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The present would always be enough for him, and the annihilation of his past a blessing.
Perhaps she would never cease to be an elitist, she thought, but it would be an elite of the merciful, the lovers of song and story, of children, of beauty, and of truth.
My life is suffused in an excruciating beauty. And a dreadful loneliness. Why? Why is it this way? My life is a temporary encampment on the edge of an abyss. I beg for oxygen, for light, for strength.
“We are all bad Catholics”, says Stephen.
Oh, yes, I am laid bare, my abscesses gaping. Self-pitying, melodramatic as well. Yet there is a truth forming within me, and though it is hurting I cannot reject it. Should a mother refuse the pain of labour? I will not hide from this mysterious being who is myself, about to be born. To do so would leave me haunted and anxious forever. I have only two options: to accept my innate poverty or become the slave of bitterness. I suspect that this will be the struggle for years to come.
Perhaps there are places within us, places of true home, that do not yet exist and
“Do you like the wind?” he said. “I do. I’ve always loved it. It’s like music, like strokes of healing. But, where I live, sometimes it’s a cruel thing, ripping at the corners of the house, wailing, tearing through the valley like vengeance itself. It can toss over boats and tear down trees. It reminds me how fragile human life is.”
“We are all deaf. The way of emptiness teaches us to hear.”
Do you think the heart of love does not hear your cries? “He is silence. Silence! And all the world is in agony!” He is waiting for your cries to be still. He holds you. He is with you in your agony. For he too was once where you are. And where your son is.
In the silence she embraced herself. She was a fullness of years waiting to be emptied. She was an emptiness waiting to be filled.
then I am a blind, wounded one, groping like everyone else through the thick smoke of our times.
But the presence who comes to me at times is so gentlemanly. He does not hammer for entrance and possession like the shadow presence. No, this spirit is love, and it has utter respect for my freedom to reject it. I have tested it a number of times. It is silence too. And in rare moments it takes a visible form:
I stood there thinking this, I was filled with a most trembling stillness, so gentle, so good, like fresh bread, warm and steaming on the sideboard, like certain kinds of white light through glass in March. There were no seraphic wings, no heavenly trumpets, no words in my mind. It was very simple, just being and embrace.
My powerlessness is necessary. There is much truth to be said. The world is crowding up with despair, with lies, with power. For most people, not only “Gott” is dead, but man too is dead. The reign of fear, the day of fire approaches.
his heart wrapped in a melancholy that is the residue of suffering an unexplainable violence.
