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March 17, 2021 - January 30, 2023
How can I break my long silence? Silence is a form of respect for the wisdom of Time, for it too is a servant of God.
Memory is not so sweet to me; the making of the world afresh is my proper aim.
Is there a word or two that I can give to those who are being born? Is there a promise I can leave to those who have not yet come into being?
Heart of his heart? How strange that in these words there was sadness yet also goodness. Was there a good sadness? It felt sweet and clean.
It burst and poured out of his throat, a wailing so deep, a sobbing so fathomless it had no sound at first, for it could never empty the ocean of deepest sad.
On the wall beside the bed, the pale green plastic face of a man with a thorny crown on his head watched him for a few minutes, then faded. He felt quiet inside, like a calm ocean.
Public scrutiny filled him with horror, for the force of it came close to breaking through a seal that protected the secret refuge within himself, an inland sea of liquid, inarticulate forms that shaped and reshaped themselves into an eloquence of vast solitudes, deserts, hills, and horizons—a language both shocking and beloved for its sere beauty.
When he first saw her, she was standing in front of the campus library, selling flowers. He bought one just for the chance to speak with her.
It seemed a very strange contradiction. These Catholics were in possession of their lives, but they had given away their lives.
He looked up at the crucifix over the altar and felt an instant of longing.
He caught himself looking up at the stars from time to time, and once, in Denver, Colorado, he sneaked away from the team, bought a hamburger and ate it, drank a glass of beer in a pub, and smoked three cigarettes in a row. It was satanic, but he survived.
Though he tried valiantly to hide his emotions, she recognized the flicker of pain, of loss, of longing in his eyes.
So many men no longer knew how to live because the chain of communication between fathers and sons had been broken, a chain that once, a long time ago, might have been connected to some ultimate meaning but which now dangled anchorless, surrounded by the sea of an indifferent cosmos.
If you tried to write it down, it would evaporate. It was about the nature of time, about kronos, not as the physicists know it, but as the poets know it, and as those who sail on the high seas know it, gripped in the transience of physical waves, dependent on the constancy of eternal stars.
He sighed, knowing that he had been defeated by a conspiracy of sunlight and youth.
As I said, the girl was of an age to go walking with her father. A walk is a kind of art form, a certain school of contemplation.
Everything is new when you see it again with someone. This child who had come from his body and that of his wife was not yet old enough to understand her origins. It was unnecessary. It was enough only to see the miraculous world step by step, to wonder at the incredible richness and variety heaped upon each other.
The snail had told her its secret: far better to see a few things closely and well than to consume a whole universe and not see it, not love it.
The sky was black glass reflecting nothing, but dazzling with billions of stars. At the crest of the hill, he lay in the damp grass. He was still. He gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears the stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away was it that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. There were galaxies out there, he knew, that whirled into each other like discs, blending in space without colliding.
He understood, despite his blindness, blinder than the eyeless snail: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.
“That love is possible only if there is a free gift of the self.”
“Because the way to faith leading through the intellect is the eye of a needle. Intellectual conversions are rare. The way through the heart is a wider door. But the way that leads directly to the soul, in the unfathomable depths of mystery and providence, is an open gate.”
“I don’t know, Father. He’s so proud.” “Yes, he is that too. His is the pride of excellent men who have been forced to struggle against the annihilation of the self, and have done so alone. By long labors and much agony he has arrived at a state of equilibrium.
Christianity is not a code of ethics for improving the behavior of humanity. Our faith is much more than that. It is light breaking into darkness. It is salvation. It is fire.”
The sensations of awe, of mastery, of commanding an impossibly large and swiftly moving vessel, were so alien to Arrow’s experience, so mystic and frightening and beautiful, that the words that might have burst forth from sheer joy refused to take shape on his lips.
“As Dad says, I’d rather be late at the Golden Gate than arrive in hell on time.” “Your father is a unique theologian.” “Isn’t he!”
Now that all distractions and physical motion had subsided, their faces rose in his mind with particular intensity.
this child reared in darkness, marked by it, and still burdened by it, might somehow be spared, might even—O miracle of miracles—be brought through the fire to a new heaven and a new earth.
“The sensation of motion speaks to the soul. We are no longer bound by the limitations of our flesh. We fly on the wind and the water, toward a destination that promises sanctuary. A living metaphor. A glimmer of transcendence.”
It need not be the sea. A mountain, a forest, a river would do. Children needed something to dream on, something that reminded them that existence was not a complex of geometrical warrens set in concrete.
Here is my little son who has been broken. Give him the words of hope, for he will do a singular good in the world.
If time was a dimension wholly within the boundaries of material creation, and if God was beyond time, then he could, if he so wished, accept the prayer of a man who lived at the end of the second millennium and apply it to the needs of those who had gone before. Were not the death and Resurrection of Christ still active and effective, not simply as a linear chain of cause and effect, but as a living thing whose generative power is undiminished?
The Mass itself was a mysterious suspension of time, a reaching through impossible barriers into the eternal Present, a moment of union with the Sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary.
History, therefore, was a limited dimension, a compression of an unspeakably vast and beautiful dance into a solid icon, an incarnate Logos, a terrarium of fertile gardens in the cup of a Hand. The metaphors mixed and agitated in his mind, each reflecting a facet of the light of understan...
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For me, too, everything that came after was a gift—everything—even the suffering.”
“I ain’t sensitive.” “You’re blunt, I’ll say that for you. Sometimes I wonder if there are any honest people left.” “Aside from you’n’me, of course”, Alice chortled. “Sometimes bluntness is a good indication of an honest person. Other times it’s just a symptom of a person who couldn’t care less about anything but themselves.”
if we had about twenty years to play around with, I could come to tea at your place and make a habit of it. I could try to cultivate your buried religious sense, and you might even take a shine to me, your pet priest, if and when you ever became convinced I’m a normal man. I could wheedle you into knitting doilies for our parish bazaar and gradually tell you about my faith, and then maybe, just maybe, you’d start to ask a few of the right questions; and maybe, just maybe, when you’re about ninety-five years old, you’d be on your deathbed and ask the doctor to call good old Ronnie, and we’d
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“Christ is real, Alice. He’s coming back, maybe before you can knit a doily. Until then we’re in a war. There’s a devil too, and he wants your hide nailed to his barn door.”
She liked the sound of a car door slamming in the dark on frosty nights—it reminded her of a dance hall in 1939, the night when soldier Nick taught her the jitterbug. The night they held hands till two in the morning, and he took her home to her mother’s front door, where she had her first and last kiss, a soldier’s kiss, smelling of Burmashave, promises, and tragedy.
Alice spent the rest of the day tearing out seams on the canvas sack, adding heavy cotton walls to both sides, cursing the treadle sewing machine, breaking needles, stabbing her fingers trying to get it just right, and, despite the fussing and fuming, rather enjoying herself.
she realized that she felt pretty good. Weird and happy—an odd combination. It had been a great day, she thought, a really great day. She didn’t know why, but the image of the lady with water coming out of her hands lingered in her mind.
He wanted to go to sleep. He wanted to wake up feeling energetic and enthusiastic, as he had during the first years of his ministry.
He wasn’t exactly sure why he did it—nostalgia perhaps—but he suddenly reversed his steps, walked swiftly through the apartment, and went into the nave of the church. The exit signs, a bank of seven-day vigil candles, and the tabernacle lamp gave enough light for him to find his way to the sanctuary without banging his knees on the pews. He genuflected, made the sign of the cross, and went up behind the altar and knelt in front of the tabernacle. He tried to force words of prayer through his mind, but they trailed off, lifeless. He just stayed there without moving until the riot subsided, and
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The joy, the exultation, the current of peace flowing through him. All gone now, frittered away in a million bureaucratic details, parish suppers, and bingo games. He hated bingo. He loved his people.
There was only a handful of serious sinners, the kind who really needed his help. He liked them especially, because they weren’t proud people and knew they needed a Savior.
He looked ahead to the storm that was close upon them, and he feared. But the light from the Presence strengthened him, spirit came into him, and he lifted his head and sang. The singing rose from a deep place within. It was a flood of peace, a river of harmony that was light and force and truth. It poured from him as a fluid word, which reflected the greater word that had been spoken when the Lord God brought his children to life. And though the song issued from his lips as a small rivulet, it swelled in the singing, and it grew until it was of immense breadth and depth and power. It filled
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He looked again, and a woman came forth from the gates of gold where Ezekiel had gone, and she came down and stood above the people in the sky. Upon her head was a crown of twelve stars, and in her hand was a mantle of blue, half as large as the sky, which she spread over the people that they might be protected and take strength and instruction.
Yet the Lord knew his chosen ones far better than did the judgment of men. Perhaps Ron had been chosen precisely because of his ordinariness. His smallness would be a protection against pride, and thus anything good the Lord did through him would be attributed to none other than its true source. He could be called up higher only because he thoroughly understood his low estate.
He looked at the hundreds of upturned faces, waiting for him to speak. He felt the quickening of the river-song, and as it rose toward his lips, he saw the fragments of meaning swim together and form the word, take up their position in the center of the stream, and when the stream surged out of his mouth, his confidence grew, and he spoke without effort or fear.
“You ask, where is mercy in the wrath of God? I tell you, now is his mercy, and even though his wrath seems a terror to you, or an abstraction, I tell you it is coming. Even his wrath is mercy. The hand of the purifier is upon us, and if we do not let him form us into a true people, a true witness, then another will form us, and that other is the spirit of this age, which is not love and is not truth.
