Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body.
Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
Category: Random thoughts
The brute from the slime
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we – you and I and others like us – have brought up from the slime.
John Williams, Stoner
Lower the defences
Dialogue is born from a respectful attitude toward the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of view, their opinion and their proposals. Dialogue entails a warm reception and not a pre-emptive condemnation. To dialogue, one must know how to lower the defences, to open the doors of one’s home and to offer warmth.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now also known as Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
Saint or Communist?
When I fed the poor, they called me a saint.
When I asked why they were poor, they called me a Communist.
Dom Helder Camara
Very bad news for competitive blokes
Some admittedly rather varied passages from Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of:
The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
Here’s one that made me laugh:
We can compare the number of synapses that fire during the female and the male orgasm – very bad news for competitive blokes …
Barnes complains about the bureaucracy that has replaced folklore in hospital dying and tells the following story:
Registering my mother’s death, I was dealt with by a woman with a metronomic delivery and no skill – or luck – in human contact. All the details had been given, the signatures provided, the duplicate copies obtained, and I was rising to leave when she suddenly uttered four soullessly otiose words in a dead voice: ‘That completes the registration.’ She used the same mechanical tone employed by the humanoid bosses of the Football Association, when the last of the ivory balls has been drawn from the velvet bag, and they announce, ‘That completes the draw for the quarter-final round of the FA Cup.’
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If I kill my enemy
Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution.
… The logic of retribution implies no end and no hope. If I kill my enemy, and his brother kills me, and my brother kills his brother, and so on and on, we may all have strong motives and even good reasons; the world may be better off without all of us. And yet this is a form of behavior that we have wisely outlawed. We have outlawed it, that is, in private life. In our national life, it remains the established and honored procedure.
… Peaceableness is not … passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and a practicable method, it is nothing. … In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.
Wendell Berry, ‘Peaceableness toward Enemies’, in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
No one would take him for a clergyman
Two thoughts from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View …
… one a profound comment by the narrrator:
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
… and one, spoken by Lucy, a little disturbing:
He seems to see the good in everyone. No one would take him for a clergyman.
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Brief thoughts & quotes … 