On Embracing Inconsistency

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight, the grey area. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairy-land. He has always cared more for truth than consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradictions along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight. He sees two different pictures at once, and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed there was such a thing as faith, but such a thing as free will also. He admired youth because it was young, and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of a healthy man. -- G. K. Chesterton

Al on Truth

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. –-Albert Einstein

On God, On Me

God is everything I am not

Yet I am not nothing  

Just nothing without Him. 



W. S.

On our Glory and Our Hope

There are moments when we are sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hands of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love … [Our source of joy is Jesus] because Jesus was the love of God alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men could kill him . . .. This is our glory and our only hope. And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet. –Frederick Buechner

On Scars

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat.
Leonard Cohen--The Favorite Game

On Seeing

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Milan Kundera -- Laughable Loves

On learning truth

I once thought that when you understood something, it was with you forever. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all of our lives to remember the most basic things.
-Lucy Grealy