Whitney’s Comments (group member since Dec 10, 2015)

Whitney’s comments from the Snippets That Inspire group.

From Maya Angelou:

"What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it."

From "The Satanic Verses" by Salmon Rushdie:

"They hadn’t been getting along lately. He told himself that afterwards, but not during.
Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the missing babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe that. During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy.

He tried to invent a happy future for them, to make it come true by making it up and then believing in it. On his way to India he was thinking how lucky he was to have her. I’m lucky yes I am don’t argue I’m the luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.

He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of these paltry fictions that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil within forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even before they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages reaching his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if his right eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it sliding to the right."

From a book called "No More Words" by Reeve Lindberg:

“Write it down!” our mother had told us whenever we said something that particularly interested or touched her: write down that sharp insight, that funny story, that especially appealing turn of phrase. She taught us that any experience worth living was worth writing about, but beyond this, she made us feel that the act of writing about it significantly affected the experience itself. I did not know whether writing enhanced an event, transforming it into something more important than it would have been had it gone unrecorded, or whether writing simply made it more real, like the testimony of an obsevant bystander who can confirm that, yes, something has indeed happened here: I am a witness, and this is what I saw."

From "Grace for the Moment" by Max Lucado (excerpted from "He Still Moves Stones"):

Growing old can be dangerous. The trail is treacherous, and the pitfalls are many. One is wise to be prepared. You know it’s coming. It’s not like God kept the process a secret. It’s not like you are blazing a trail as you grow older. It’s not as if no one has ever done it before. Look around you. You have ample opportunity to prepare and ample case studies to consider. If growing old catches by surprise, don’t blame God. He gave you plenty of warning. He also gave you plenty of advice.

Your last chapters can be your best. Your final song can be your greatest. It could be that all of your life has prepared you for a grand exit. God’s oldest have always been among His choicest.

This post is an excerpt from the "Daily Open Windows" website of T. Austin-Sparks, whose writings are a gift to me every single day:

"The gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:11,12 NIV).

I wonder what Paul would think... were he to come back today and look over the literature of the past many centuries upon his letters, the systems of truth, of doctrine, the wonderful organizations men have made of the things which he said in a moment of inspiration and need – I wonder what he would say. I think he would look at it with blank amazement, and say, "Well, that ever they could have made that out of what I said! That ever that could have resulted!" I am not sure that he would recognize his own teaching. I am quite sure that he would be very doubtful as to whether it was the right outworking of what he said. I simply raise that as a question, and yet include it as something upon which to reflect. Does not a systematizing of truth result in limitation, in a setness which breathes death? The New Testament themes are far, far too big for our molds. You cannot systematize the Cross of the Lord Jesus, you can only go on your knees and worship, conscious that you see something really far beyond your power to compass. But immediately you have boxed it in a system of truth, you have reduced it from its divine and eternal dimensions, and robbed it of its power, and brought it into a realm of death in that measure. The Person of Christ, the resurrection of Christ – take any one of the great themes of the New Testament – when you have so wonderfully brought together all the fragments and organized them, and put them into a manual, a textbook, you have killed the thing....

When the Lord Jesus came, and in Himself gave some interpretation to the law, some light upon the law, which did not fall within the compass of their system, there was no room for Him, there was no room for God in His own law. There must be room left for God!"

By T. Austin-Sparks from: "The Risen Lord and the Things Which Cannot be Shaken - Chapter 1." Please note that all his writings are available free of charge. You're welcome and Merry Christmas!

From "Tozer on Worship and Entertainment," compiled by James L. Snyder. This excerpt is from "The Chief End of Man" in 1962:

Worship is unnatural only in the sense that so few people really do it. But it is natural in that it is what God created us for. That’s what he meant us to do, to worship Him and enjoy Him forever… I find that when people haven’t found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not in them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they’re not educated, they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated, they write poetry.”

From "Boys in the Trees" by Carly Simon:

Fame is manic and terrifying, especially when your identity and status become gradually and exclusively dependent on others’ opinions, jealousies, and rivalries.

... a grandmother who impressed eccentricity in its dearest forms....

From BOYS IN THE TREES by Carly Simon

"Music brought me closer to the idea of God. Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief."

This quote is from a book entitled MOTHERING SUNDAY by Graham Swift:

We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?

Leonard Cohen died yesterday. I post this quote from a profile on him that appeared in the October 17, 2016 edition of The New Yorker Magazine entitled HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN::

"The big change is the proximity to death... I know there's a spiritual aspect to everybody's life, whether they want to cop to it or not... It's there, you can feel it in people -- there's some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot penetrate but which influences their mood and activity. So that's operating.... You hear this deep reality singing to you all the time...."

From Under the Net
By Iris Murdoch

An oppressive silence surged out of the place like a cloud. I closed the door and shut out all the little noises of the riverfront. Now there was nothing but the silence…. the silence was over me like a great bell, but the whole place throbbed with a soundless vibration which it took me a moment to recognize as the beating of my own heart… It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine….

Two excerpts from profiles that were published recently ( October 2016) by "The New Yorker" magazine:

JANET MCTEER says of herself, “I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.” She recently turned down a job because, “It was June. The wisteria blooms in June.” And I remember thinking, I want to be that -- somebody who can say, “Right now, right here, the wisteria is more important to me.

LEONARD COHEN recalls what life was like with Marianne: “There would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,” he said. “There would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.”

Words On a Page?

From “Ever After” by Graham Swift:

I shouldn’t blame Tubby Baxter. Rather, I owe him infinite thanks for introducing me to Literature, which despite its failure to save lives, including I must say, my own, and despite its being, in a place like this, forever chopped up and flung into preservatives as if it were a subject for an autopsy, I still believe in. I still believe is the speech, the voice of the heart.

From "A Healing Touch: True Stories of Life, Death, and Hospice" by Richard Russo (the chapter entitled "Blue Angels, Blue Angels" by Monica Wood:

"But really, there is something about music, even in a place such as this -- maybe especially in a place such as this -- that’s irresistible. The next song is I’ll Fly Away…. Ellen strums softly, taking the melody. I add the high harmony… and the song takes on layers and motion… and our blended notes rise up and up and widen the room and the world, yes they do. Everybody sees this, and now we’re a team, lighting into the rest of the songs…I’ve begun to think of this as praying, as holy work. We are a ring of people, an ad hoc band of angels…. mingling our voices, magnificently I believe… The music has made us friends."

The phrase "mad abstract dark" is from Yeats, and a book I just finished captures it both in plot and in glimpses as scene, like this:

"... in the intervals between labor and labor the wild regret that was never to die, but was to be hidden in silence and unforgiving and the avoidance of outward feeling until over it grew a shell of habit, so that for days at a time the three forgot the reason for their watchful silence and the bleakness of their house..." (From "Remembering Laughter" by Wallace Stegner).

This is a quote from a newsletter called "Open Heaven Digest" by Ron McGatlin:

"Dull and sleeping souls are awakening. Sparks of glory are becoming hearts on fire with passionate holy Love, all-consuming love for God and His creation, unexplainable love flowing like a flood from deep within, outward to change the atmosphere and the world around us. Refreshing, life-giving love flows freely in a never-ending stream to bring life to a desperate, love-starved people."

From "Under the Net" by Iris Murdoch:

“Fireworks are sui generis," he once said to me. If you must compare them to another art, compare them to music.” There was something about fireworks which absolutely fascinated Hugo. I think what pleased him most about them was their impermanence. I remember his holding forth to me once about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. “That’s what all art is really,” Hugo said, “only we don’t like to admit it.”

From "The Sea, The Sea" by Iris Murdoch

The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon, it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains toward the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

From "Angle of Repose" by Wallace Stegner:

"He stared, he snapped his fingers, his brow wrinkled deeply under the pushed-up glasses. and the glasses fell down astride the flat bridge of his nose. They were odd glasses that in the sunlight refracted and divided the eyes behind them so that for an instant he looked as multiple-eyed as a horsefly."