Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“At some point I realized that for all my literary talk of the piquancy and poignancy that mortality imparts to immediate experience, part of my enjoyment of life had always been an unconscious assumption of its continuity.”

“What happens is some mysterious resonance between thing and language, mind and matter, that reveals—and it does feel like revelation—a reality beyond the one we ordinarily see.”

“Life is always a question of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus. Contemporary despair is to feel the multiplicity of existence with no possibility for expression or release of one’s particular being.”

“Reading Bonhoeffer makes me realize again how small our points of contact with life can be, perhaps even necessarily are, when our truest self finds its emotional and intellectual expression.”

“[Stevens] displayed on that occasion more of the candor and boldness for which he was famous The coming electoral contest, he told his audience, was only the latest phase "in the long and persistent war between Liberty and Slavery; between Oppression and Freedom; a war which has existed, active or latent, ever since the first tyrant usurped the rights of others.”

“. "In my judgment," Stevens said, "Republicanism is founded in love of universal liberty, and in hostility to slavery and oppression throughout the world." Had his party "the legal right and the physical power" to do so, it would "abolish human servitude and overthrow despotism in every land" ”

“Bonhoeffer, after being in prison for a year, still another hard year away from his execution, forging long letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge out of his strong faith, his anxiety, his longing for his fiancée, and terror over the nightly bombings: “There are things more important than self-knowledge.” Yes. An artist who believes this is an artist of faith, even if the faith contains no god.”

“For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.”

“The work that emerges from this crisis of consciousness may be judged a failure or a success by the world, and that judgment will still sting or flatter your vanity. But it cannot speak to this crisis in which, for which, and of which the work was made. For any artist alert to his own soul, this crisis is the only call that matters. I know no name for it besides God.”

“So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost...”

“The Scottish runner Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire, once explained why he couldn’t give up running: "I believe that God made me for a purpose but he also made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure … To give up running would be to hold him in contempt." I like this notion: God doesn’t give a gift without giving an obligation to use it.”

“What does faith mean, finally, at this late date? I often feel that it means no more than, and no less than, faith in life—in the ongoingness of it, the indestructibility, some atom-by-atom intelligence that is and isn’t us, some day-by-day and death-by-death persistence insisting on a more-than-human hope, some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with the eyes to see it, love.”

“If our inner lives are always in transition, then our goal should be to acquire and refine a consciousness that is capable of registering the most minute changes in sensation, feeling, faith, self.”

“Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ’s weakness equals a supernatural strength.”

“How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points?”

“For [Hans Urs von] Balthasar, the man pursued by God may very well have loved another person, but not fully, not in the freedom of ultimate love, which scours the ego and urges one toward the spark of divinity within another person. It is those sparks that must unite; that is the only fire that time and change will not snuff out.”

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that Christ is always stronger in our brother’s heart than in our own, which is to say, first, that we depend on others for our faith, and second, that the love of Christ is not something you can ever hoard. Human love catalyzes the love of Christ.”

“Christ comes alive in the communion between people. When we are alone, even joy is, in a way, sorrow’s flower: lovely, necessary, sustaining, but blooming in loneliness, rooted in grief. I’m not sure you can have communion with other people without these moments in which sorrow has opened in you and for you.”

“In the tenderest spots of human experience, nothing is more offensive than intellectualized understanding.”

“But the Kansas-Nebraska law four years later convinced him [Lincoln] that slaveholders and their allies were determined to extend the slave-labor system and that to stop them antislavery citizens would have to take control of the federal government and put slavery itself "in the course of ultimate extinction." ”

“During the second half of the 1850s, the steadily increasing salience of the slavery issue induced a growing segment of the North's foreign-born population to transfer its loyalties from the Democratic to the Republican parties...”

“The [Republican] platform...was a call to move national political power from the hands of those pledged to the defense and extension of the slave-labor system and to transfer it instead to those determined to usher slavery toward extinction while actively aiding the growth and development of the North's type of diversified, free-labor capitalist economy.”

“The Democrats nominated...James Buchanan..."From my first entrance into the Senate of the United States until the present moment my efforts have been devoted both in and out of that body, whenever the occasion required, to the maintenance of the constitutional rights of the South in opposition to all the projects of the abolitionists and quasi-abolitionists.”

“Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.”

“what is most moving and durable about Jesus are the moments of pure—at times even helpless: My God, my God—humanity. No, God is given over to matter, the ultimate Uncertainty Principle. There’s no release from reality, no "outside" or "beyond" from which some transforming touch might come.”

“Contingency. ... As all of human life is uncertain. I suppose that to think of God in these terms might seem for some people deeply troubling (not to mention heretical), but I find it a comfort. It is akin to the notion of God entering and understanding—or understanding that there could be no understanding (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)—human suffering.”

“Christ is contingency... ”

“Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not.”

“Perhaps it is never disbelief, which at least is active and conscious, that destroys a person, but unacknowledged belief, or a need for belief so strong that it is continually and silently crucified on the crosses of science, humanism, art, or (to name the thing that poisons all these gifts of God) the overweening self.”

“One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present.”