SOMETHING TO AIM AT

'My hope is that twenty or thirty years down the line, I will be listening to some young whippersnapper who will say, with no idea that she's saying anything unusual, "Oh, I was raised Christian - so of course I've never doubted that God loved gay people.'"

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian's Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God's Extravagant Love, p.xxi.

PASTORAL SILENCE

'There are moments when one must not attempt to console, when the word must not be uttered to parents of murdered children. When one should keep one's mouth shut. "In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning., Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.440.

THE POWER OF LITURGY

'How is it that something so repeatedly sung, done, or said can remain so spellbinding? Fragments, mere wisps of liturgy, hang about in our hearts and cannot be exercised by unbelief. Familiarity itself becomes unfamiliar. There is no knowing what is happening. Poets know not to grapple with it. To let it be.'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.436. 

THE POWER OF PLACE

'We should cleanse our eyes in scenery - use it like lotion.'
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.388.

SCRIPTURE IS...

'Scripture is a virtual forest and a simple shade, a bare wood and a glorious orchard.'
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.136.

RESURRECTION HOPE

'Teach me to live that I may dread,
The grave as little as my bed.'

Thomas Ken in Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A lifetime in the English Countryside, p.134.