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Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors.
By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted and they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.
I had seen beyond the scrim of the physical world and it was all love, living love, a love of which our human love, our human lives, were only a manifestation and a symbol.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.1
in the end you discover you are still yourself, no matter what. Some traits are in your nature, born with you. Some scars are written in your flesh indelibly, the signature of history. And some brokenness is simply inherent in the human condition. I was grieving over my limitations and the unchangeable past, mourning the ideal childhood I hadn’t had, and the ideal parents my parents couldn’t be.
He looked up into the light and said aloud, “Thank you, sun, for shining on me.” At this point, I felt pretty much the same way.
Maybe all of history’s beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity’s relationship with an unseen spirit of love.
You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror.
Reality is the same for everyone, but your experience of reality is yours alone. You cannot know that experience fully by yourself, you cannot experience that experience fully by yourself. It must be reflected back to you by its source, its creator, and only his love can reflect it back to you as it actually is. You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.
In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what.
the very fact that the mind can be deceived implies that it can be not deceived, that it can know things rightly—deep things—beauty, truth—just as they are.
I saw now that I was like an archaeologist who, after a lifetime of digging, had unearthed the lost foundations of a civilization that turned out, in fact, to be his own.
We are meant for something better, and we know it, and even as we suffer and mourn, we also laugh.
I saw my own sin and suffering on the face of everyone who prayed, and I understood that tuna casseroles can also be part of the language of love.
Ritual and transition, symbol and reality, story and life—they are intimately intertwined forever. They are the language of the imagination, the language in which God speaks to man.
God had sung to me without ceasing in the stories I loved and in my love and in my story.
And somehow, once again, by the hilarious mercy of God, I had made my way to the great good thing.
