Egregious Reader

“Even if a wall was constructed, it’s not a cure-all. When any human being is facing starvation and unimaginable violence, he or she will do nearly anything to survive—including scaling a wall or crossing an ocean, as we’ve witnessed among the throngs of Syrian refugees escaping Europe. If a wall is the only thing that stands between near-certain death and the possibility of life, you and I would risk everything to climb over it, because the risk of staying put is far greater than the fear of being caught. ‘Show me a fifty-foot wall,’ former secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once said, ‘and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.’”

So below is a quote from one of my favorite authors (an Orthodox Priest and scholar) Alexander Schmemann from his book on Baptism: ​"the Church has never formulated it [teaching concerning the Devil] systematically, in the form of clear and concise 'doctrine.' What is of paramount importance for us, however, is that the Church has always had the experience of the demonic, has always, in plain words, known the Devil. If this direct knowledge has not resulted in a neat and orderly doctrine, it is because of the difficulty, if not impossibility, rationally to define the irrational. And the demonic and, more generally, evil are precisely the reality of the irrational. Some theologians and philosophers, in an attempt to explain and thus to 'rationalize' the experience and the existence of evil, explained it as an absence : the absence of good. They compared it, for example, to darkness, which is nothing but the absence of light and which is dispelled when light a...

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.                                             Wendell Berry (1967) Everything we do lives after us.                                                                                      Wallace Stegner (1976) "The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents. We are God's stake in human history... We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom."                                                                   Abraham H...

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.              -- GK Chesterton Lunacy and Letters Good sermon called Theology of Sleep by John Baillie: http://www.luc.edu/faculty/pmoser/idolanon/BaillieChristianDevotion.html#sleep

From The Hitch-Hikers by Eudora Welty I just liked this line: Of course it was by the guitar that he had known at once that they were not mere hitch-hikers. They were tramps. They were full blown, abandoned to this. Both of them were.

Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt t...

"Having no tradition myself, I used to have a romantic view of tradition. I thought that time really does sift men's acts, that the good they do lives after them and gradually improves their descendants, and that the ill they do eventually writhes in pain and dies among its worshipers. That was real innocence. Everything  we do lives after us." Wallace Stegner The Spectator Bird

Berry's new book ends with the title story A Place In Time. It takes us right into the present (2008). It mostly tells the story of Mary and Elton Penn who married for love even thought it made for hard beginnings as Mary's family shunned them for their entire lives. At the very end of the story, after Mary and Elton have died, Andy Catlett is talking with their daughter Martha and he hears that once Mrs. Mountjoy (Mary's mother) reached out to Martha ... this was too late and was not reciprocated but it left Andy pondering. "Andy had often proposed to himself that joy, the joy of love or beauty or of work, could so abound in this world that it would overflow all of this world's mortal vessels. But that night he was thinking of sorrow, filled suddenly with the apprehension of such hurt and sorrow as might overflow the capacity of the world, let alone that a mere life. ...      ...He thought, as we all have been taught to think, of our half-lit world, a speck ha...

This is from a lecture in 1986 describing his fiction: Everybody grows up inside a particular, almost invariably small world. Everybody, without exception. Very early in our lives we learn the "banking system" of that world: family, small town, neighborhood, church, community. At the same time, ideas begin to come to us from outside this small particular world. These ideas are often alien to those values we are being taught in our particular world. We learn to behave and act in a certain way from our fathers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles. We learn if we behave incorrectly, certain things follow from that incorrect behavior. We turn on the television set and someone is behaving incorrectly. Nothing happens as a result. It's a joke. It's a laugh. It's accepted. When we experience this sort of thing in an ongoing way, we develop a certain method of handling this constant clash of values. What I'm trying to explore in my books is one kind of such co...

"I told him that a man’s life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I’ve tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.” Mat Feltner from Wendell Berry's A Place On Earth . This is a weighty thing to say, it makes me heavy to think of it, yet, I feel I must agree with it and take upon myself this weight. I think it is key that he says "man's life." There is a difference when you are a child, but once you have crossed into adulthood, by age or progeny, then you move beyond the realm of the temporal ... your actions, your deeds, what you do in the land, what you fail to do has lasting effects. It is wise to consider. It is wise to be deliberate. Mat goes on to apply this wisdom directly to his actions toward his own son who is missing in action in WWII. He is feeling the permanence of his fathering, knowing that he may...

What a solemn, precious lesson! It is not to sin only that the cleansing of the Husbandman refers (John 15:1-3). It is to our own religious activity, as it is developed in the very act of bearing fruit. In working for God our natural gifts of wisdom, or eloquence, or influence, or zeal are ever in danger of being unduly developed, and then trusted in. So, after each season of work, God has to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the consciousness of the helplessness and the danger of all that is of man, to feel that we are nothing. ---- Andrew Murry (from Dawn's Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God). Just try to imagine that the Pattern is called a "Lamb." That alone is a scandal to the natural mind. Who has any desire to be a lamb? (Soren Kierkegaard)