God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manly Hopkins

Big-Kid Eyes

By the end of third grade, most of the kids’ baby teeth were gone. The permanent ones had arrived in their mouths. Around fourth grade something similar happens with eyes. The baby eyes don’t drop out, nor are there eye fairies around to leave quarters under pillows, but new eyes do arrive nevertheless. Big-kid eyes replace little-kid eyes.

Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop up everything they see and swallow it whole, no questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They notice things that the little-kid eyes never bothered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the way a kid dresses or pronounces a word.

-Jerry Spinelli, Loser

Do it Again

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”

-Ogden Nash

Television vs Radio

Television has no patience and little curiosity, and so the picture jumps constantly. A guitarist can sit and pick the most stunning simple version of "Wildwood Flower" and achieve a moment of transcendent grace but television is deaf, it can't sit still, it circles the guitarist, shoots his hands, his face, jumps in back of him, crouches, circles, until the viewer is completely separated from the performance. You don't need this if you want Leo Kottke, whose appeal is through his music. What you want television for is a celebrity guitarist who is more interesting for who he is than for what he sounds like. For example, if a Doberman pinscher played "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" on the guitar, you wouldn't be satisfied to listen to him on the radio and hear the announcer say, "That was Rex playing. Good job, Rex." You'd want to see it for yourself.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married

The Royal Navy Prayer

Go forth into the world in peace: be of good courage; hold fast that which is good; render no man evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak; help the afflicted; honour all men; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Rather a Handsome Pig

“If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice, “that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”

The baby grunted again and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turned-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose: also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether, Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature, when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further.

So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire-Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Part-time Novelist, Christian, Pig

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

That is who I am. Who you are I do not know, and yet perhaps I know something. I know that like me you wake up each morning to a day that you must somehow live, to a self that you must somehow be, and to a mystery that you cannot fathom if only the mystery of your own life. Thus, strangers though we are, at a certain level there is nothing about either of us that can be entirely irrelevant to the other. Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse. And there is always some comfort in knowing that Kilroy also was here.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

PSAL. I. Done into Verse, 1653

Bless’d is the man who hath not walk’d astray
In counsel of the wicked, and ith’ way
Of sinners hath not stood, and in the seat
Of scorners hath not sate. But in the great
Jehovah’s Law is ever his delight,
And in his Law he studies day and night.
He shall be as a tree which planted grows
By watry streams, and in his season knows
To yield his fruit, and his leaf shall not fall,
And what he takes in hand shall prosper all.
Not so the wicked, but as chaff which fann’d
The wind drives, so the wicked shall not stand
In judgment, or abide their trial then,
Nor sinners in th’assembly of just men.
For the Lord knows the upright way of the just
And the way of bad men to ruin must.

-John Milton

Blinking Eye

“There’s more to you, young Haroun Khalifa, than meets the blinking eye.”

-Salman Rushdi, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Fidelity

It was at that moment that King Pellinore reappeared. Even before he came into view they could hear him crashing in the undergrowth and calling out, “I say, I say! Come here at once! A most dreadful thing has happened!” He appeared dramatically upon the edge of the clearing, just as a disturbed branch, whose burden was too heavy, emptied a couple of hundredweight of snow upon his head. King Pellinore paid no attention. He climbed out of the snow heap as if he had not noticed it, still calling out “I say! I say!”

“What is it, Pellinore?” shouted Sir Ector.

“Oh, come quick,” cried the King and, turning round distracted, he vanished again into the forest.

“Is he all right,” inquired Sir Ector, “do you suppose?”

“Excitable character,” said Sir Grummore. “Very.”

“Better follow up and see what he’s doin’.”

The procession moved off sedately in King Pellinore’s direction, following his erratic course by the fresh tracks in the snow.

The spectacle which they came across was one for which they were not prepared. In the middle of a dead gorse bush King Pellinore was sitting, with the tears streaming down his face. In his lap there was an enormous snake’s head, which he was patting. At the other end of the snake’s head there was a long, lean, yellow body with spots on it. At the end of the body there were some lion’s legs which ended in the slots of a hart.

“There, there,” King Pellinore was saying. “I didn’t mean to leave you altogether. It was only because I wanted to sleep in a feather bed, just for a bit. I was coming back, honestly I was. Oh, please don’t die, Beast, and leave me without any fewmets.”

-T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone

Calling

If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, "Here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well."

-George Smith Patton

Cottleston Pie

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly
Ask me a riddle, and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie
A fish can't whistle and neither can I
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie
Why does a chicken?--I don't know why
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie

-A. A. Milne

Morning Prayer

We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be that in the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere—grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.

-C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, “A Slip of the Tongue”

Deut 4:9

“Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.”

Epic Poetry

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

-G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, “A Piece of Chalk”