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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The real question persists: is the spirit truly quickened here?
As my cleric friend Larue Owen asserts, “Insistence upon certainty produces toxic theology.”
But the number of people who need comfort is far exceeded by the number of folks who need to be awakened, and challenged to grow up.
Triple A’s: ambiguity, ambivalence, and anxiety.
If my poor little brain and stunted imagination thinks it can own the mystery, then I am in a transient psychosis.
As Jung said so succinctly, the smallest of things with meaning are always greater than the largest of things without meaning.
Yeats’s summary that “man is in love, and loves what vanishes. / What more is there to say?” could we find a more succinct definition of our common condition?
Of all the traumata that afflict us, no doubt the most damaging is the loss of this connection to the source within.
Samuel Beckett, reminds us that the quantity of tears in the world is always a constant. Where someone is laughing, someone elsewhere must be weeping. There are those who would think this attitude is neurotic; I think it is realistic, caring, and balanced.
(Not having to earn love is what they call grace, and I acknowledge that gracefulness.)
My third argument for the existence of what we call soul is very simple: music.
Nietzsche added, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Perhaps in music our soul aligns with the archetypal rhythms which thrum through the fibers of being itself, echoing timelessly down the fleeting generations of human presence.
Listen to your list, observe yourself, feel, and then tell me you have no soul.
To be elevated, we think, can either be trivial or profound, but seems to be a desire for everyone.”
