REAL INTIMACY

'The real business of being human, I would like to argue, has little to with sex. Sex is rightly listed alongside the pleasures of eating and drinking. The same pleasure centre of the brain is lit up. But it's not intimate. Intimacy is about a spiritual, not a physical closeness. 

Real intimacy is singularly unerotic. When my mother died, when my husband's parents died, when we listened to each other and held each other - that was intimate. Being with someone who is grieving and being allowed in, being trusted to that extent - that is true intimacy, in a way that showing off our new negligee is not.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.95. 

ARE WE ALL TRANSGENDER?

'To the question, 'is gender binary?' the answer is, biologically, yes. The minute percentage of intersex conditions are errors in the generic code. But psychosocially, the answer is an emphatic no. We all share stereotypically male and female qualities, that's a fact. It might just turn out that we are all transgender, if that means a mismatch between social script and biological body. It's just that some of us take gender more seriously than others, and decide to do something about it.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.62. 

THE DAMAGE WE'VE CAUSED

'...we caused transgenderism, we as a society set up the circumstances which made it inevitable. We gave the genders these absurd roles, because our appetite for sex demanded super-male men and super-female women. But human beings don't fit snugly into the binary categories we have set up for them. Our genders have been artificially exaggerated, and the contrary reactions - both transgenderism and the refusal to acknowledge as more than a social construct - are both the consequence of that. Yet the truth of the matter is surely this: we have significantly more in common with a person who shares our background in interests and outlook, than with a person who happens to share the same XX/XY chromosome. Men and women really aren't that different from each other.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.xiii.

THE LIMITS TO CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE

'Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less.' 

Martin Boyd, A Difficult Young Man, p.59. 

WORSHIP DEFINED

'Worship is the human response to divine initiative.'
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.197. 

WHERE WILLINGNESS TO FORGIVE IS FOUND

'We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.189. 

HIDDEN SERVICE AS THANKSGIVING

'Joyous hidden service to others is an acted prayer of thanksgiving.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline p.163. 

A DIALOGUE-ANTHEM

Christian, Death

Chr. Alas, poor Death, where is thy glory?
Where is thy famous force, thy ancient sting?
Dea.  Alas, poor mortal, void of story,
Go spell and read how I have killed thy King.
Chr. Poor Death! and who was hurt thereby?
Thy curse being laid on Him makes thee accurst.
Dea.  Let losers talk, yet thou shalt die;
These arms shall crush thee.
Chr.                                               Spare not, do thy worst.
I shall be one day better than before;
Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.

George Herbert, The Complete English Works, p.165. 

THE POINT OF FASTING

'The central idea in fasting is the voluntary denial of an otherwise normal function for the sake of intense spiritual activity.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.73.

PERMISSION TO FAIL AT PRAYER

'I was liberating to me to understand that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.46. 

OUR DESIRE FOR A GO-BETWEEN

'Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand. One of Israel's fatal mistakes was their insistence upon having a human king rather than resting in the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, 'They have rejected me from being king over them!' (1 San.8:7). The history of religion is the story of almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between.  In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realise that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline; The Path to Spiritual Growth, p.28. 

THE EFFECT OF BULLYING ON A BULLY

'Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person's life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.' 

William Maxwell, 'With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge' in Billie Dyer and Other Stories, p.68. 

THE FATHER LOVE OF GOD

'At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says "I've been waiting for you."' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.201. 

OPPOSITES UNDERSTAND

'...opposites often instinctively understand each other...'
William Maxwell, 'My Father's Friends' in Billy Dyer and Other Stories, p.80. 

THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLIMENTING SOMEONE FOR SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL

'Obviously I have not got through a long life without praising people - their houses, their gardens, their wives, their children, their political opinions, quite often their writing. But though I have liked a lot of people and loved a few, I have never been much good as telling them so, or telling them why. The more my admiration goes out to a man or woman personally, and not to some performance or accomplishment, the harder it is for me to express. The closer I come to fundamental values and beliefs, the closer I come to reticence. It is a more naked act for me to tell someone I am impressed by his principles and his integrity than to say I like his book or his necktie.' 

Wallace Stegner, 'A Letter to Wendell Berry' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.207. 

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WRITERS NEED?

'We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.84. 

THE LIMITS OF FICTION

'It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever got away with much.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.76. 

SYMBOLISM

'Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader - sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated. They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so if they can be got to read a reputedly symbolic work at all, they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra. Find x. And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have "understood" the story. Many students confuse the process of understanding a thing with understanding it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.71. 

WHAT MAKES WRITING ENGAGING?

'A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make on object real; and she believes that this is connected with us having five senses. If you're deprived of any of them, you're in a bad way, but if you're deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren't present.' 

Flannery O Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery & Manners, p.69. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INHABITING A STORY

'To be without a story is to live without any type of script that might help us know who we are and what we're about. We flail and meander. We frantically try on roles and identities to see if they fit. To be character-ized by a story is to have a name, a backstory, a project - all of which serve as rails to run on, something stable and given that we count on. We can be known because there's someone to know.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.163.