What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movie...
On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted t...
Instructions for freedom": 1. Life's metaphors are God's instructions. 2. You have just climbed up and above the roof, there is nothing between you and the Infinite; now, let go. 3. The day is ending, it's time for something that was beautiful to tur...
Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over, Groceries. David's purpose was to shake you up, drive you out...
Being with a friend in great pain is not easy. It makes us uncomfortable. We do not know what to do or what to say, and we worry about how to respond to what we hear. Our temptation is to say things that come more out of our own fear than out of our ...
One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger. When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary t...
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs a...
Little Cinder Girl, they can't understand you. You rise from the as-heap in a blaze and only then do they recognize you as their one true love. While you pray beneath your mother's tree you carrve a phoenix into your palm wth aa hazel twig and coal; ...
Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly," I said. "So why won't the radio play?" "I don't know," he said. "Try connecting them here." He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled "AC," and w...
I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which ...
A few years ago, when I was hitchhiking through Laramie, Wyoming, I met an old and infertile man named John. I told him, “I think I’d have made a good son, John. But I’d have made an even better Johnson.” He nodded as he took a long drag from...
We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very imma...
He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world to enter, that of THE MONK. He had studied the book with great care and finally selected a passage that was purely descriptive. The result was the sa...
I felt sorry for the inhabitants and went into the forest to admonish the wolf in God's name not to eat any more sheep. I called him, he came—and do you know what his answer was? 'Francis, Francis,' he said, 'do not destroy God's prescribed order. ...
Jesus must have had man hands. He was a carpenter, the Bible tells us. I know a few carpenters, and they have great hands, all muscled and worn, with nicks and callused pads from working wood together with hardware and sheer willpower. In my mind, Je...
There is going to come a time when we have to accept who we are without the assistance of religion. That will be the dawn of true faith. We leave the big decisions to invisible consultants and pray we get the answers we are looking for. The late grea...
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that d...
A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That's why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to he...
The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but reverie. He enters God's theater free; he sees the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in whi...
[S]ince you are angry at me without reason, you attack me harshly with, "Oh outrageous presumption! Oh excessively foolish pride! Oh opinion uttered too quickly and thoughtlessly by the mouth of a woman! A woman who condemns a man of high understandi...
Christ want to point this out and to warn His followers that in the world everyone should live as though he were alone and should consider His Word and preaching as the very greatest thing on earth, thinking this way to himself: “I see my neighbor ...
