The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no w...
In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in th...
Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot...
Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in cr...
Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. T...
I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs. She said there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees the...
During the year of 2015 stay grounded. How? Each night before you go to sleep, write a word/expression capturing a positive state of mind on a sheet of paper. Fold the paper in a V and prop it on your nightstand beside your bed so you will see it the...
No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science...
Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a ...
Maybe it’s something to do with the movements: the Cat and then the Cow, the twist to the left and then to the right, the reaching up, and then bending to the ground, the constant training of the body to move one way, and then to move in the opposi...
'Tragedy admires man. Comedy feels a bit sorry for him.' We think we are kings or queens, masters of the universe or at least our own destiny. We forget that a foot may crush us, or that the wind may knock us down. We are not in control. We are subje...
In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June--...
How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day. To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, S...
Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me. Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground, And thing next most diffuse to cloud, Not all your light tongues talking aloud...
The high ground of Christ & Him crucified must be claimed in our preaching. Any other footing is a slippery slope that inevitably descends downward into vain rhetoric and mere words. To the contrary, every pulpit must present a towering vision of the...
This obsession is a curious thing. Sometimes wonder about the merits of devoting so much of myself to a singular climbing objective. Much of the time it beats me down, leaves me hanging my head in despair. But then there are the moments that bring me...
Notwithstanding the extravagance of some of their characters, these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been abl...
Just as soon as I meet and learn to love a friend we must part and go our separate ways, never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest-and perhaps the more so on account of that very c...
Perfection" Every oak will lose a leaf to the wind. Every star-thistle has a thorn. Every flower has a blemish. Every wave washes back upon itself. Every ocean embraces a storm. Every raindrop falls with precision. Every slithering snail leaves its s...
nothing knee-jerk about their politics. Two out of three of them say that abortion is “always” or “usually” morally wrong. They are far more likely than voters age thirty and over to identify themselves as politically “strictly independent....
In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the tr...
