Both Parents In Heaven Quotes

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

I know after all the awful places you've had to go, it's hard to imagine how good heaven can be, but I've seen it, and no words can describe it...It's worth it all. We've both lost a parent, we've been beaten and bruised, and we've done through hell together. I even died. And I can tell you...giving up everything to serve God is worth it all.

I am indebted to my dear parents (both now in heaven) for having had habits of order and regularity instilled into me at a very early age.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It’s really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

Psychodynamic theorists and psychologists of various traditions theorise that the sense of having fallen originates in our experience of birth. We are created in the body of woman and grow in the womb where all our needs are automatically met. Then we fall, in birth, into the human world, separated from our maternal Eden, but always remembering a heavenly place where all our needs were met. It should not be a surprise, but we now know that the baby in the womb can see and hear and remember. Any parent who has seen a placenta will know that it is made in the image of a tree, a wondrous tree of life that fed us until we were ready for birth. Is it any surprise that in so many traditions the symbolism of trees is so important? The tree of life is the first thing we see in the womb, we never forget this and psychodynamic theorists argue we yearn for this, all our lives, hoping to escape life’s frustrations by returning to a blissful womb like state. If this is true, is it any wonder that legends of fallen angels so fascinate and entice us? In these legends perhaps we see echoes of our own fall. Psychologically we identify with those with whom we share similar experiences; and the fallen angels can easily become mirrors in which to see ourselves.

tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of

Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge. This is the promise of psychology, and for the most part the psychotherapists are obliged to live it and embody it. But it was Rank who saw how false this claim is. "Psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception," he said, because it does not give what men want, which is immortality. Nothing could be plainer. When the patient emerges from his protective cocoon he gives up the reflexive immortality ideology that he has lived under-both in its personal-parental form (living in the protective powers of the parents or their surrogates) and in its cultural causa-sui form (living by the opinions of others and in the symbolic role-dramatization of the society). What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology-unless, said Rank, psychology itself become the new belief system.

I can only imagine the sort of havoc Oliver must have wreaked as a boy.” Oliver handed Minerva in, then climbed in to sit beside her. “We weren’t that bad.” “Don’t listen to him,” Minerva exclaimed, her eyes twinkling. “One dull evening, he and his friends went to a ball dressed in the livery of the hired footmen. Then they proceeded to drink up the liquor, flirt and wink at the elderly ladies until they were all blushing, and make loud criticisms of the entertainment. After the lady of the house caught on to their scheme and rounded up some stout young men to throw them out, they stole a small stone cupid she had in her garden and sent her a ransom note for it.” “How the devil do you know that?” Oliver asked. “You were, what, eleven?” “Twelve,” Minerva said. “And it was all Gran’s servants could talk about. Made quite a stir in society, as I recall. What was the ransom? A kiss for each of you from the lady’s daughter?” A faint smile touched Oliver’s lips. “And she never did pay it. Apparently her suitors took issue with it. Not to mention her parents.” “Good heavens,” Maria said. “Come to think of it,” Oliver mused aloud, “I believe Kirkwood still has that cupid somewhere. I should ask him.” “You’re as bad as Freddy and my cousins,” Maria chided. “They put soap on all the windows of the mayor’s carriage on the very day he was supposed to lead a procession through Dartmouth. You should have seen him blustering when he discovered it.” “Was he a pompous idiot?” Oliver asked. “A lecher, actually. He tried to force a kiss on my aunt. And him a married man, too!” “Then I hope they did more than soap his windows,” Oliver drawled. The comment caught Maria by surprise. “And you, of course, have never kissed a married woman?” “Not if they didn’t ask to be kissed,” he said, a strange tension in his voice. “But we weren’t speaking of me, we were speaking of Dartmouth’s dastardly mayor. Did soaping his windows teach him a lesson?” “No, but the gift they left for him in the coach did the trick. They got it from the town’s largest cow.” Oliver and Minerva both laughed. Mrs. Plumtree did not. She was as silent as death beside Maria, clearly scandalized by the entire conversation. “Why do boys always feel an urgent need to create a mess others are forced to clean up?” Minerva asked. “Because they know how it irritates us,” Maria said.

Now, then,” he said, returning to the head of the table, “I think you should know that Gran’s original requirement is still in place. The four of you must marry or she will disinherit the lot of us. I’ve done my part. So I suggest that while Maria and I are in America, you four start looking for mates.” It took a second for that to sink in. Minerva exploded first. “That isn’t fair! Gran, I’m sure you’ll have your heir from Oliver and Maria in no time, given the hours they spend up there in the master bedchamber. Why in heaven’s name must you continue this farce?” “I asked her to continue it,” Oliver said. When his siblings gaped at him, he added, “Gran is right-it’s time that we take our place in the world as more than hellions. We’ve been sleepwalking too long, locked into the past, unable to live fruitful lives. Now that Maria has awakened me, I want to wake you up, too. I want you to stop boxing at shadows and hiding in the dark from the scandal of our parents’ deaths. I want you to find what I’ve found-love.” He gazed at Maria, who cast him an encouraging smile. They’d both agreed that this might be the only way to force his siblings awake. “Speak for yourself,” Minerva answered. “I’m perfectly fine. You’re just using that nonsense as an excuse for joining up with Gran to ruin our lives.” She glanced resentfully at Maria. “Is this the thanks we get for pushing him into your arms?” “Pushing me into her arms?” Oliver echoed. “All that making you jealous and keeping you from her-“ Gabe began. “And lying to you about her inheritance,” Jarret added. “Though that didn’t work out quite as planned.” “You wouldn’t even be together if not for us,” Celia said. “I suspect my wife would beg to differ,” Oliver drawled. “But that’s neither here nor there. Rail at me all you want, but Gran’s deadline is still in place. You have ten months to marry.” He cast them a thin smile. “Given how difficult that may prove, however, I’ve hired someone to help you.” He turned to the door. “Mr. Pinter? Would you step inside, please?” The Bow Street Runner walked in, looking uneasy at facing the entire cadre of scandalous Sharpes. “Mr. Pinter has agreed to help you by researching the backgrounds of your potential spouses. I know it can be difficult, especially for you girls, to sort the legitimate suitors from the fortune hunters.” He knew that firsthand. “So Mr. Pinter will investigate anyone who sparks your interest. That should make the entire process move more quickly.” “And cold-bloodedly,” Celia muttered under her breath. Pinter arched an eyebrow but said nothing.

Romans 1: 8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. 9 For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers; 10 Making request, if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you. 11 For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; 12 That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. 13 Now I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto,) that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles. 14 I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. 15 So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. 17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

We kissed again, and I shivered in the cold night air. Wanting to get me out of the cold, he led me to his pickup and opened the door so we could both climb in. The pickup was still warm and toasty, like a campfire was burning in the backseat. I looked at him, giggled like a schoolgirl, and asked, “What have you been doing all this time?” “Oh, I was headed home,” he said, fiddling with my fingers. “But then I just turned around; I couldn’t help it.” His hand found my upper back and pulled me closer. The windows were getting foggy. I felt like I was seventeen. “I’ve got this problem,” he continued, in between kisses. “Yeah?” I asked, playing dumb. My hand rested on his left bicep. My attraction soared to the heavens. He caressed the back of my head, messing up my hair…but I didn’t care; I had other things on my mind. “I’m crazy about you,” he said. By now I was on his lap, right in the front seat of his Diesel Ford F250, making out with him as if I’d just discovered the concept. I had no idea how I’d gotten there--the diesel pickup or his lap. But I was there. And, burying my face in his neck, I quietly repeated his sentiments. “I’m crazy about you, too.” I’d been afflicted with acute boy-craziness for over half my life. But what I was feeling for Marlboro Man was indescribably powerful. It was a primal attraction--the almost uncontrollable urge to wrap my arms and legs around him every time I looked into his eyes. The increased heart rate and respiration every time I heard his voice. The urge to have twelve thousand of his babies…and I wasn’t even sure I wanted children. “So anyway,” he continued. That’s when we heard the loud knocking on the pickup window. I jumped through the roof--it was after 2:00 A.M. Who on earth could it be? The Son of Sam--it had to be! Marlboro Man rolled down the window, and a huge cloud of passion and steam escaped. It wasn’t the Son of Sam. Worse--it was my mother. And she was wearing her heather gray cashmere robe. “Reeee?” she sang. “Is that yoooou?” She leaned closer and peered through the window. I slid off of Marlboro Man’s lap and gave her a halfhearted wave. “Uh…hi, Mom. Yeah. It’s just me.” She laughed. “Oh, okay…whew! I just didn’t know who was out here. I didn’t recognize the car!” She looked at Marlboro Man, whom she’d met only one time before, when he picked me up for a date. “Well, hello again!” she exclaimed, extending her manicured hand. He took her hand and shook it gently. “Hello, ma’am,” he replied, his voice still thick with lust and emotion. I sank in my seat. I was an adult, and had just been caught parking at 2:00 A.M. in the driveway of my parents’ house by my robe-wearing mother. She’d seen the foggy windows. She’d seen me sitting on his lap. I felt like I’d just gotten grounded. “Well, okay, then,” my mom said, turning around. “Good night, you two!” And with that, she flitted back into the house. Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. I hid my face in my hands and shook my head. He chuckled, opened the door, and said, “C’mon…I’d better get you home before curfew.” My sweaty hands still hid my face. He walked me to the door, and we stood on the top step. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he kissed me on the nose and said, “I’m glad I came back.” God, he was sweet. “I’m glad you did, too,” I replied. “But…” I paused for a moment, gathering courage. “Did you have something you wanted to say?” It was forward, yes--gutsy. But I wasn’t going to let this moment pass. I didn’t have many more moments with him, after all; soon I’d be gone to Chicago. Sitting in coffee shops at eleven at night, if I wanted. Working. Eventually going back to school. I’d be danged if I was going to miss what he’d started to say a few minutes earlier, before my mom and her cashmere robe showed up and spoiled everything.

I know that it has been my Father in Heaven, Who has been with me all along, carrying me past all the obstacles, never forsaking me when I was fatherless and virtually motherless, and never letting me fall into despair. I hope this story will be a source of encouragement for others who have family problems. One or both of your parents may be missing or lacking in some way, but there is always a Father looking out for us, as it says in Tehillim: “Though my father and mother have abandoned me, Hashem will gather me in.

Our heavenly Father is never content with just controlling us. Control is no problem for him; he’s sovereign after all. But in grace he wanted more for us. So he devised a plan that would result in our forgiveness and complete transformation. In Jesus he made a way for us to see our sin, to confess it, to be granted complete forgiveness, and to be blessed with both the desire and the power to change. He is the Redeemer, and so he is unwilling to settle for anything less than radical personal heart and life change.

In 1952, a year after becoming Chabad’s leader, the Rebbe undertook to send a newly married couple to serve as shluchim in Brazil. Unlike the Lipskers, in this case the bride and her parents, all three Lubavitchers, were very unhappy with the Rebbe’s request. The father, who held a key position for the movement in Israel, couldn’t comprehend the idea of his daughter and son-in-law moving to a country with little Jewish infrastructure in place, and he wrote to the Rebbe to express his unhappiness. We possess no copy of the father’s letter, but the basic content of what he said is clear from the Rebbe’s response (when the letter was published, the Rebbe, as was his custom, omitted all names). The father, clearly pleased about the marriage, wrote that the family’s “happy event was [now] disturbed” by the news that the couple were to be sent abroad. It seems apparent from the Rebbe’s response that the father made no effort to disguise his displeasure at what the Rebbe had done. The Rebbe was in no way apologetic. He wrote in his capacity as a leader, in a sense as a military general who understood the need to deploy his troops where they were most needed, to “a place where your son-in-law and your daughter can fully utilize their potential.” The Rebbe acknowledged that moving to a foreign and largely nonobservant Jewish community requires a certain measure of self-sacrifice (mesirut nefesh), but he then posed a rhetorical question intended to overwhelm any further opposition. To paraphrase: “If one can’t expect such self-sacrifice from a graduate of our yeshiva, one who is a child as well of such a graduate and who is married to the daughter of such a graduate, if even from such people one can’t ask for a measure of self-sacrifice, then upon whom can one rely?” The Rebbe proceeded to offer both a carrot and a stick. Thus, he assured the father—knowing that the letter would be read by his daughter as well—that the couple would flourish in every meaningful manner by undertaking such a mission: “The vastness of the good fortune that will result if they accept this offer, including good fortune in a physical sense, is obvious to me.” On the other hand—and the Rebbe stated this as a fact, not a threat—refusing such a mission would cut the couple off from the work of the Previous Rebbe (who had died just two years earlier), and, by implication, from the Rebbe himself. Although he expressed “shock” that an offer to spread “the light of Torah and Chasidus” to unknowledgeable Jews could lead to the parents feeling that their happiness had been “disturbed,” he also set down, near the letter’s end, his trademark conclusion: “As stated above, I am not giving an order, Heaven forbid. This is only a suggestion.

As I mentioned, I look at death differently now. I have experienced the death of six people who were close to me, five in the last ten years. My father, my daughter, my mother, my husband’s parents and finally my sister all left this earth to move on. I know there will be more over the course of my lifetime. It is a fact of life that we all leave this world at some time. I now use the word transition, for though our body may cease to be, our soul lives on, transitioning from this physical plane back to the heavenly dimension from which it came. Our souls never die, they simply return Home to the infinite Source of all life. And yes, for those left behind, the pain can be overwhelming. We miss our loved ones when they move on. We miss the physical aspect of them, touching them, interacting with them. More than anything though, it really boils down to missing the connection we have with Spirit and losing a loved one seems to amplify that feeling of disconnect, of separation. The good news is we can still connect with them, now more easily then ever, as the veils are being lifted between this dimension and others. My granddaughter Hampton spends more time now with her Auntie Moonie than she ever did when Moonie was alive. I, too, find it is getting easier to tune in and connect to my sister and my daughter. They are both just a thought away.

The 49-year-old Bryant, who resembles a cereal box character himself with his wide eyes, toothy smile, and elongated chin, blames Kellogg's financial woes on the changing tastes of fickle breakfast eaters. The company flourished in the Baby Boom era, when fathers went off to work and mothers stayed behind to tend to three or four children. For these women, cereal must have been heaven-sent. They could pour everybody a bowl of Corn Flakes, leave a milk carton out, and be done with breakfast, except for the dishes. Now Americans have fewer children. Both parents often work and no longer have time to linger over a serving of Apple Jacks and the local newspaper. Many people grab something on the way to work and devour it in their cars or at their desks while checking e-mail. “For a while, breakfast cereal was convenience food,” says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. “But convenience is relative. It's more convenient to grab a breakfast bar, yogurt, a piece of fruit, or a breakfast sandwich at some fast-food place than to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal.” People who still eat breakfast at home favor more laborintensive breakfasts, according to a recent Nielsen survey. They spend more time at the stove, preparing oatmeal (sales were up 3.5 percent in the first half of 2014) and eggs (up 7 percent last year). They're putting their toasters to work, heating up frozen waffles, French toast, and pancakes (sales of these foods were up 4.5 percent in the last five years). This last inclination should be helping Kellogg: It owns Eggo frozen waffles. But Eggo sales weren't enough to offset its slumping U.S. cereal numbers. “There has just been a massive fragmentation of the breakfast occasion,” says Julian Mellentin, director of food analysis at research firm New Nutrition Business. And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more healthconscious, they're shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg's four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packagedfood analyst at Consumer Edge. If such discerning shoppers still eat cereal, they prefer the gluten-free kind, sales of which are up 22 percent, according to Nielsen. There's also growing suspicion of packagedfood companies that fill their products with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For these breakfast eaters, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam may seem less like friendly childhood avatars and more like malevolent sugar traffickers.

Another time, the souls of a husband and wife came through to validate their presence to their daughter with a very specific shtick. The dad had me yell, “Bingo!” at which point Mom’s soul said, “They don’t have bingo on TV. It’s The Price Is Right!” The daughter laughed so hard and said that game show was her parents’ favorite. She used to call them when they were alive, and they’d say, “We need to call you back. The Big Deal is on right now!” When the daughter’s son was born, he came into the world right before the Big Deal aired, and the family joked that the baby was the Big Deal of the day. The mom’s soul also had me add that she likes Bob Barker better than Drew Carey as a host. Hey, that certainly wasn’t me talking! I think they’re both great. And though there’s a lot to be happy about in Heaven, people who were crabby or bossy here don’t seem to become unusually chipper. I’ll never forget when I channeled a woman’s parents, and I got a grumpy vibe from them. I asked the daughter, “Were your parents cranky?” And at the same time that the woman said, “No, my parents were wonderful,” her husband mouthed, “Hell yeah, they were cranky!” Grief can cause us to romanticize the deceased, so I took the husband’s word on this one.

The children and young people upon whom came this outpouring of the Holy Spirit and through whom came these visions and revelations were members of the Adullam Rescue Mission in Yunnanfu, Yunnan Province, China. For the most part, these children had been beggars in the streets of the city. In some cases they were poor children with one or both parents dead and had been brought to the Home. There were also some prodigals who had run away from their homes in more distant parts of this or adjoining provinces. But from whatever source they came, these children, mostly boys ranging in ages from six to eighteen, had come to us without previous training in morals and without education. Begging is a sort of "gang" system in which stealing is a profitable part. The morals are what would be expected of a "gang" in a godless land. The Bible is carefully and daily taught in the Adullam Home, and the gospel is constantly preached. Since the children coming into the home have always been open to the teachings given, before the outpouring of the Holy Spirit recorded below, some of them were doubtless converted, while many had a very good knowledge of the main themes of the Bible. All who received the Holy Spirit knew enough to believe in one God and to trust in the blood of Christ for salvation. They also prayed for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. They sought Christ. We did not see any one seeking visions or any of the manifestations that were received day by day as all single heartedly prayed and praised the Lord Jesus. He alone was sought and magnified throughout all the weeks of the Spirit's outpouring. In this visitation from the Lord all were treated impartially. The oldest and the youngest, the first arrivals and the latest comers, the best and the worst, all sitting together around their common Father's table were alike treated to His heavenly bounties. This giving of the Promised Spirit was clearly a love gift of grace "apart from works" or personal merit. It was not something that was worked

A serene mind does not require precepts. An upright behaviour does not need contemplative practice. 心平何勞持戒　行直何用修禪 Filial piety is gratefully taking care of parents. Justice is tenderly empathizing both the superior and inferior. 恩則孝養父母　義則上下相憐 Deference is to be in harmony despite nobility and inferiority. Tolerance is to not reveal the faults of others. 讓則尊卑和睦　忍則眾惡無喧 Given that fire can be made from drilling wood, Red lotuses can surely sprout from mud. 若能鑽木取火　淤泥定生紅蓮 Effective medicine is bitter to the taste. Earnest advice are words hard against the ear. 苦口的是良藥　逆耳必是忠言 Correction of errors gives rise to wisdom. Concealment of failures indicates an unvirtuous mind. 改過必生智慧　護短心內非賢 Altruism should be practiced often everyday. Ascension does not come from monetary alms. 日用常行饒益   成道非由施錢 Bodhi can only be found in the mind No need to search profound outside. 菩提只向心覓　何勞向外求玄 Upon hearing these words and practice accordingly, then heaven will be nowhere but before your eyes. 聽說依此修行　天堂只在目前

In July, 1853, it pleased the Lord to try my faith in a way in which before it had not been tried. My beloved daughter and only child, and a believer since the commencement of the year 1846, was taken ill on June 20th. "This illness, at first a low fever, turned to typhus. On July 3rd there seemed no hope of her recovery. Now was the trial of faith. But faith triumphed. My beloved wife and I were enabled to give her up into the hands of the Lord. He sustained us both exceedingly. But I will only speak about myself. Though my only and beloved child was brought near the grave, yet was my soul in perfect peace, satisfied with the will of my Heavenly Father, being assured that He would only do that for her and her parents, which in the end would be the best. She continued very ill till about July 20th, when restoration began. "On

Ian and Daphne Ivory were laying on the floor, side-by-side, with their throats slit, and in the middle sat a table with two wineglasses full of red liquid. The pool of blood around his parents grew by the minute. Their arms were tied together above their heads. “Conrad!” I slapped my hands across my mouth, while my heart pounded rapidly against my chest. He didn’t move, he didn’t react. Reaching back, he grabbed my arm and steadied me. “Come, my love. They sacrificed for us.” Lifting the wineglasses, he handed me one. My hands shook as my eyes darted between them both. “They… killed themselves?” “Yes.” “How are you not⁠—” “This was always the plan, my love, and one day, you and I will go into the eternal heavens together for our son and his bride, too.” “To be pure even after I take your purity away tonight, we must drink this to protect our morals and souls.” Clinking his glass against mine, he lifted it to his lips and began to drink. “Drink it, Demi. Now.” His voice shifted, and fear rose inside me as my body felt paralyzed. “Demi!” he yelled as he licked the liquid from his lips. Placing my mouth on the rim, I slowly sipped. The thick taste of iron burned my mouth and I immediately choked and coughed. “Drink it, or lay dead with them!” He slapped my glass upward.

Connecting with a child is an incredible opportunity and gift for both you and the child. See through their eyes and invite them to teach you. They will feel delighted and inspired to assist you.

It began to be apparent to me that although Benjamin and Dora recognized the supremacy of the religious sphere of revelation (and for me this was still tantamount to the acceptance of the Ten Commandments as an absolute value in the moral world), they did not feel bound by it; rather, they undermined it dialectically, where their concrete relationship to the circumstances of their lives was concerned. This was first revealed during a long conversation about the question to what extent we had a right to exploit our parents financially. Benjamin’s attitude toward the bourgeois world was so unscrupulous and had such nihilistic features that I was outraged. He recognized moral categories only in the sphere of living that he had fashioned about himself and in the intellectual world. Both of them reproached me for my naiveté, telling me that I let myself be dominated by my gestures and that I offended with an “outrageous wholesomeness” that I did not have but that had me. Benjamin declared that people like us had obligations only to our own kind and not to the rules of a society we repudiated. He said that my ideas of honesty—for example, where our parents’ demands were involved—should be rejected totally. Often I was utterly surprised to find a liberal dash of Nietzsche in his speeches. What was strange about all this was that such arguments, no matter how vehemently they were conducted, often ended with particular cordiality on Benjamin’s part. After one such tempest, both he and Dora were of an “almost heavenly kindness,” and when Benjamin saw me out, he clasped my hand for a long time and looked deep into my eyes.

The sheer scale of the family wealth makes Jonathan’s concerns about losing it seem pretty irrational. But emotions are emotions. “You put the walls up and you want to guard it and protect it and defend it and heaven forbid somebody should take it from you,” he says. “You’re fear-based now.” In some ways, being very rich and very poor are strangely similar. Just as having not enough money creates fear and anxiety, so can having more than you know what to do with. At both ends of the spectrum, money tinkers with our notions of self-worth, our egos, our social lives, the stability of our marriages, our relationships with children, parents, and siblings—even our mental health. Raising that difficult child properly requires a network of friends and relatives, teachers and advisors, except in the ultrawealth world those teachers and advisors wear business casual and charge substantial fees. “I’m a lawyer, not a therapist,” one estate lawyer who caters to ultra-high-net-worth clients told me. “Although the fact of the matter is, you become one.

Beneath the previously mentioned disappointments on both sides and the disputes I have mentioned there lurked a deep-seated bitterness and disillusionment over the images of one another that we had fashioned for ourselves. Occasionally such feelings were expressed under the veil of an exchange of letters that the infant Stefan and I would leave out for each other. Stefan’s letters were in Dora’s handwriting, but they were written with Walter’s knowledge and possibly even with his participation. On June 20—six weeks after my arrival!—Stefan wrote me with reference to a letter of mine that, as far as I recall, never existed: Dear Uncle Gerhardt [sic]: Herewith I am sending you a better photo of me which has arrived in the meantime. Thank you very much for your letter; various things may be said about it, and that is why I am writing you, for if I visit you, you will again tell me so many things that I won’t be able to get a word in edgeways. Well then, first I must tell you that you ought to know I no longer remember. For if I could remember, I certainly would not be here, where it is so unpleasant and you are creating such a bad atmosphere; no, I long since would have returned where I came from. That’s why I can’t read the end of your letter. My mother read the rest to me. Incidentally, I have very strange parents; but more about that later. When I was in town yesterday, something occurred to me: When I grow up, I’m going to be your pupil. Better start thinking now. Best of all, start keeping a little book in which you note everything down. Now I will tell you something about my parents. I won’t say anything about my mother, because she is, after all, my mother. But I have all sorts of things to tell you about my father. You are wrong in what you write, dear Uncle Gerhardt. I believe you really know very little about my Papa. There are very few people who know anything about him. Once, when I was still in heaven, you wrote him a letter that made all of us think that you did know him. But perhaps you don’t after all. I think a man like that is born only once in a great while, and then you just have to be kind to him and he will do everything else by himself. You, dear Uncle Gerhardt, still think that one has to do a great deal. Perhaps I shall also think that way when I am a grown man, but now I think more like my Mama, that is, not at all or very little; and so all this to-do and the great excitement over everything seems much less important to me than which way the wind is blowing. But I don’t want to be smart-alecky, for you know everything much better. That’s the whole trouble. Many regards from Stefan

For as in the natural economy parents vary the mode of instruction according to the age of their children (that while infants may be taught at first by spoken word, then by the voice of a master and the reading of books and finally may derive instruction by themselves from books), so the heavenly Father who chasteneth his people as a man chasteneth his son (Dt. 8:5), instructs the church yet in infancy and lisping by the spoken word, the simplest mode of revelation. The church presently growing up and in the beginning of its youth constituted under the law, he teaches it both by spoken word (on account of the remains of its infancy) and by writing (on account of the beginnings of a more robust age in the time of the apostles). At length, as of full age under the gospel, he wishes it to be content with the most perfect mode of revelation (viz., with the light of the written word). So the Scriptures are made necessary not only by the necessity of command, but by the hypothesis of the divine economy which God wished to be various and manifold (polypoikilon) according to the different ages of the church (Eph. 3:10).

Until now I didn’t dare say anything like the word ‘home,’ though when I saw this valley, I thought I must stay here. It is too perilous to hope for something as impossible as a home, and we both know it.… There will come a time when it is all shattered—by something we find out that makes us realise we are living in fool’s heaven, or by something—or someone—from outside, bringing our past along to catch us. It’s bound to happen. It’s only a matter of time.… “Can’t seem to forget the time when I was a child that I had my nanny beaten because she—I can’t remember. She never came back. I thought she died of it. She was old. All I remember is my triumph. This was my world and I knew how to manage it. My grandmother gave me a present then…I have it with me still. Brought it to remind myself that I am what I despise. Or have been. That kind of blood doesn’t wash off. “I have wondered why I stay alive. I ran away. I stayed away. I told myself there was nothing I could do. I just survive to spite them, to make them fear something at least. Certainly not because I love myself as they seem to do here, without lives and torture on their conscience. What does it mean to be good? Everywhere I go there is a different answer. * “I am tired of the pain of this. There are people all around me in these mountain towns who have not had a life of such pain. I am starting to hate on account of it. Hate them for their happiness. Hate my family, even my parents, for the kind of world they made and live in. Hate myself, I suppose, too, for being trapped here. In these mountains, in this body, in this life. “I cannot imagine, right now, why I stay alive. I never questioned it in the years of struggle: life justified itself. But now that I am safe and sitting in these gardens, living in these easy households, playing with these carefree children, I cannot bear to live like this. I am a twisted creature without merit.… “But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good.… “Can someone so hurt—here they call it ‘abused’—be good?

Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. 카톡►ppt33◄ 〓 라인►pxp32◄ 홈피는 친추로 연락주세요 팔팔정판매,팔팔정팝니다,팔팔정구입방법,팔팔정구매방법,팔팔정판매사이트,팔팔정약효, 비아그라복용법,시알리스복용법,레비트라복용법 The fire of the liquid, which makes you, when you wake up, when you wake up, when you're stoned, when you're stoned, when you turn heaven and earth upside down, when you turn black and white, when the world turns right and wrong, when it turns human history upside down, when it turns four arts of the Chinese scholar, when it turns red and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white and white, when it turns black and white and white, when it turns Crazy poem immortal, Make Public Cao Cao, write hongmen banquet, Wet Qingming Apricot rain, thin Begonia Li Qingzhao, Jingyanggang, help Wu Song three Fists Kill Tigers, Xunyang Tower, Vertical Song Jiang Poem Rebellion, you Ah, you, how many Heroes Jin Yong's Linghu Chong put down how many village men singing and dancing with you, beauty with you, urge poetry, Zhuang Literati Bold, some people borrow you crazy, some people borrow you to seize power, sometimes you are just a prop, to set off the atmosphere at the negotiating table, sometimes you are more like a hidden weapon, knocking out the opponents who drink too much. You, you, have entered both the luxurious houses of Zhu men and the humble cottages, both overflowing the golden bottles of the Royal Family and filling the coarse bowls of the peasant family. You are needed for sorrow, and you are needed for joy, on your wedding night, when you meet a friend from another country, when your name is inscribed on the gold list, the migrating and exiled prisoners, the down-and-out Literati, the high-flying officials of the imperial court, are all your confidants, your companions, and even the condemned prisoners who are about to go on their way, they all want you to say goodbye to them because of you, how many great events have been delayed, because of you, how many unjust cases have been made, because of you, how many anecdotes have been kept alive, because of you, how many famous works have been produced, but also because of you, how many people's liver cancer has been created, and the soul has gone to heaven, it is true, there are successes and failures as well as you, life also has you, death also has you, you drown sorrow more sorrow, poor also has you, rich also has you, thousands of families also can not leave you.

What is your opinion of Lady Helen?” he asked as Quincy arranged the meal on the table in front of him. “She is the jewel of the Ravenels,” Quincy said. “A more kind-hearted girl you’ll never meet. Sadly, she’s always been overlooked. Her older brother received the lion’s share of her parents’ interest, and what little was left went to the twins.” Rhys had met the twins a few days earlier, both of them bright-eyed and amusing, asking a score of questions about his department store. He had liked the girls well enough, but neither of them had captured his interest. They were nothing close to Helen, whose reserve was mysterious and alluring. She was like a mother-of-pearl shell that appeared to be one color, but from different angles revealed delicate shimmers of lavender, pink, blue, green. A beautiful exterior that revealed little of its true nature. “Is she aloof with all strangers?” he asked, arranging a napkin on his lap. “Or is it only with me?” “Aloof?” The valet sounded genuinely surprised. Before he could continue, a pair of small black spaniels entered the parlor, panting happily as they bounded up to Rhys. “Good heavens,” he muttered with a frown. Rhys, who happened to like dogs, didn’t mind the interruption. What he found disconcerting, however, was the third animal that trotted into the room after them and sat assertively by his chair. “Quincy,” Rhys asked blankly, “why is there a pig in the parlor?” The valet, who was busy shooing the dogs from the room, said distractedly, “A family pet, sir. They try to keep him in the barn, but he will insist on coming into the house.” “But why--” Rhys broke off, realizing that regardless of the explanation, it would make no sense to him. “Why is it,” he asked instead, “that if I kept livestock in my home, people would say I was ignorant or daft, but if a pig wanders freely in the mansion of an earl, it’s called eccentric?” “There are three things that everyone expects of an aristocrat,” the valet replied, tugging firmly at the pig’s collar. “A country house, and a weak chin, and eccentricity.” He pushed and pulled at the pig with increasing determination, but the creature only sat more heavily. “I vow,” the valet wheezed, budging him only an inch at a time, “I’ll have you turned into sausage and collops by tomorrow’s breakfast!” Ignoring the determined valet, the pig stared up at Rhys with patient, hopeful eyes. “Quincy,” Rhys said, “look sharp.” He picked up a bread roll from his plate and tossed it casually in the air. The valet caught it deftly in a white-gloved hand. “Thank you, sir.” As he walked to the door with the bread in hand, the pig trotted after him. Rhys watched with a faint smile. “Desire,” he said, “is always better motivation than fear. Remember that, Quincy.

Here’s the problem,” Dransun interrupted. “You’ve got no colors and no affiliation, but you’ve got a sword. So you’ve got the means to kill people, but not the means to be held responsible.” He sniffed. “Parents?” “What?” “Any parents?” “Both dead.” “Hometown?” “Burned to the ground.” “Allies? Compatriots? Friends?” “Just the ones I find on the road. And in a tavern. And, this one time, hunched over a

Numbers from Heaven" by Kurtis C. R. Palmer & Ramona Palmer is the first picture book in the Womb to BLOOM to Classroom series. It has vividly beautiful 3D illustrations that almost leap out of the book's pages, quickly capturing the interest of young ones. From the very first pages, they'd want to follow Zoey, the Zebra and P.B., the Panda Bear, learning and even enhancing the power of their imagination. This book opens to children a whole new world that's not only educational but also fun and worth their time. Parents and their kids can spend precious bonding moments while learning to count and even recognize some colors. The story itself takes the child to simple exercises in counting, allowing the young one to master the number being taught. Zoey's story also contains some mystery that kids can look forward to. As she discovers the treasure chest left by her Grandpa, who knows what wonders await her and her friend as they try to unlock the secret behind each key that they possess! Being the first book in a whole series that promises to teach various subjects, parents and children can definitely look forward to new adventures with Zoey and her friends. I was so happy when the book even presented a bonus animated reading of the story for those who subscribe to their Newsletter. I watched it right away and I couldn't wait to watch for more. I'm certain my nephews would enjoy both the book and the animation as they get to know Zoey and her set of friends. Two thumbs up and five stars for this educational and fun-filled book!

In contrast to most of the examples given in this chapter, it is occasionally recorded that even solitary confinement imposed by enemies can be the trigger for psychological experiences of lasting value. Anthony Grey, who experienced solitary confinement in China, and Arthur Koestler, who was similarly imprisoned in Spain, discussed their experiences together on television. The transcript of their discussion appears in Koestl’s collection of essays, Kaleidoscope. Both men were grateful that they did not have to share a cell with another prisoner. Both felt that solitude enhanced their appreciation of, and sympathy with, their fellow men. Both had intense experiences of feeling that some kind of higher order of reality existed with which solitude put them in touch. Both felt that trying to put this experience into words tended to trivialize it, because words could not really express it. Although neither man subscribed to any orthodox religious belief, both agreed that they had felt the abstract existence of something which was indefinable or which could only be expressed in symbols. Anthony Grey thought that his experience had given him a new awareness and appreciation of normal life. Koestler concurred, but added that he had also become more aware of horrors lurking under the surface. Koestler also refers to a feeling of inner freedom, of being alone and confronted with ultimate realities instead of with your bank statement. Your bank statement and other trivialities are again a kind of confinement. Not in space but in spiritual space . . . So you have got a dialogue with existence. A dialogue with life, a dialogue with death. Grey comments that this is an area of experience into which most people do not enter. Koesder righdy affirms that most people have occasional confrontations of this kind when they are severely ill or when a parent dies, or when they first fall in love. Then they are transferred from what I call the trivial plane to the tragic or absolute plane. But it only happens a few times. Whereas in the type of experience which we shared, one has one’s nose rubbed into it, for a protracted period.17 So, occasionally, good can come out of evil. Anthony Grey recalled being shown a painting by a Chinese friend in which a beautiful lotus flower is growing out of mud. The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.

In attachment theory studies, researchers have observed that children are highly susceptible to both the emotional states and actions of their caregivers, and that interpersonal patterns between children and their caregivers can last a lifetime.

The paper looked a lot like the “lists” he would give us for birthday or Christmas presents he wanted, I thought. And I was almost right. “What’s this?” I asked, with the sort of sing-song voice a father gives to a child when he’s been handed an art project. Samuel said, “Those are all the toys at the store that I also want to take to heaven with me when I die.” I could hardly think of the words to say. Later that night, I lay awake in the bed, and said to my wife, “Do you realize what a failure I am as both a father and as a theologian? I basically lied to my son about the eschaton, and simultaneously taught him to store up on earth the treasures he wants to take to heaven. That’s the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. That means that, in terms of parenting, I am literally anti-Christ.” Maria laughed, and said that I should wash the imaginary “666” from my forehead. But I still slept uneasily, knowing that for all my self-image as a man of gospel courage, my Christian conviction couldn’t stand up to a toy owlet.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

Within a year Ballou, whom Steinbeck would eventually consider a “fine” and “sensitive” man, but too gentlemanly to fight New York publishing battles, remaindered both The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown and rejected Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat manuscript as unsuitable. For a while Steinbeck was back in a familiar situation: writing under stressful circumstances (both his parents were seriously ill) and trying not to worry about publication. Arguably, the time he and Carol spent caring first for his mother, then for his father, probably did as much as anything else to end Steinbeck’s interest in heroic, larger-than-life literary characters. Frequent interruptions to clean his mother’s bed-pans and wash loads of soiled sheets, and later to witness his father’s decline into senility, refocused Steinbeck’s attention on common life, on the realm of “clerks” who, when they broke through reality at all, broke into a far more limited, even dubious, kind of heroism than Henry Morgan’s or Joseph Wayne’s. Steinbeck had already struck that chord in Pastures, but it would be with In Dubious Battle and with Of Mice and Men that a gritty style and an uncompromising vision of beleaguered humans caught in overwhelming circumstances would carry his “new conception of realities” to yet another stage of achievement.