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Fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Only Fools despise wisdom and discipline." Proverbs 1:7 NLT ↗
#black-book-author #christian #christian-life #inspiration #motivation
Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on eath, and all ye need to know'. Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Pslams, to Isaiah, to St. John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels-- four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say. ↗
She heard him close the door. “I was going to impress you with my romantic eloquence, of course. I’d thought to wax philosophical about the beauty of your brow.” Lucy blinked. “My brow?” “Mmm. Have I told you that your brow intimidates me?” She felt his warmth at her back as he moved behind her, but he didn’t touch her. “It’s so smooth and white and broad, and ends with your straight, knowing eyebrows, like a statue of Athena pronouncing judgment. If the warrior goddess had a brow like yours, it is no wonder the ancients worshiped and feared her.” “Blather,” she murmured. “Blather, indeed. Blather is all I am, after all.” She frowned and turned to contradict him, but he moved with her so that she couldn’t quite catch sight of his face. “I am the duke of nonsense,” he whispered in her ear. “The king of farce, the emperor of emptiness.” Did he really see himself so? “But—” “Blathering is what I do best,” he said, still unseen. “I’d like to blather about your golden eyes and ruby lips.” “Simon—” “The perfect curve of your cheek,” he murmured close. She gasped as his breath stirred the hair at her neck. He was distracting her with lovemaking. And it was working. “What a lot of talk.” “I do talk too much. It’s a weakness you’ll have to bear in your husband.” His voice was next to her ear. “But I’d have to spend quite a bit of time outlining the shape of your mouth, its softness and the warmth within. -Simon to Lucy on their wedding night. ↗
We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking. ↗
Their dad said, “Heaven is beautiful like your mother was beautiful, but like it beauty is fleeting and once beheld for years, for decades, gold that seemed precious and unique no longer holds the significance it once held to the one who has possessed it and been possessed by it. And heaven resides in God’s breast, not the true god, for there is no true god, only many faces and many incarnations of want, of structure, of meaning. And his heart-tent is vast drawing to it those who swear allegiance to beauty and partial truth. Partial,” their father said, stroking Maggie’s arm, “because truth is independent of religion or creed or upbringing. It is a matter of the heart, separate from fact, without the limitations of doctrine. And what would heaven feel like? More of the same corrupt single-mindedness of a deity who abhors independence, who truly and fiercely fights the accumulation of knowledge in its worshipers. So the weak run to it, the road-weary, the undecided. Because God makes things easy, they do not have to make choices for themselves, they do not have to study the greater mysteries that echo like a clarion call in their souls and resonate in their hearts, seeds planted in the dark soil of their youth that are burned to chaff in the commonplace, never tilled or watered, hopeless due to acquiescence. ↗
As he stood there, the audience was forgotten. The past, with all its mistakes and suffering, its doubt and sin, came before him for an instant, then vanished, and his heart leaped for joy, because he knew that it was gone forever. And the future, made beautiful by the presence of Christ and the conviction that he was right with God, stretched away as a path leading ever upward, until it was lost in the glories of the life to come, while he heard, as in a dream, the words of his confessed Master, “Follow: thou me. ↗
The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals. ↗
I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around. A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess. And wasn’t that just how life usually felt—a confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow? ↗
#death #depression #family #glass-girl #grief
No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance--quite remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets--nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on. ↗
