Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its religious meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart.”

“Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not”

“Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.”

“Just as we plant the flag of faith on the mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this exact same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.”

“And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think.”

“"Because IT's completely unused to being refused. That's the only reason I could keep from being absorbed, too. No mind has tried to hold out against IT for so many thousands of centuries that certain centers have become soft and atrophied through lack of use. If you hadn't come to me when you did, I'm not sure how much longer I would have lasted. I was on the point of giving in."”

“"But that's exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike." For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came moment of blazing truth. "No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"”

“Thaddeus Stevens was no longer a young man when the Civil War broke out; he had just turned sixty-nine years old. "To most men there comes, sooner or later, a period of inaction, inability for further progress... But, continued Representative Horace Maynard, "this period Mr. Stevens never reached." "The slaveholders' rebellion seemed to rejuvenate him and inspire him with superhuman strength."”

“"The present Constitution was formed in our [the North's] weakness. Some of its compromises were odious, and have become more so by the unexpected increase of slaves," whose numbers "were expected soon to run out" when the Constitution was written. But since then the strength and moral conscience of the North had increased. ”

“How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name”

“The greatness of Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal.”

“I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd.”

“get off your mystified ass and do something”

"beware of pride and arrogance Charles, for they may betray you.”

“For a Christian—which I think Weil was, although...she could never quite bring herself to be baptized and formally enter the church—this means believing in a God who is not apart from matter (or not merely that) but part of it, a God who does not simply enjoin us to participate fully in life, and specifically in the relationships within our lives, but a God who inheres wholly within those relationships.”

“Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward—or at least outward—even in your lowest moments.”

“How small the earth is to him who looks from heaven” (Delille)

“this is how you ascertain the truth of spiritual experience: it propels you back toward the world and other people, and not simply more deeply within yourself”

“value spiritual experience precisely for this fact: it removes you from the chaos of ordinary consciousness, from the needs and demands of other people, from the dirty business of human love. But there is a death in this. Solitude is an integral part of any vital spiritual life, but spiritual experience that is solely solitary inevitably leads to despair”

“But what does it mean to transform these moments of intense inward understanding of the world and experience? I think it can only mean that we carry them with us back into the welter of our lives, that we return to them not as refugees from experience, but as devotees of it. ”

“the void of God and the love of God come together in the mystery of the cross”

“the preacher spoke inspiringly of the church as a place where our individual and communal needs and instincts were reconciled”

“Turning inward turned me outward too, to a world made radiant by my ability to believe in it.”

“I thought for years that any love had to be limiting, that it was a zero-sum game: what you gave with one part of yourself had to be taken from another. In fact, the great paradox of love, and not just romantic love, is that a closer focus may go hand in hand with a broadened scope. "To turn from everything to one face," writes Elizabeth Bowen, "is to find oneself face to face with everything."”

“He longed to be free of all that he once longed for, and began to imagine that there might come such a scouring (from where? with what?) that he might be, not wiped clean of what he’d so imperfectly learned, but emergent and changed on the other side of it. Not a purge, a passage. Then all these disparate pieces might cohere in him, cohere as him.”

“Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.”

“"Memory is the basis of individual personality," Miguel de Unamuno writes, "just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future." ”

“Life is short, we say, in one way or another, but in truth, because we cannot imagine our own death until it is thrust upon us, we live in a land where only other people die.”