Friday, February 4, 2011

Silent as Stone Or?

What to write about? Sometimes ideas pour out so fast it is all you can do to catch up and put them down. Sometimes the muses are as silent as stone. Things have been kind of quiet inside, so I thought I would share a few things I have encountered along the reading way.

Doing the right thing, even out of duty, changes souls.
Charles Foster, The Sacred Journey (56)

Be comforted that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
Paul Harding, Tinkers (72)

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus, The Essential Writings (13)

A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. Flannery O’ Connor

At first I thought of these as random and desperate, but some pattern emerges for me reading them together like this. Maybe an adult faith is one that understands and feels the complexity of the world, its heartaches and confusions, and yet persists in doing the right thing, in seeking to shape the soul, in searching for those images that open the heart to the beauty of the world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

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