So Much for Feng Shui

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn (after an argument in a raffia bungalow under an azure sky) that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery.

-Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel, 25.

USB Cables

I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next. -Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 121.

Incarnation

Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Heruleans, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves...all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being—man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd, with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over.

-Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 26

Q.
What do you believe when you say: "I believe in God the Father, almighty, maker of heaven and earth"?

A.
That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who out of nothing created heaven and earth
and everything in them,
who still upholds and rules them
by his eternal counsel and providence,
is my God and Father
because of Christ his Son.

I trust him so much that I do not doubt
he will provide
whatever I need
for body and soul,
and he will turn to my good
whatever adversity he sends me
in this sad world.

He is able to do this because he is almighty God;
he desires to do this because he is a faithful Father.

It Just Makes You Sick

This was as much as I heard of Mr. Gilmer's cross-examination, because Jem made me take Dill out. For some reason Dill had started crying and couldn't stop; quietly at first, then his sobs were heard by several people in the balcony. Jem said if I didn't go with him he'd make me, and Reverand Sykes said I'd better go, so I went. Dill had seemed to be all right that day, nothing wrong with him, but I guess he hadn't fully recovered from running away.

"Come on out under the trees," I said. "Heat got you, I expect." We chose the fattest live oak and we sat under it.

"It was just him I couldn't stand," Dill said. "That old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him—"

"Dill, that's his job. Why, if we didn't have prosecuters—well, we couldn't have defense attorneys, I reckon."

Dill exhaled patiently. "I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it make me sick, plain sick."

"He's supposed to act that way, Dill, he was cross—"

"He didn't act that way when—"

"Dill, those were his own witnesses."

"Well, Mr. Finch didn't act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined them. The way that man called him 'boy' all the time and sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered—"

"Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro."

"I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business takin' like that—it just makes me sick."

"That's just Mr. Gilmer's way, Dill, he does 'em all that way. You've never seen him get good'n down on one yet. Why, when—well, today Mr. Gilmer seemed to me like he wasn't half trying. They do 'em all that way, most lawyers, I mean."

"Mr. Finch doesn't."

"He's not an example, Dill, he's—" I was trying to grope in my memory for a sharp phrase of Miss Maudie Atkinson's. I had it: "He's the same in the courtroom as he is on the public streets."

"That's not what I mean," said Dill.

"I know what you mean, boy," said a voice behind us. We thought it came from the tree-trunk, but it belonged to Mr. Dolphus Raymond. He peered around the trunk at us. "You aren't thin-hided, it just makes you sick, doesn't it?"

-Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 226-227.

Skin the Cat

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

-G. K. Chesterton, "The Maniac," Orthodoxy, 15.

Long on Diagnosis, Short on Cure

Now they were awful good at triage, that's for sure
But they were long on diagnosis and short on cure

-Don Chaffer

Vandalism of Shalom

...Shalom is God's design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.

-Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Optimism

We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.

-Winston Churchill

Freaks

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.

-Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction"

Rot

In the introduction to a collection of his stories called Rotting Hill, Wyndham Lewis has written, "If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot." The general accusation passed against writers now is that they write about rot because they love it. Some do, and their works may betray them, but it is impossible not to believe that some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is.

-Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and His Country"

Like and As

You put up a brave front in this world, especially if it’s the world I was born into. No matter what sad thing happens, you go on with business as usual if for no other reason than that it would never do to let down in front of the help. You go on teaching your ninth graders the difference between like and as. You keep the lawn mowed in the summer and the walk shoveled in the winter. When you find out your wife has been cheating on you with your muscle-bound nephew, you don’t throw them out but get out yourself. You move into Mrs. Gunther’s boarding house where after a while things work themselves out somehow and you get back together again so almost entirely as if nothing had ever happened that it might as well not have, for all you take away from it that might have saved your soul.

-Frederick Buechner, Treasure Hunt

Leaderless, Sheep are Lost

This is the way that it was in the south: the snow fell fine and beautiful, with a soundless flake. There was the sense of mothering come to a drowsy child, someone tucking the world to sleep. Animals were thankful for the featherbed.

But in the north, those several nights, the snow was a dissatisfied hag: bitch-winter beating the earth with her stick. Bitter crystals blew hard and horizontal so that the Animals lowered their heads and turned away. If someone tried to see where he was, his eyeballs stung for the trouble, as though punished for looking—and he saw nothing anyway.

So the Sheep simply stopped on a hillside—the lee side, they hoped, but they didn’t know. They were leaderless, and their own poor senses had been whited out. They pressed together in a flock, all of them hanging their heads, not one of them lying down, for fear that he might be covered and smothered and lost forever. Or, maybe Sheep were just too stunned to think of lying down. They’d walked into this weather standing up; they’d wait the weather standing up still. They stood, leaderless. They stood like plain cattle in the blizzard. They packed their tails against their anuses and stood motionless. And this is how submissive the Sheep were: they didn’t so much as shake the hoarfrost from their faces. Their own breathing bearded them; their exhalations froze, and the white beards grew, because no one told them to move.

It is a perilous thing to be leaderless and obedient at once. When there’s no command to obey, then “No” becomes the only command, and a heartless one: No to instincts, no to boldness, no to newness even in this witching weather; then no to survival, and no to life. Don’t move! How do you know your movement isn’t for the worse? Then stand still and hang your heads, Sheep, Sheep! And the harder the storm blows, the meeker the Sheep. The worse the conditions, the more they yearn to obey. Therefore, this blizzard fixed them.

Leaderless, there was nothing to do but nothing.

Leaderless, they just stood still, and the Hag shrieked all around them, cursing them, beating them with her stick.

Leaderless, Sheep are lost.

-Walter Wangerin, The Book of Sorrows

Could Be A Lot Worse

a kiss for the miles to drive, a prayer for when it rains
one shot of perspective, a couple more to kill the pain
when all the best metaphors are hitting too close to home
when all the best metaphors are bleeding from your bones

I'm gonna die a failure, but to happiness awake
you can go to sleep in hell, and wake up at heaven's gate
think of all that we missed today that lay right before our eyes
think of all that fades away in our hard-pressed compromise

this is dangerous terrain we're attempting to traverse
and it's a cryin' shame, but it could be a lot worse

so you proceed with caution, though you're mumbling in the dark
and that one shot of perspective has finally hit your heart

faith, she's a whistling train running hard in the dark
hope is like a thing untamed, gonna lay to waste your heart
love is a little bit of God, there for all to know
love is the everlasting arms that never do let go...

this is dangerous terrain we're attempting to traverse
and it's a cryin' shame, but it could be a lot worse

-Bill Mallonee

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