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I believe that it is in you to be good citizens. And what is it to be a good citizen? It is to acknowledge the other person’s rights before asserting your own, but always to be conscious of your own. It is to be free in word and deed, but it is also to know that your freedom is subject to the other person’s freedom. It is to create the useful and the beautiful with your own hands, and to admire what others have created in love and with faith.
Nay, Jesus was not a phantom, nor a conception of the poets. He was man like yourself and myself. But only to sight and touch and hearing; in all other ways He was unlike us. He was a man of joy; and it was upon the path of joy that He met the sorrows of all men.
One thing I did not use to understand in Jesus: He would make merry with His listeners; He would tell jests and play upon words, and laugh with all the fullness of His heart, even when there were distances in His eyes and sadness in His voice. But I understand now.
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
He was often sad, but His sadness was tenderness shown to those in pain, and comradeship given to the lonely. When He smiled, His smile was as the hunger of those who long after the unknown.
Yet He was sad with the sadness of the winged who will not soar above his comrade.
In a field, I have watched an acorn, a thing so still and seemingly useless. And in the spring I have seen that acorn take roots and rise, the beginning of an oak tree, towards the sun. Surely you would deem this a miracle, yet that miracle is wrought a thousand thousand times in the drowsiness of every autumn and the passion of every spring. Why shall it not be wrought in the heart of man?
And there lies the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and ourselves. His senses were all continually made new, and the world to Him was always a new world.
Jesus, the man who revealed God as a being of joy,
For we are all creatures of sadness and of small doubts.
Last night I invented a new pleasure, and as I was giving it the first trial an angel and a devil came rushing toward my house. They met at my door and fought with each other over my newly created pleasure; the one crying, “It is a sin!”—the other, “It is a virtue!”
“Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.”
I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was.
Suddenly we heard a voice crying, “This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea.” And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur. And my soul said, “Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment.”
the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.
The Eye Said the Eye one day, “I see beyond these valleys a mountain veiled with blue mist. Is it not beautiful?” The Ear listened, and after listening intently awhile, said, “But where is any mountain? I do not hear it.” Then the Hand spoke and said, “I am trying in vain to feel it or touch it, and I can find no mountain.” And the Nose said, “There is no mountain, I cannot smell it.” Then the Eye turned the other way, and they all began to talk together about the Eye’s strange delusion. And they said, “Something must be the matter with the Eye.”
And my Sorrow grew like all living things, strong and beautiful and full of wondrous delights.
And my Joy and I were alone, unsought and unvisited.
But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet? Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?
