quote day: a spiritual theme

“Madame,” I said, “if our god were a pagan god or the god of intellectuals — and for me it comes to much the same — He might fly to His remotest heaven and our grief would force Him down to earth again. But you know that our God came to be among us. Shake your fist at Him, spit in His face, scourge Him, and finally crucify Him: what does it matter? My daughter, it’s already been done to Him.”

~ George Bernanos
Diary of a Country Priest

Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

~ Frederick Buechner

The only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living human being. When it is absorbed there, like blood in a sponge or a spear thrown into one’s heart, it loses its power and goes no further.

~ Gale D. Webbe
The Night and Nothing

Vengeance is a passion to get even. It is a hot desire to give back as much pain as someone gave you ….. The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score. Fairness never comes. The chain reaction set off by every act of vengeance always takes its unhindered course. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as long as parity is demanded, and the escalator never stops, never lets anyone off.

~ Lewis Smedes
The Art of Forgiveness

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God …
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing:
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

~ T.S. Eliot
“East Coker”

When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his hurtful act. You recreate him. At one moment you identify him ineradicably as the person who did you wrong. The next moment you change that identity. He is remade in your memory. You think of him now not as the person who hurt you, but a person who needs you. You feel him now not as the person who alienated you, but as the person who belongs to you. Once you branded him as a person powerful in evil, but now you see him as a person weak in his needs. You recreated your past by recreating the person whose wrong made your past painful.

~ Lewis Smedes
The Art of Forgiveness

He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. Creation seems to be delegation, through and through. I suppose this is because He is a giver.

C.S. Lewis
The World’s Last Night

I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end.

T.S. Eliot

And here in dust and dirt, O here
The lilies of His love appear.

~ George Herbert