Al Owski’s Reviews > My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer > Status Update

“And when we act in the will of God, we express hope in its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Václav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs.”

“Paul says that God is in fact always near us if we will simply learn to look, and then he says...a few decades after the death of Christ, that is notable and powerful for its utter lack of historicity: “in Christ we live, and move, and have our being.” Paul is trying to get those Athenians—or, more likely, his own early followers—to see the life of Christ as not merely a point in time but as a portal to eternity.”

“No, to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ, though I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this: Did a man named Jesus really rise from the dead three days after being crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago?”

“This is why I am, such as I am, a Christian, because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time.”

“What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.”

“The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is.”

“But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls.”

“Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us.”

“You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body.”

“The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you.”