Visiting Paris

The thing is, Adam, time travel is like visiting Paris. You can't just read the guide book. You've got to throw yourself in, eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers—or is that just me? Stop asking questions. Go and do it!

-Doctor Who (quoted by Charles Garland, preaching in Fairmont, WV on 7/24/2008)

The Clown in the Belfy

In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. "When the steeple was added," Howard Mudgett writes in his history, "one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven."

...Let us never forget Lyman Woodard...silhouetted up there against the blue Rupert sky. Let us join him in the belfry with our feet toward Heaven like his because Heaven is where we are heading. That is our faith and what better image of faith could there be? It is a little crazy. It is a little risky. It sets many a level head wagging. And it is also our richest treasure and the source of our deepest joy and highest hope.

-Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, 115-117.

Dabble and Splash

This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there never dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.

-C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory