Not Just a Laundry List

All who read scriptures know this story well...Absalom instigated a palace coup and David fled for his life to the wilderness. Civil war followed, father fighting son, son fighting father. David won back his throne at a terrible cost, the death of his son, over which he mourned magnificently. The life of David is full of incidents like this. Everyone’s life is. Not a palace coup for most of us and, hopefully, not the treachery of a son, but conflict and failure and fear, love and betrayal, loss and salvation. Every day is a story, a morning and evening ending that are boundaries for people who go about their tasks with more or less purpose, go to war, make love, earn a living, scheme and sin and believe. Everything is connected. Meaning is everywhere. The days add up to a life that is a story...We are not always aware that we are living a story; often it seems more like a laundry list. But story it is.

- Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall

A Poem Can Be Like

A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist, 212.

Even Rocks

There’s an organic interconnectedness in the comprehensive totality of creation, visible and invisible, “heavens and earth,” by which everything seen and heard, tasted, touched and experienced, if only followed far enough and deep enough, brings us into the presence of God. Even rocks.

-Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 207.

The Devil's Work is Abstraction

The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities—which, of course, is why “David’s heart smote him after he had numbered the people” (2 Samuel 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the “acceptability” of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, 279.

Things Must Be Met for Themselves

But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults: it is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 19-20

Peevish

The Dean was sorry for his disappointment but the peevishness added to his joy, for a man is only peevish to his friends.

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch, 177.

An Unanswerable Objection to John Locke

It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near to it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.

- Thomas De Quincy, "On Murder", 19 (Quoted by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Footnote 68)