Pretty Pervasively Influential In Protestant Thought.

Families Will Not Be Broken. Curse And Expel Them, Send Their Children Wandering, Drown Them In Floods And Fires, And Old Women Will Make Songs Of All These Sorrows And Sit On The Porch And Sing Them On Mild Evenings.

Every Sorrow Suggests A Thousand Songs And Every Song Recalls A Thousand Sorrows And So They Are Infinite In Number And All The Same.

I Do Have An Impulse To Sort Of Leverage What I Say Against Something I Disagree With.

And There Is No Living Creature, Though The Whims Of Eons Had Put Its Eyes On Boggling Stalks And Clamped It In A Carapace, Diminished It To A Pinpoint And Given It A Taste For Mud And Stuck It Down A Well Or Hid It Under A Stone, But That Creature Will Live On If It Can.

It Seems To Me There Is Less Meanness In Atheism, By A Good Measure. It Seems That The Spirit Of Religious Self-righteousness This Article Deplores Is Precisely The Spirit In Which It Is Written. Of Course He's Right About Many Things, One Of Them Being The Destructive Potency Of Religious Self-righteousness. (p. 146)

I’m Writing This In Part To Tell You That If You Ever Wonder What You’ve Done In Your Life, And Everyone Does Wonder Sooner Or Later, You Have Been God’s Grace To Me, A Miracle, Something More Than A Miracle. You May Not Remember Me Very Well At All, And It May Seem To You To Be No Great Thing To Have Been The Good Child Of An Old Man In A Shabby Little Town You Will No Doubt Leave Behind. If Only I Had The Words To Tell You.

Pity And Charity May Be At Root An Attempt To Propitiate The Dark Powers That Have Not Touched Us Yet.

I'm Amazed At What I Have Taken For Granted. How To Truly Take In Our Situation I Don't Know, But I Wish I Had Started Asking Myself That Question Earlier Than I Did.

The Accessibility And Effective Immortality Of Actual Information Is A Magnificent Phenomenon, A Beautiful Extension Of Human Consciousness. It Is Too Bad People Find So Many Ways To Abuse The Internet, But That's Just How Things Are.

... But It's Your Existence I Love You For, Mainly. Existence Seems To Me Now The Most Remarkable Thing That Could Ever Be Imagined.

When We Accept Dismissive Judgments Of Our Community We Stop Having Generous Hope For It. We Cease To Be Capable Of Serving Its Best Interests.

Cultures Cherish Artists Because They Are People Who Can Say, Look At That.

Fact Explains Nothing. On The Contrary, It Is Fact That Requires Explanation.

That Is To Say, I Pray For You. And There's An Intimacy In It. That's The Truth.

Praying For You

It's A Difficult Thing To Describe Theology, What It Means And How It Disciplines Thinking. Certainly, Theology Is The Level At Which The Highest Inquiry Into Meaning And Ethics And Beauty Coincides With The Largest-scale Imagination Of The Nature Of Reality Itself.

Sometimes I Have Loved The Peacefulness Of An Ordinary Sunday. It Is Like Standing In A Newly Planted Garden After A Warm Rain. You Can Feel The Silent And Invisible Life.

I Owe Everything That I Have Done To The Fact That I Am Very Much At Ease Being Alone.

Most Institutions Of Higher Learning In The West Were Founded By And For Religious Denominations. The Supposed Alienation Of Education And Faith Is A Recent Phenomenon. At The Same Time, Neither Education Nor The Lack Of It Predisposes One To Faith.

The Assumption Behind Any Theology That I've Ever Been Familiar With Is That There Is A Profound Beauty In Being, Simply In Itself. Poetry, At Least Traditionally, Has Been An Educing Of The Beauty Of Language, The Beauty Of Experience, The Beauty Of The Working Of The Mind, And So On. The Pastor Does, Indeed, Appreciate It.

I Think Probably One Of The Important Things That Happened To Me Was Growing Up In Idaho In The Mountains, In The Woods, And Having A Very Strong Presence Of The Wilderness Around Me. That Never Felt Like Emptiness. It Always Felt Like Presence.

If We Focused On Using The Opportunities We Have, Which Are Very Great By Any Standard - Health, Longevity, Comfort And Privacy, Endless Resources Of Culture And Information - We Would Not Just Navigate This World, We Would Leave A Good Inheritance To Succeeding Generations.

A Sermon Is A Form That Yields A Certain Kind Of Meaning In The Same Way That, Say, A Sonnet Is A Form That Deals With A Certain Kind Of Meaning That Has To Do With Putting Things In Relation To Each Other, Allowing For The Fact Of Complexity Reversal, Such Things. Sermons Are, At Their Best, Excursions Into Difficulty That Are Addressed To People Who Come There In Order To Hear That.

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