{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
This, for me, is one of the most striking passages from Douglas Coupland’s Life after God, which I recently re-read:
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.
Wise advice on marriage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:
… let there be spaces in your togetherness.
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone …And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
I certainly don’t believe in a heavenly holiday camp filled with harp-playing, hymn-singing and perpetual church services – or any other kind of everlasting torment!
Dave Tomlinson, How to Be a Bad Christian … and a Better Human Being
Quite!
Be anything you like …, but at all costs avoid one thing: success …. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.
This again is from Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now. ‘Full attention given to nothing’ – as a teacher I’d say this is one of the most debilitating faults of our 24/7 society.
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two – love and controlling power over the other person – are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality
They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them …
From Stoner by John Williams
Very sad – and, one suspects, all too often so very true.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 