More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brooks
Read between
February 12 - March 4, 2020
“You are living through an unusual time,” Henri Nouwen writes. You see that you are called to go toward solitude, prayer, hiddenness, and great simplicity. You see that, for the time being, you have to be limited in your movements, sparing with phone calls, and careful in letter writing….The thought that you may have to live away from friends, busy work, newspapers, and exciting books no longer scares you….It is clear that something in you is dying and something is being born. You must remain attentive, calm, and obedient to your best intuitions. In the wilderness, life is stripped of
...more
“It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!”
“At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and…great laughter.”
As Augustine put it, “Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.” T. S. Eliot once captured the ideal of religious life: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).”
A people is made by making, Sacks continues; a nation is built by building.
When you see that, you realize joy is not just a feeling, it is a moral outlook. It is a permanent state of thanksgiving and friendship, communion and solidarity.
Love emerges between people out of nothing, as a pure flame.
