FEARING GOD

'To fear God is to no longer assert self. To fear God is to give up not only the need to master all threats but the drive to know all answers. To fear God is to trust that it is better to have him without answers than to have answers without him.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.194.

WHERE ENJOYMENT POINTS US

'...in God's world, enjoyment is a clue to reality's deepest, brightest secret: that the universe is the gleeful invention of unassailably happy God.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.132.

OUR DERANGED AGE

'You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientfic and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he or what he is doing.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.116.

A COSMIC IRONY

'The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this effort establishes its own uniqueness.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.113.

WE ARE COSMIC MISFITS

'God has made us cosmic misfits.'
Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, p.71.

MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY WRONG EXPECTATIONS

'Trauma in reponse to disaster often stems from the unbiblical fiction that the world is, and ought to be experienced as, all right. To declare it instead sick, "a vale of tears", is not pessimistic. It is to own that the world needs saving still; that Easter is not a past event, but present; that is our life, our joy and our hope depend on it. Only in paradise, when we are home at last, with Jesus, will God make all crying case. For now, we eat our fill from his table as wanderers, his bread, seasoned with our tears.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.169.

THE VERY FACE OF GOD

 'When the Blessed Virgin, having given birth, looked into this face, she enjoyed a privilege no woman or man had known since Adam and Eve before the fall, still robed in glory.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.143.

GOD'S ACTIVE HANDS

'Theology teaches that God's hands were never more active than when fastened to the wood of the tree, "puntured by nails", causing blood to flow "as the price of a great salvation". This is a lesson to be pondered often and in silence.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.74.

INCARNATE INTIMATE LOVE

'Some time ago I read a remarkable book, the Confessions of a Chiropodist. The writer reveals an interesting fact: all her patients (she insists this is a rule without exception) ask, when they first turn up, forgiveness for their feet - for the general state of them, their shape, their relative smallness or largeness. Most of us, it seems, are ashamed of our feet. That explains, perhaps, why so many people are reluctant to take part in foot-washing on Maundy Thursday. It sheds light, too, on what went that night, long ago, in the Upper Room. When Jesus took the feet of the Twelve, one by one, into his hands it was to say: "I know you as you are. I love you as you are."'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.40.

THEOLOGY & PRAYER

'If you are a theologian, you will truly pray; and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.'

Evagrius in Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.39,

THE FACT OF DEATH

'Death is the greatest fact in life. It faces us from our earliest consciousness. There is nothing startling in it to the child's mind.'

Frances Comper in Sarah Perry, Death of an Ordinary Man, p.183.

THERE ARE NO ORDINARY LIVES

'...now I understand that there are no ordinary lives - that every death is the end of a single event in time's history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular.'

Sarah Perry, Death of a Ordinary Man, p.6.

THE POWER OF FIRE

'"If everyone sat in front of a fire once a week," he said, "the people who made tranquillizers would go out of business.'"

Laurie Colwin, Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object, p.107.

GRIEF IS METABOLIC

'As the days went by, I realized that grief is metabolic it crawls through you like disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like [a] sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.'

Laurie Colwin, Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object, p.27.