Quotations
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The Unquiet Universal Trance
Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten-tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in “reality.” One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring himself that he has not fallen behind. That he is still there. That he still counts! My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To “fall behind” in this sense is to…
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On All Saints Day
“One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. He is offering up his sufferings to God, and many a time he is praying much more truly than one who goes away by himself and meditates his head off, and, if he has squeezed out a few tears, thinks that is prayer.” – Saint Teresa of Avila. To Roman Catholics, saints are super-Christians, marked out by their devotion, piety, and service to Christ. To Protestants, everyone who believes in Jesus is a saint. I’m not sure what I believe. This is a sentence that can apply to about 90% of my own interior life. What I…
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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