Chiefs Kingdom Quotes

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

the four statements that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

And now you see why lies matter. The actual fib might not matter, but what it shows us is that what you say can’t always be trusted. You can’t always be trusted.

As a good rule of thumb, if you have to lie, you might be doing something wrong.

Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war.

Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

But he also knew praying was more to steady the person than inform the deity.

Swagruhe Pujyate Murkhaha; Swagraame Pujyate Prabhuhu Swadeshe Pujyate Raja; Vidvaansarvatra Pujyate. A fool is worshipped in his home. A chief is worshipped in his village. A king is worshipped in his kingdom. A knowledgeable person is worshipped everywhere.

Ruth Zardo. A gifted poet. One of the most distinguished in the nation. But that gift had come wrapped in more than a dollop of crazy.

It was no use telling her he understood. Or that it was all right. She’d earned the right to no easy answer.

There was nothing like the pain of the present to cure the pain of the past.

Who hurt you once so far beyond repair / That you would greet each overture with curling lip.

There’s more, but I won’t go on. It’s a poem by Rupert Brooke. He was a soldier in the First World War. It helped him in the hellhole of the trenches to think of the things he loved. It helped me too. I made mental lists and followed the things I love, the people I love, back to sanity. I still do.

He was tired of the tyranny of the greater good.

Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can't erase the past. It's trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don't,' he said, 'you'll be at perpetual war.

What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.

That must be Dong Zhuo!” cried Zhang Fei. “What’s the use of pursuing Lu Bu? Better seize the chief villain and so eradicate the evil by plucking up its roots.

Hope itself wasn’t necessarily kind. Or a good thing.

Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors.

In the kingdom of the blind, Amelia recited to herself as she trudged along— —the one-eyed man is king, Gamache read.

In grief people were themselves and not themselves.

You do know that the earth is round.” “The earth might be, but human nature isn’t. It has caverns and abysses and all sorts of traps.

The mess in the drawers was in contrast to the neat desktop. Many people’s lives were like that. The neat room and the messy closet. The well-ordered counters and the chaos in the cabinets.

she was left with the warmth of the words from books now ash.

If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power becomes useless.

Things were pretty dire when Ruth was the healing agent.

While there were few things more terrifying than being outside in a blizzard, there were few things more comforting than being inside.

Far greater than Gamache’s anger was his caring.

In time, it wasn't all that long ago, but measured in events, it was an eternity.

A fool is worshipped in his home. A chief is worshipped in his village. A king is worshipped in his kingdom. A knowledgeable person is worshipped everywhere.

The memory of the heart was far stronger than whatever was kept in the mind. The question was, what did people keep in their heart?

Ruth’s last book of poetry was called I’m FINE. Which sounded good until you realized, often too late, that “F.I.N.E.” stood for “Fucked-Up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

A will, an estate, could become about more than money, property, possessions. Who was left the most could be interpreted as who was loved the most. There were different sorts of greed. Of need.

She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own doctors, their own communities.

She painted what appeared to be portraits, but that was only on the surface. The beautifully rendered flesh stretched, and sometimes sagged, over wounds, over celebrations. Over chasms of loss and rushes of joy. She painted peace and despair. All in one portrait. With brush and canvas and oils, Clara both captured and freed her subject.

No. The real danger in a garden came from the bindweed. That moved underground, then surfaced and took hold. Strangling plant after healthy plant. Killing them all, slowly. And for no apparent reason, except that it was its nature. And then it disappeared underground again.

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure.

The communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hallowed archetypal dream of Golden Age (or Paradise) where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just and wise chief rules over the human kindergarten. This powerful archetype in its infantile form has gripped them, but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our superior points of view. We even support it by our own childishness, for our Western civilization is in the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously, we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and expectations. We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on Earth. The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex and inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

You gave him The Gashlycrumb Tinies?” asked Stephen. “By Edward Gorey? Oh, I think I really do love you,” he said to Ruth.

I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.” Armond Gamache

Things are strongest where they’re broken.

he wondered if, in his effort to get to safety, he wasn’t fleeing from a wreck but causing it.

the one-eyed man is king,

The sore point became their family legend, their myth, their legacy. What they lost became their most prized possession. Their inheritance.

Yes, the real danger always came from the thing you couldn’t see.

This part of rue Ste.-Catherine wasn’t so much an artery as an intestine.

Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.

Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.

Her notebook, on the table, contained neither rhymes nor reason but held, between the worn pages, the lump in the throat.

Elizabeth, and especially Francis Drake, whom Mendoza recognized as the chief threat to Spain’s imperial ambitions.

Let me tell you something, man. I sat here at this desk during the war as one report after another of Arab sellouts came in. The Egyptian Chief of Staff selling secrets to the Germans; Cairo all decked out to welcome Rommel as their liberator; the Iraqis going to the Germans; the Syrians going to the Germans; the Mufti of Jerusalem a Nazi agent. I could go on for hours. You must look at Whitehall’s side of this, Bruce. We can’t risk losing our prestige and our hold on the entire Middle East over a few thousand Jews.” Sutherland sighed. “And this is our most tragic mistake of all, Sir Clarence. We are going to lose the Middle East despite it.” “You are all wound up, Bruce.” “There is a right and a wrong, you know.” General Sir Clarence Tevor-Browne smiled slightly and shook his head sadly. “I have learned very little in my years, Bruce, but one thing I have learned. Foreign policies of this, or any other, country are not based on right and wrong. Right and wrong? It is not for you and me to argue the right or the wrong of this question. The only kingdom that runs on righteousness is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdoms of the earth run on oil. The Arabs have oil.” Bruce Sutherland was silent. Then he nodded. “Only the kingdom of heaven runs on righteousness,

Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them. Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere. That way they only had to remember the place, not the password

Too often it is said that there is no absolute truth, but only opinion and private judgment; that each of us is conditioned, in his view of the world, by his own peculiarities, his own taste and bias; that there is no external kingdom of truth to which, by patience and discipline, we may at last obtain admittance, but only truth for me, for you, for every separate person. By this habit of mind one of the chief ends of human effort is denied, and the supreme virtue of candour, of fearless acknowledgment of what is, disappears from our moral vision. Of such scepticism mathematics is a perpetual reproof;

But wouldn’t people, his clients, realize? When there was no actual money in the account?” “How?” “When they asked for it.” “But people don’t,” she said. “They give it to their investment dealer, and at best they cash in the dividends or take the profits. But the capital remains in the account. Weren’t you ever told by your parents never to touch the capital?” “No. I was told not to touch my brother’s bike.

How many clients had Myrna sat across from as they complained about having been “done wrong”? Whose grip on grievances was so tight it strangled reason. They’d give up sanity before giving up these injustices.

Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,

For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty’s dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

To these things I would add that law among the Macarians—a people that live not far from Utopia—by which their king, on the day on which he began to reign, is tied by an oath, confirmed by solemn sacrifices, never to have at once above a thousand pounds of gold in his treasures, or so much silver as is equal to that in value.  This law, they tell us, was made by an excellent king who had more regard to the riches of his country than to his own wealth, and therefore provided against the heaping up of so much treasure as might impoverish the people.  He thought that moderate sum might be sufficient for any accident, if either the king had occasion for it against the rebels, or the kingdom against the invasion of an enemy; but that it was not enough to encourage a prince to invade other men’s rights—a circumstance that was the chief cause of his making that law.  He also thought that it was a good provision for that free circulation of money so necessary for the course of commerce and exchange.  And when a king must distribute all those extraordinary accessions that increase treasure beyond the due pitch, it makes him less disposed to oppress his subjects.  Such a king as this will be the terror of ill men, and will be beloved by all the good.

Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.

Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom, The Slayer Time, Ancient of Days, come hither to consume; Excepting thee, of all these hosts of hostile chiefs arrayed, There shines not one shall leave alive the battlefield! Dismayed No longer be! Arise! obtain renown! destroy thy foes! Fight for the kingdom waiting thee when thou hast vanquished those. By Me they fall—not thee! the stroke of death is dealt them now, Even as they stand thus gallantly; My instrument art thou! Strike, strong-armed Prince! at Drona! at Bhishma strike! deal death To Karna, Jyadratha; stay all this warlike breath! ’Tis I who bid them perish! Thou wilt but slay the slain. Fight! they must fall, and thou must live, victor upon this plain!

Dominant men have never looked so dull and dreary as they do today. During most of history, dominant men have been colorful and flamboyant, such as American Indian chiefs with their feathered headdresses and Hindu maharajas decked out in silks and diamonds. Throughout the animal kingdom males tend to be more colourful and accessorised than females-think of peacocks’ tails and lions’ manes.

While we often recognize the need to learn how to face hunger and need, we aren't always aware that we need similar help to face wealth and abundance. It's not easy to face affluence every day without committing idolatry or succumbing to ingratitude. In fact, church history is filled with stories of sincere believers facing lowness, hunger, need, suffering, persecution, hardship, and death with Christ-honoring joy and faithfulness. But the stories of Christian fidelity in the midst of overwhelming abundance, provision, plenty, and wealth are fewer and farther between. This is why Jesus says that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:23). One of the chief challenges for Christians in the West is to learn to face our unprecedented abundance with the strength supplied by Christ and not by the wealth.

Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish. And the tragedy was almost always compounded, Myrna knew. These people invariably passed it on from generation to generation. Magnified each time. The sore point became their family legend, their myth, their legacy. What they lost became their most prized possession. Their inheritance.

The chief source of moral ideas is the reflection on the interests of human society. Ought these interests, so short, so frivolous, to be guarded by punishments, eternal and infinite? The damnation of one man is an infinitely greater evil in the universe, than the subversion of a thousand millions of kingdoms. Nature has rendered human infancy peculiarly frail and mortal; as it were on the purpose to refute the notion of a probationary state. The half of mankind die before they are rational creatures.

Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred. Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.

We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.

This pageantry involved the British not merely exalting the principle of hierarchy in ensuring reverence for their own queen, but extending it to India, honouring ‘native princes’, ennobling others and promoting the invention of ersatz aristocratic tradition so as to legitimize their rule. Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one)6, depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building.

Do you know what will be the main labor during the thousand years of rest? It will be that which we are trying to urge the Latter-day Saints to perform at the present time. Temples will be built all over this land, and the brethren and sisters will go into them and perhaps work day and night in order to hasten the work and accomplish the labors necessary before the Son of Man can present His kingdom His Father. . . . "We have come into the world now in order to do these things-at least, it is one of the chief objects of our coming. We cannot lay too much stress upon the importance of this work

Myrna looked at the thick snow in the yard. And thought of the poisonous plants buried there. Frozen, but not dead. Just waiting. Though the real threat, Myrna knew, didn’t come from the poison flowers. Those you could see. Those you knew about. And besides, they at least were pretty. No. The real danger in a garden came from the bindweed. That moved underground, then surfaced and took hold. Strangling plant after healthy plant. Killing them all, slowly. And for no apparent reason, except that it was its nature. And then it disappeared underground again. Yes, the real danger always came from the thing you couldn’t see.

And my friend, the apostle carried this estimation of himself all through his life until he died. For even after his salvation he spoke of himself in this way: “I am the least of the apostles” (1Co 15:9); “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given” (Eph 3:8); he styled himself the chief of sinners (1Ti 1:15); and finally said, “I be nothing” (2Co 12:11). There’s no self-love here, no self-esteem or self-confidence, but here is one who had learned the lesson of the first beatitude very well: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I am nothing; I have nothing; I know nothing;

Q. Wherein lies the chief significance of the doctrine of non-resistance? A. In the fact that it alone allows of the possibility of eradicating evil from one's own heart, and also from one's neighbor's. This doctrine forbids doing that whereby evil has endured for ages and multiplied in the world. He who attacks another and injures him, kindles in the other a feeling of hatred, the root of every evil. To injure another because he has injured us, even with the aim of overcoming evil, is doubling the harm for him and for oneself; it is begetting, or at least setting free and inciting, that evil spirit which we should wish to drive out. Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil.

Doorkeepers He was not merely of the salt of the earth, but of the leaven of the kingdom, contributing more to the true life of the world than many a thousand far more widely known and honoured. Such as this man are the chief springs of thought, feeling, inquiry, action, in their neighbourhood; they radiate help and breathe comfort; they reprove, they counsel, they sympathize; in a word, they are doorkeepers of the house of God. Constantly upon its threshold, and every moment pushing the door to peep in, they let out radiance enough to keep the hearts of men believing in the light. They make an atmosphere about them in which spiritual things can thrive, and out of their school often come men who do greater things, better they cannot do, than they. Malcolm, ch.

God wants people in his city: he tears down the walls to let everyone inside. But God’s very presence is a fire that protects the city. Like a father protecting his children from the bullies on the prowl. Like a chief protecting his village from hostile invasion. Like a husband protecting his wife from a would-be rapist. God protects his kingdom from the tyrannous onslaught that wants inside. God fights “fire with fire.” He does not need cannons or jets or armies to protect his city: it is protected by the very strength of his presence, indwelling in glory with all who would receive him. God’s holy love is experienced inside the city as redemptive glory. But to those ill-intentioned powers that want to invade, God’s holy love is experienced as protective fire.

We have all heard evangelists quote from Revelation: "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with Me." Usually the evangelist applies this text as an appeal to the unconverted, saying, 'Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart. If you open the door, he will come in.' In the original saying, however, Jesus directed his remarks to the church. It was not an evangelistic appeal. So what? The point is that seeking is something that unbelievers do not do on their own steam. The unbeliever will not seek. The unbeliever will not knock. Seeking is the business of believers. Edwards said, "The seeking of the kingdom of God is the chief business of the Christian life." Seeking is the RESULT of faith, not the cause of it.

The travellers crossed, beyond Milligaum, the fatal country so often stained with blood by the sectaries of the goddess Kali. Not far off rose Ellora, with its graceful pagodas, and the famous Aurungabad, capital of the ferocious Aureng-Zeb, now the chief town of one of the detached provinces of the kingdom of the Nizam. It was thereabouts that Feringhea, the Thuggee chief, king of the stranglers, held his sway. These ruffians, united by a secret bond, strangled victims of every age in honour of the goddess Death, without ever shedding blood; there was a period when this part of the country could scarcely be travelled over without corpses being found in every direction. The English Government has succeeded in greatly diminishing these murders, though the Thuggees still exist, and pursue the exercise of their horrible rites.

If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us – or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice – to declare it and claim immediate redress. If we, or in our absence abroad the chief justice, make no redress within forty days, reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him, the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress, they may then resume their normal obedience to us.

The Communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vein hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hallowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten. This powerful archetype in its infantile form has gripped them, but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our superior point of view. We even support it by our own childishness, for our Western Civilization is in the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously, we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and expectations. We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in Justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on Earth... the sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites-- day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that the one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or Joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus. And our king has nothing to do with violent power. Our king has no use for nuclear weapons. Why? Because you can’t love your neighbor with hydrogen bombs. Our king said his kingdom does not come from the world of war, which is why his servants do not fight. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting.”[9] The kingdom from heaven that Jesus brings into the world does not come riding an M1 Abrams tank. In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, we study war no more, we turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, we turn tanks into tractors and missile silos into grain silos. Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden. Our goal is not Armageddon, our goal is New Jerusalem. We’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God. Of course Governor Pilate doesn’t believe any of this.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

I’m FINE. Which sounded good until you realized, often too late, that “F.I.N.E.” stood for “Fucked-Up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

Between the new snow and the fact she was made almost entirely of gummy bears, it would probably be a soft landing.

When the church is set aside as the primary institution of the kingdom, Christians find a substitute to serve as the communal form and chief instrument of the kingdom of God. In American history, this substitute has generally been found in the “Redeemer Nation.” What is called “American civil religion” is the product of a failure of ecclesiology.

There were few things more soothing, Jean-Guy thought, than hearing people you love talking softly in another room.

It is unexpected events, inevitable situations, the imperious necessities of successive epochs, which most often decide the conduct of the greatest powers and the most able politicians. It is after the fair, when the course of facts and their consequences has received full development, that, amidst their tranquil meditations, annalists and historians, in their learned way, attribute everything to systematic plans and personal calculations on the part of the chief actors.

Out there in the wild, the lion is a VIP, and the rest are his entourage.

I see you know your art. Yes. Not many realize that it’s the play of light and dark, of subtleties and extremes—

He said that if we thought we ould compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.

It's a reminder that if someone's happy, maybe that's the only reality that matters.

Everything. And I don’t just mean in business. As humans, we invest not just money. We spend time. We spend effort. There’s a reason it’s put like that. Life’s short, and time is precious and limited. We need to pick and choose where to put it.

Often what seemed obvious was not a fact, or even the truth.

How intimating became intimidating. It was subtle, and all the more powerful for it.

Chief among these recognitions is that all creatures in-habit and live within a single field of shared consciousness, that all are projections of a single Being, and that all of us— angels, humans, animals, vegetables, microbes and minerals—are differentiated aspects of one conscious and coherent whole. This recognition is the cornerstone of the new Sacred Reality, the foundation of the kingdom of heaven.

It started with the four statements that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry. And ended with him saying, simply, “Matthew 10:36.

The inhabitants of the place came to call this ethos the “Kansas City Spirit,” the idea that something small would become something grand if only the people believed.

The fact that NSO sold Pegasus in 2017 to the Saudis barely registered any outrage until the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in December 2018. Israel has a long covert history of relations with Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence about threats to its royal family from as early as the 1970s.49 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who became the country’s spy chief, spent decades meeting Israeli and Jewish leaders as well as Mossad chiefs.50 NSO was immediately blamed for being an accessory to the Khashoggi killing, giving the accused ring leader bin Salman and his team the ability to track Khashoggi’s movements before his death. NSO denied any responsibility but nonetheless reportedly briefly canceled its contract with the Kingdom. NSO’s denials of any complicity in the murder were bogus, with evidence emerging that his wife, fiancé, and associates had their phones compromised by Pegasus both before his death and in the days after, including by the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia that often tracks dissidents for its friend. Today, both Khashoggi’s wife and fiancé, Hanan Elatr and Hatice Cengiz, live in fear for their lives.51

Turning swords to plowshares is, as I like to see it, one of the chief promises the game holds out for us.

There, at 5650 Ward Parkway, Pendergast hired a Nichols architect to design him an ostentatious mansion that was near equal parts French Regency, Italian Renaissance, and American Prairie.

General Hospital No. 2, a public hospital that served the Black working class and poor. The community held the hospital in high regard despite political corruption and racist policies stunting its development. Its all-Black administration and staff were a first for a municipal hospital in the United States, and the hospital’s training programs were nationally recognized. Around one-third to one-half of the country’s Black medical school graduates in the 1920s found internships in Kansas City and St. Louis.