PATHS TO GOD

'...any authentic longing, any longing that, even implicitly, points towards eternity, is a possible path towards God.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.145.

TO BE HUMAN

'To be created in God's image - to be human - is to carry in the depth of one's being a longing to transcend the boundaries of human nature so as to have a share in divine life.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.139.

WHAT WE'RE MADE OF

'...I'm made of longing...'
Rainer Maria Rilke in Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.134.

THE FRAGILITY OF HAPPINES

'Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting, and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it's something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like old threads in the world's fabric. They ought to be seized.'

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, p.121.

BEWARE!

'...the chief intoxicant of spiritual life: self-righteous ingratitude.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.42.

HUMANITY

'I am dust with a nostalgia for glory.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, p.32.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS' RESURRECTION

'The sun rose and set every day. The moon, too. The tides went out and came in. The seasons turned in order. Some of the trees lost their leaves in the autumn and grew them back in the spring. People ate breakfast and supper when they had food and smoked and drank their tea. They had babies and raised them. They worked and slept. They sang and laughed and yelled and wept and fought and coupled. But from the first time she'd heard it, Esther Honey understood that if the man Jesus had died and been buried then really and truly rose, it was the only time such a thing had ever happened and that meant everything else in the world took its real meaning from that young man lying dead in his grave and awakening back to life and rolling the stone away from his tomb and saying goodbye to his friends and helpless not in spirit but actually in that body that had died and come back to life.'

Paul Harding, This Other Eden, p.193.

TRUE FREEDOM

'Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.129.

HUMAN WHOLENESS

'Men are whole not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.104.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

PERSPECTIVE

'One afternoon [in 1939] I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata...Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back: "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowers flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.'

Leonard Woolf in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p.727.

THE POWER OF FICTION

'...fiction is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death. And that is what binds us together, young and old.'

John Cheever in Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a young writer's life p.168.