Books
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This Is How A Man Falls In Love
“I believe passionately that Christianity is a way of life, not a theological system with which one must be in intellectual agreement. I feel that Christ would admit into discipleship anyone who sincerely desired to follow him, and allow that disciple to make his creed out of his experience; to listen, to consider, to pray, to follow, and ultimately to believe only those convictions about which the experience of fellowship made him sure. This is how a man falls in love. He could not write a creed about the loved one at the beginning. He finds someone whose life he would like to share, and, if she is willing to…
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Undertakings
Jinx and I were up before the sun lifted above the fog, and the air was as cool as an August morning’s can be, full of mist and memories and murmurs, and we set out for our stroll. On the way back, the sun pierced the fog and clattered down upon us in arrows and spears, and the birds sensed the change and their cries grew more boisterous and they began to swoop from tree to fence to building to post to rock. The gravel crunched beneath my shoes and a chipmunk scampered across my path, his tail held straight up. Jinx was looking in the other direction and I…
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Last Standard Day
We slept in just a tad this morning, and then got ready for our annual ritual of joy: the book sale at the public library in a nearby town. When we arrived, the crowd was still pretty sparse, so I anticipated some good free-range browsing. This was before he sidled up to me. I was among the history/biography tables when I detected the presence of someone standing close behind me. I glanced back and saw that he was about my age and size, with a neatly-trimmed Vandyke and steel-rimmed glasses. The expression on his face was smug; I clocked him as some sort of academic. His clothes weren’t top quality,…
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A Big Little Life
Up until this past weekend, I had read exactly one book by Dean Koontz. It was a supernatural suspense novel called Whispers, and I read it when I was a young Marine in 1980. The book came into my possession just as I was ending a two-or-three year spree of reading Stephen King novels, and I was growing tired of the genre. Whispers did its work with me — it kept me up late into the night reading, and later kept me awake listening to the night sounds and thinking about the world Koontz had created. But I assumed that Mr. Koontz was treading the same ground King had already…
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Recoverable And Precious
I have been working for some time now on a memoir, a memoir focused on a particular area of my life and a particular person. As the stack of pages grows incrementally, I find myself remembering things long forgotten, and discarding memories that I once thought important but now see as distractions. As with all the things I have ever undertaken in my life, I feel inadequate to the task, but I also feel a strong compelling hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward as certainly as my own fingers push the pencil along the page of my notebooks. Reading this evening in one of Frederick Buechner’s…
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Dancing With God
We have but to live, take each day as it comes, see the Lord in all that happens and have a kind of response to the will of God that is much like dancing. You must work with it. It is not a matter of passive submission. This is no way to dance; it is too heavy, too leaden, too dragging and uninspired. No, you must dance with your partner, you must cooperate, you must work with the will of God. This is the sort of dancing that leads to the kingdom and makes one free. — Brother Paul Quenon, OCSO, in his book “In Praise of the Useless Life:…
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Boll
“There were some days when he hated everything except himself, but today was like most days, when he hated only himself and loved everything…” — Heinrich Boll “In The Valley of the Thundering Hoofs“ ~ S.K. Orr
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“Where The Holiness Is Palpable…”
I’ve been reading Frederick Buechner’s novel The Storm and enjoying his reverent craft to a high degree. I’ve also been listening to some of his talks while driving to and from work. An interview conducted by Walter Brueggemann is one of my favorites, and I’ve included the third section of it below. In the interview, Buechner talks about his experiences within and thoughts about the church, and he makes the perceptive point that “the mystery is missing” in the physical structure of today’s church buildings, noting with sadness the sterile, brightly lit religious structures of today. His words about holy aesthetics reminded me of the fine essay In Praise of…