We had to learn ourselves Victor Frankl What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing ones, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. Victor Frankl, speaking […]
The absoluteness of the gospel has to do with the absoluteness and the unconditional nature of love Walter Kasper The absoluteness of the gospel has to do with the absoluteness and the unconditional nature of love, which neither casts aside nor absorbs the other, but rather withdraws, makes room for the other and thus acknowledges […]
God desires us, as if we were God Rowan Williams The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are […]
let me be the thinking heart Etty Hillesum Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman from Amsterdam, died in Auschwitz on 30th November, 1943. Throughout the descent into Nazism she kept an extraordinarily moving diary, addressing “that deeper and wider part (of myself) in which I repose….what I call God”. In the concentration camp women and girls […]
This ineffable moment Mary Austin How long this ineffable moment lasted I never knew. It broke like a bubble at the sudden singing of a bird, and the wind blew and the world was the same as ever – only never quite the same. Mary Austin If you’ve had such an experience (‘a moment in […]
The sudden illumination T S Eliot During what seemed like months of rain I was carrying a tray load of food to a wormy litter of pups down at the kennels when I slipped and fell on my back, dog dishes shooting in all directions. I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by rain under […]
‘The most surprising, precious moment’ Ruth Cracknell ‘Something you somehow haven’t to deserve’ Robert Frost It is the most precious moment I have known; it is the most surprising moment because entirely unexpected. And if this moment I can keep, then nothing more do I need, now or ever. We are not, you see, and […]
Struck by grace Paul Tillich Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the bible contains the truth. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness….when we walk through the […]
Significance of trivial things James Joyce There are moments when the outer world is seen with an almost pristine wonder….Sudden brilliance of the chestnut tree across the road. Bright yellow leaves in the sun. How enlivening, inspiriting they are in those unexpected shafts which strike into the heart from them outside world. Philip Toynbee Ian […]
Grandly related Henry Thoreau In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. […]