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The Kingdom of heaven is within, and it can be preserved only when the life within us has no death in it. Hell’s spirit must be kept out of every heart if Rajska Polja is to be preserved in peace. This is a task no man can do for another. We can help each other in this, he says, but each must do the major task within his own soul.
“Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning”, he concludes. “Wherever there is murder, there will always be falsehood with it. For this reason we must live in the truth. It is never enough simply to avoid killing others. We must never permit the smallest seed of untruth to sprout within the heart of the soul.”
“I see the light, but the walls imprison it.” “The light has entered the prison. Nothing can keep it out.” “If there is no window, the light cannot enter.” “If there is no window, the light enters within you.”
“Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?” Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect it? “Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time. When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it—both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.”
“You are not what you do, Josip. You are what you are.”
“A man suffers injustice. He resents it, and his resentment grows and grows and becomes anger. Anger, if it is fed, then becomes hatred. Hatred, if fed, opens the soul to evil spirits. And when they possess a man, he becomes capable of any atrocity. Afterward, he will not know how or why he became like that.”
“In Christ’s grace, you can do this. Though the sins committed against you are most grievous and would test the greatest of souls, you have been given a cross and a blessing that few can receive. Will you ask each day for the grace to forgive?”
“You do not need strength. You need the heart of a child.
One does not need to recreate the cosmos or to fix it, but I can choose to love, despite everything.
Only God frees me to choose this because, without him, I would slide into the condition of the killers, the beast-men of Goli Otok. I am no better than they are. All men, without Christ, are capable of becoming Cain—though everyone would deny it.
“Music is a spiritual language that leaps across the oceans, through language barriers and cultural fortresses—from soul to soul.”
“It’s as if heaven is raining miracles upon us, but we cannot see because we do not look.
If he had been given a choice, would he have chosen to be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? Never. It was given. It is gift and cost—and in time the cost may become entirely gift. It is hard to know if that will be the end of all this striving, impossible to guess when the next blessing or blow will fall.
Life is strange. You learn something new every day.
Despair or faith—you either go insane, or you turn to Christ for answers and consolation.
