Depths Of Misery Quotes

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

The capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.

The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.

Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.

The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.

Being a stoic does not mean being a robot. Being a stoic means remaining calm both at the height of pleasure and the depths of misery.

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

The human heart is certainly an abyss of misery and sin, but God lies in its depths.

The mind is a powerful force. It can enslave us or empower us. It can plunge us into the depths of misery or take us to the heights of ecstasy. Learn to use the power wisely.

Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy to dismiss concern about animals as the soft-headed mental masturbation of people who really don't understand oppression and the depths of actual human misery, I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.

I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.

I’ve learned that in order to be happy, you first have to have been extremely depressed. Until you have learned to suffer, happiness will never endure. The love that lasts just three years is the love that has neither scaled mountains nor lingered in the depths of despair, but the kind of love that is handed to you on a plate. Love only lasts if everyone involved knows what it costs, and it’s best to pay in advance, or else you might find yourself having to settle the bill later on. We weren’t prepared for happiness, because we weren't yet used to misery. We had grown up in the religion of comfort. You first have to know who you are and who you love. You have to be a finished person to live an unfinished story.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.

Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height.

What precipices are sloth and pleasure! To do nothing is a sorry resolve to take; are you aware of that? To live in indolence on the goods of others, to be useless, that is to say, injurious! This leads straight to the depths of misery. Woe to the man who would be a parasite! He will become vermin! Ah, it does not please you to work! Ah, you have but one thought--to drink well, to eat well, and sleep well. You will drink water; you will eat black bread; you will sleep on a plank, with fetters riveted to your limbs, and you will feel their cold touch at night on your flesh!

Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?

Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound.

I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.

...he does not stir. She bows her head, looks at him, hugs him to her belly and weeps. No-one could imagine the depths of her misery.

Life has its enigmatic events, that can make it a mystery, or my misery. It all depends on how I view it.

Ag, what things are moods, that come and go like the wind that blows where it lists. For a man can be happy and free, and be cast down by a word. And a woman can be in the depths of misery, and be lifted up by an asking for forgiveness. So one goes from joy to dejection, and hurt to exaltation, and certainty to doubt, as when with some summer storm the whole world is dark and sombre, till suddenly the sun breaks through, almost at its setting, and bathes tree and grass and hill in green and yellow light, the link of which, as the English say, was never seen on land or sea.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: “You are tearing up the pavements of hell!” They might reply: “That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me.

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

The mind is a powerful force. It can enslave us or empower us. It can plunge us into the depths of misery or take us to the heights of ecstasy. Learn to use the power wisely." ~ David Cuschieri

God knows that, as we are prone to sin, so, when conscience is thoroughly awaked, we are as prone to despair for sin; and therefore he would have us know, that he setteth himself in the covenant of grace to triumph in Christ over the greatest evils and enemies we fear, and that his thoughts are not as our thoughts are, Isa. v. 8; that he is God, and not man, Hos. xi. 9; that there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery, Eph. iii. 18; that we should never be in such a forlorn condition, wherein there should be ground of despair, considering our sins be the sins of men, his mercy the mercy of an infinite God.

Often the depths of human misery can be found amongst legions of happy people.

She loved him as I loved my children, but she burdened us with the depth of her love. It went as deep as misery.

alone was responsible for the bitter and sweet experiences of my life – the joys and miseries, smiles and tears, pleasure and pain. They were all like the waves of the mighty ocean – unable to touch the depths.

However cruelly fate treats people, however miserable life can be, there are those who will accept the challenge to plumb the depths of that misery to find the essence of what really lies deep inside themselves.

Miserable humanity was clamouring from the depths of its abyss of suffering, and the clamour swept along, sending a shudder down every spine, for one and all were plunged in agony, refusing to die, longing to compel God to grant them eternal life. Ah ! life, life! That was what all those unfortunates, who had come from so far, amid so many obstacles, wanted - that was the one boon they asked for, in their wild desire to live it over again, to live it always! O Lord, whatever our misery, whatever the torment of our life may be, cure us, grant that we may begin to live again and suffer once more what we have suffered already. However unhappy we may be, to be is what we wish. It is not heaven that we ask Thee for, it is earth; and grant that we may leave it at the latest possible moment , never leave it indeed, if such be Thy good pleasure. And even when we no longer implore a physical cure, but a moral favour, it is still happiness that we ask for; happiness , the thirst for which alone consumes us. Oh Lord, grant that we may be happy and healthy; let us live, ay, let us live forever!

As the Great rise by degrees of Greatnesse to the Pitch of Glory, so the Miserable sink to the Depth of their Misery by a continued Series of Disasters. Yet it cannot be denied but most Men owe not only their Learning to their Plenty, but likewise their Vertue and their Honesty: for how many Thousands are there in the World, in great Reputation for their Sober and Just dealings with Mankind, who if they were put to their Shifts would soon lose their Reputations and turn Rogues and Scoundrels? And yet we punish Poverty as if it were Crime, and honour Wealth as if it were a Vertue. And so goes on the Circle of Things: Poverty begets Sin and Sin begets Punishment.

Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.

And that was the thing, wasn’t it? When life rode on its highs, you wanted it to go on forever. But in the depths of the invariable dives, you’d be happy to be put out of your misery, because whatever awaited beyond this life had to be better than this shit on Earth.

I remember the sad case of a very godly man whom I knew who had two daughters who were the most excellent women. They had reached middle life when I met them. They lived, in a sense, for the things of God, and yet neither of them had ever become a member of a Christian church, or ever taken communion at the Lord's Table. As regards their life and conduct, you could not think of better people, and yet they had never become members of the church and they had never partaken of the bread and the wine. Why? They said they did not feel they were good enough. What was the matter with them? They were looking at themselves instead of at the finished, perfect work of Christ. You look at yourself and, of course, you will miserable, for within there is blackness and darkness. The best saint when he looks at himself becomes unhappy; he sees things that should not be there, and if you and I spend our whole time looking at ourselves we shall remain in misery, and we shall lose the joy. Self-examination is all right, but introspection is bad. Let us draw the distinction between these two things. We can examine ourselves in the light of Scripture, and if we do that we shall be driven to Christ. But with introspection a man looks at himself and continues to do so, and refuses to be happy until he gets rid of the imperfections that are still there. Oh, the tragedy that we should spend our lives looking at ourselves instead of looking at Him who can set us free!

Quotidie morior.”42 “I die daily.” I decrease,43 I renounce self more each day so that Christ may increase in me and be exalted; I “remain” very little “in the depths of my poverty.” I see “my nothingness, my misery, my weakness; I perceive that I am incapable of progress, of perseverance; I see the multitude of my shortcomings, my defects; I appear in my indigence.” “I fall down in my misery, confessing my distress, and I display it before the mercy”44 of my Master.

I must not hesitate to acknowledge where Europe is great, for great she is without doubt. We cannot help loving her with all our heart, and paying her the best homage of our admiration,—the Europe who, in her literature and art, pours out an inexhaustible cascade of beauty and truth fertilizing all countries and all time; the Europe who, with a mind which is titanic in its untiring power, is sweeping the height and the depth of the universe, winning her homage of knowledge from the infinitely great and the infinitely small, applying all the resources of her great intellect and heart in healing the sick and alleviating those miseries of man which up till now we were contented to accept in a spirit of hopeless resignation; the Europe who is making the earth yield more fruit than seemed possible, coaxing and compelling the great forces of nature into man's service. Such true greatness must have its motive power in spiritual strength.

And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song. Then something went wrong. (Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through their windows.) The day Soraya stopped singing, in the middle of a line, as if someone had thrown a switch, Haroun guessed there was trouble brewing. But he never suspected how much.

Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you were, then you would experience the sense of meaning in relationship to your sufficiently high goal, and it would justify the misery and limitations of your life. If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ.

Thinking it over, one’s life is both the longest possible and the shortest possible, simultaneously, because it can be rethought and re-experienced in a moment, always in that moment in which such a (bold) thought occurs to one. Always wanting the impossible and left with the possible in his minimal existence, the individual always finds himself in the lowest depths of dissatisfaction. Nevertheless he always manages to create another life situation for himself, probably because he really loves life, just as it is. We always crave something other than we can have, than we have, other than what is suitable for us, and so we’re unhappy. When we’re happy we immediately analyze this happiness to death, if we’re like Roithamer and so forth, and are right back in misery.

The most beautiful word on the lips of mankind is the word Mother,' and the most beautiful call is the call of My Mother.' It is a word full of hope and love, a sweet and kind word coming from the depths of the heart. The mother is every thing-she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly..Every thing in nature bespeaks the mother. And the mother, the prototype of all existence, is the eternal spirit, full of beauty and love.. The word mother is hidden in our hearts, and it comes upon our lips in hours of sorrow and happiness as the perfume comes from the heart of the rose and mingles with clear and cloudy air.

I didn't quite know it at the time, but I sensed it in my fear--these animals were the creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, and then it's children who suffer most. And then, when the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks backs and waits, It's something in our hearts . . . This is what I know. Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself--call it what you like--in the end, it's all we've got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish.

In 1919, 1920, 1921, the entire Jewish press was assaulting the Romanian state, unleashing disorder everywhere, urging violence against the regime, the form of government, the church, Romanian order, the national idea, patriotism. Now, as if by a miracle, the same press, controlled by the same men, changed into a defender of the state’s order, of laws; declares itself against violence. While we become: ‘the country’s enemies’, ‘extremists of the Right’, ‘in the pay and service of Romania’s enemies’, etc. And in the end we will hear also this: that we are financed by the Jews. ... We have endured outrage after outrage, ridicule after ridicule, slap after slap, until we have come to see ourselves in this frightening situation: Jews are considered to be defenders of Romanianism, sheltered from any unpleasantness, leading a life of peace and plenty, while we are considered enemies of our nation, with our liberty and life endangered, and we are hunted down like rabid dogs by all the Romanian authorities. I witnessed with my own eyes these times and lived through them, and I was saddened to the depths of my soul. It is dreadful to fight for years on end for your fatherland, your heart as pure as tears, while enduring misery and hunger, then find yourself suddenly declared an enemy of your country, persecuted by your own kind, told that you fight because you are in the pay of foreigners, and see the entire Jewry master your land, assuming the role of defender of Romanianism and caretaker of the Romanian state, menaced by you, the youth of the country. Night after night we were troubled by these thoughts, occasionally feeling disgusted and immensely ashamed and we were seized by sadness.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Those writings that are the guardians of ideas and virtuous love at least protect us from the arid sorrow born of loneliness, the icy hand that misery lays heavily upon us, when we believe we cannot arouse even the slightest compassion. Such writings can draw tears from people in any situation; they elevate the soul to more general contemplation, which diverts the mind from personal pain; they create for us a community, a relationship, with the writers of the past and those still living, with men who share our love for literature. In the desolation of exile, the depths of dungeons, and on the verge of death, a particular page of a sensitive author may well have revived a prostrate soul: and I who read that page, I who am touched by it, believe I still find there the trace of tears, and by feeling similar emotions I enter into some sort of communion with those whose fate I so deeply grieve.

The rats at the door had gone away. I drank another bottle of wine. To think I was once rich. I once had money. I had everything but something. I used to think that all people desire to be cared for; some are so used to it that they take it for granted, others, who never feel it, desire it so much that they constantly need it. So much in fact, that when they don’t receive it they have outbursts, and in the end they wind up pushing away those people who in the end would have cared for them as their heart desired within its innermost depths. So they are always alone, always on the edge of society, within it, but at the same time, apart from it. They are like spectators watching with envy the dance of mankind, wishing for that one feeling that only another’s love can bring. A whisper that speaks to one and only one and says: “You truly are worth something.” They never know that feeling that shines on some. So they cease to expect and begin looking elsewhere for that…wonderful whisper of… War. Love almost seems like war. The ancient Greeks used to say, ‘Love as if you will one day hate.’ I used to think that meant something very pessimistic, that love was not real. But really, man is just an animal anyway. It’s not just about that though, the Greeks meant more. It’s like, ‘Live as if you will one day die.’ Do not take for granted life, and for the Greeks, do not take for granted your love. After all, it really is something special. Even if it doesn’t last, it’s the moment that matters. How cliché, but the problem with most men is that they learn words, rather than the concepts that the words signify. And life, death, love, are these not the most important things, those which a man should learn before all else. And the moment…what of this, even in misery it still matters. But all we learn are words and a way to be. God I love wine.

If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn't understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgement, to common sense, or why they would say "I know, I know" when I urged a little reasonableness on them, and why it meant "It doesn't matter, I just don't care." That's what the saints and the martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations. I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don't see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery. I realized many things that I am at a loss to express. And of course those feelings become milder with time, which is a mercy.

Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or performance, but upon ‘the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity’, that the Father loves the Son, and it is in the Son’s merits, and not our own, that Christians are loved. Because God is a loving community, Christians can be confident. Then, instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart. From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us’. Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behaviour it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.

Thou Melko shalt see that no theme can be played save it come in the end of Ilúvatar’s self, nor can any alter the music in Ilúvatar’s despite. He that attempts this finds himself in the end but aiding me in devising a thing of still greater grandeur and more complex wonder:–for lo! through Melko have terror as fire, and sorrow like dark waters, wrath like thunder, and evil as far from the light as the depths of the uttermost of the dark places, come into the design that I laid before you. Through him has pain and misery been made in the clash of overwhelming musics; and with confusion of sound have cruelty, and ravening, and darkness, loathly mire and all putrescence of thought or thing, foul mists and violent flame, cold without mercy, been born, and death without hope. Yet is this through him and not by him; and he shall see, and ye all likewise, and even shall those beings, who must now dwell among his evil and endure through Melko misery and sorrow, terror and wickedness, declare in the end that it redoundeth only to my great glory, and doth but make the theme more worth the hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous, that of all the deeds of Ilúvatar it shall be called his mightiest and his loveliest.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

In the night I awoke. Was this my own voice reciting what was written? “ ‘And every secret thing shall be opened, and every dark place illuminated.’ ” Dear God, no, do not let them know this, do not let them know the great accumulation of all of this, this agony and joy, this misery, this solace, this reaching, this gouging pain, this . . . But they will know, each and every one of them will know. They will know because what you are remembering is what has happened to each and every one of them. Did you think this was more or less for you? Did you think—? And when they are called to account, when they stand naked before God and every incident and utterance is laid bare—you, you will know all of it with each and every one of them! I knelt in the sand. Is this possible, Lord, to be with each of them when he or she comes to know? To be there for every single cry of anguish? For the grief-stricken remembrance of every incomplete joy? Oh, Lord, God, what is judgment and how can it be, if I cannot bear to be with all of them for every ugly word, every harsh and desperate cry, for every gesture examined, for every deed explored to its roots? And I saw the deeds, the deeds of my own life, the smallest, most trivial things, I saw them suddenly in their seed and sprout and with their groping branches; I saw them growing, intertwining with other deeds, and those deeds come to form a thicket and a woodland and a great roving wilderness that dwarfed the world as we hold it on a map, the world as we hold it in our minds. Dear God, next to this, this endless spawning of deed from deed and word from word and thought from thought—the world is nothing. Every single soul is a world! I started to cry. But I would not close off this vision—no, let me see, and all those who lifted the stones, and I, I blundering, and James' face when I said it, I am weary of you, my brother, and from that instant outwards a million echoes of those words in all present who heard or thought they heard, who would remember, repeat, confess, defend . . . and so on it goes for the lifting of a finger, the launching of the ship, the fall of an army in a northern forest, the burning of a city as flames rage through house after house! Dear God, I cannot . . . but I will. I will. I sobbed aloud. I will. O Father in Heaven, I am reaching to You with hands of flesh and blood. I am longing for You in Your perfection with this heart that is imperfection! And I reach up for You with what is decaying before my very eyes, and I stare at Your stars from within the prison of this body, but this is not my prison, this is my Will. This is Your Will. I collapsed weeping. And I will go down, down with every single one of them into the depths of Sheol, into the private darkness, into the anguish exposed for all eyes and for Your eyes, into the fear, into the fire which is the heat of every mind. I will be with them, every solitary one of them. I am one of them! And I am Your Son! I am Your only begotten Son! And driven here by Your Spirit, I cry because I cannot do anything but grasp it, grasp it as I cannot contain it in this flesh-and-blood mind, and by Your leave I cry. I cried. I cried and I cried. “Lord, give me this little while that I may cry, for I've heard that tears accomplish much. . . .” Alone? You said you wanted to be alone? You wanted this, to be alone? You wanted the silence? You wanted to be alone and in the silence. Don't you understand the temptation now of being alone? You are alone. Well, you are absolutely alone because you are the only One who can do this! What judgment can there ever be for man, woman, or child—if I am not there for every heartbeat at every depth of their torment?

9:36a    ἰδὼν δὲ τούς ὄχλους ἐσπλαγχνίσθη πεϱὶ αὐτῶν seeing the crowds, his insides were moved with pity for them THE JEWS AND THE GREEKS could not succeed in making pity and compassion into a purely mental act. It sounds archaic, hardly short of embarrassing, to say that “Jesus saw the crowds and felt pity for them in his bowels.” But, in fact, any translation that omits compassion’s element of viscerality (for σπλάγχνα, the root of the verb here, means “viscera”, “bowels”, “womb”) has already betrayed the depth of Jesus’ divine and human pity. We all know how the strongest emotions—whether sorrow, fear, joy, or desire—are all initially registered in the abdominal region, and this physiological reaction is one of the proofs of the authenticity of our emotions. The same teacher, herald, and healer who surpassed all others in these crafts finally reveals himself in utter silence and inactivity in his deepest nature: the Compassionate One who is affected by suffering more elementally than the sufferers he sees around him. If Mary’s womb was proclaimed blessed for having borne such a Child, we now see in the Son the Mother’s most precious quality: wide-wombed compassion. When we allow ourselves to be moved in this way, we are already hopelessly involved with the object of our pity: no possibility here of a distanced display of “charity” that refuses to become tainted by contact with the stench of human misery. Jesus looks at the crowds, then, and is viscerally moved. What power in the gaze of a Savior who pauses in the midst of his activity in order to take into himself the full, wounded reality about him! Jesus never protects himself against the claims of distress. He is not content with emanating the truth, joy, and healing power that are his: he must become a fellow sufferer. His loving gaze is like an open wound that filters out no sorrow. He has already done so much for them; but as long as he sees misery, nothing is enough; and so he wonders what else remains to be done. His contemplative sorrow becomes a stimulant to his creative imagination. He nestles all manner of plight within his person, and every human need becomes a churning in his inward parts. He interiorizes the chaos of the surrounding landscape, but, by entering him, it becomes contained, comprehended, embraced and saved.

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.

I can’t force people to believe. They’re either searching or they aren’t. No matter what sense of misery grips someone, whatever depth of shame, there’s still some rebel independence coursing through their veins. We’re all guilty of that, of course.

CHAPTER II—THE LOWEST DEPTHS There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each one is for himself. The I in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf. The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty—that is the point of departure; to be Satan—that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges. We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified, honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress. The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths, hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point, and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated, the great cavern of evil. This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of everything. Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates. It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination. It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance. All the others, those above it, have but one object—to suppress it. It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime. Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. The only social peril is darkness. Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there converted into evil.

darkness comes light. From the depths of misery comes hope. From black soil grow supple flowers.

More and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing - subversive loathing of 'the hegemonic discourse,' Western loathing of the East, Eastern loathing of the West, secular loathing of believers, religious loathing of the secular. Sweeping, unmitigated loathing surges like vomit from the depths of this or that misery. Such extreme loathing is a component of fanaticism in all its guises.

The Wood stared back at me out of Kasia’s face: an endless depth of rustling leaves, whispering hatred and longing and rage. But the Dragon paused; my hand had clenched on his. Kasia was there, too. Kasia was there. I could see her, lost and wandering in that dark forest, her hands groping ahead of her, her eyes staring without seeing as she flinched away from branches that slapped in her face, thorns that drank blood from deep scratches on her arms. She didn’t even know she wasn’t in the Wood anymore. She was still trapped, while the Wood tore at her little by little, drinking up her misery. I let go of him and stepped towards her. The working didn’t fail: the Dragon kept on reading, and I kept feeding my magic to the spell. “Kasia,” I called, and cupped my hands before her face. The light of the spell pooled in them: a brilliant sharp terrible white light, hard to bear.

remember that god will not leave you in the depths of darkness he will lift you out of your misery for he will never give you more than you can take -

The individual human lot, how practically it disengages itself from the mass! We talk of campaigns and revolutions, and it is all paper theory, less important to our instincts than the single case, anywhere on the round world, that has managed to become detached, to rise, like a microcosm of misery, out of the depths. There is the picture and the drama; and we stare fascinated at the bubble we see, while the fate of anonymous thousands sleeps in the next paragraph.

Consoler of our misery, religion is at the same time the most natural of our emotions. Unknown to us, all our physical sensations, all our moral feelings, awake it in our hearts. All that appears to us without limits, and that generates the notion of immensity - the sight of the sky, the silence of the night, the vast extent of the seas- all that leads us to tenderness or to enthusiasm - the consciousness of a virtuous action, of a generous sacrifice, of a danger bravely confronted, of the pain of another aided or comforted - all that stirs up in the depths our soul the primitive elements of our nature - the contempt for vice, the hatred of tyranny - feed our religious feeling. This feeling is intimately connected with all the noble, delicate and deep passions. Kike all these passions, it has something mysterious about it: for common reason cannot satisfactorily explain any of these passions.

They’ve gone, love. Stay a moment more. There’s nothing to be gained by haste at this point, and we need to sort this out before we face your family.” Love? Now he called her love? “Let me go. I can’t breathe…” She tried to wrestle free, but he had his hand on the back of her head, his arm around her back. Out in the hallway, the front door didn’t close; it banged shut with the impact of a rifle shot ricocheting through the house… and through the rest of Eve’s blighted, miserable life. “Mama slammed that door, Lucas Denning. Her Grace, the Duchess of Moreland, slammed a door, because of me, because of my stupid, selfish, useless, greedy, stupid, asinine…” There were not words to describe the depth of the betrayal she’d just handed her family. She collapsed against Deene’s chest, misery a dry, scraping ache in her throat. “Eve, many couples anticipate their vows, even a few couples closely associated with the Duchess of Moreland.” The reason in his voice had her hands balling to fists. “I will not marry you.” She could not, not him of all men. That signal fact gave her scattering wits a rallying point. Deene did not argue. When an argument was imperative, he did not argue. His hand stroked slowly over her hair, and as the fighting instinct coursing through Eve’s body struggled to stand against a swamping despair, some part of Eve’s brain made a curious observation: Deene was breathing in a slow, unhurried rhythm, and as a function of the intimacy of their posture, Eve was breathing in counterpoint to him. The same easy, almost restful tempo, but her exhale matched his inhale. “We cannot marry, Deene. I won’t have it. A white marriage was as far as I was willing to go, and then only to the right sort of man, a man who would never seek to… impose conjugal duties on me.” His arms fell away, when Eve would very much have liked them to stay around her. Better he not see her face, better she not have to see his lovely blue eyes going chill and distant. “We need to set you to rights.” His hands on her shirt were deft and impersonal, his fingers barely touching her skin. The detachment in his touch was probably meant to be a kindness, but it… hurt. “Lucas, I cannot think.” “We’ll think this through together. I can guarantee you not a soul will be coming through that door until we decide to pass through it ourselves.” “I hate that you can be so calm.” And—worst

The mind is a powerful force. It can enslave us or empower us. I t can plunge us into the depths of misery or take us to the heights of ecstasy. Learn to use the power wisely.

[Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?] Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice and not having the freedom to let go is miserable. I see so many people who have been unable to choose the story that gives them peace, so they take a painful event, put more lenses and more filters on it, until it becomes misery and they suffer needlessly. This absence of consciousness causes people to suffer needlessly, because of the stories they’ve created and the layers of meaning they’ve piled onto those stories. All this becomes a rock they are chained to.

[...] I mean, this was the second half of the twentieth century, for pity's sake, and they still saw communism as the road to utopia. I wonder if any of the people spouting these messages ever really grasped, in later years, the depths of the misery for which they were responsible.

Quara's need was and is so great that a person like me could be swallowed up in it a dozen times over. I had problems of my own then. Don't condemn me because I wrote her off. Her barrel of misery has depth enough to hold a thousand bushels of happiness.

The next hurdle is the recognition that we have many deeply ingrained habit patterns that take time—a lot of time—to change. At first the typical neophyte is sure that he or she has a tremendous capacity and will grow more quickly than others. Then the sobering realization dawns that the degree of self-transformation is equal to the effort made. If neophytes have persisted thus far, they will almost inevitably encounter doubt (samshaya)—doubt about their own capacity; doubt about their teacher; doubt about the efficacy of the teaching. It is not far from the truth to say that practitioners who do not befriend doubt are bound to become self-deluded. If there really is no doubt or self-delusion, then they are quite simply enlightened. Another obstacle, not often identified, is the fact that practitioners’ karmic tendencies (read unconscious or semiconscious habit patterns) are magnified because awareness is enhanced through regular practice. This can be likened to a bright searchlight shining deep into the well of the mind. In the depth of the unconscious reside all kinds of unpleasant realities that get flushed out by steady application to self-inspection and self-understanding. At times, the unconscious materials that drift into the conscious mind seem overwhelming, and then it becomes clear that spiritual life is a form of brinkmanship. The Indic tradition speaks of the razor-edged path. Gradually spiritual practitioners learn to overcome their intrinsic materialism (i.e., constantly thinking in terms of the visible reality only). There is a progressive loosening of the ego knot or “self-contraction” (ātma-samkoca) by which the ordinary individual anxiously seeks to hold everything together. Spiritual practitioners learn to be humorous about everything, including themselves. Life is seen from a new perspective: as a strange play in which we are willy-nilly involved and which we can either misunderstand and suffer or understand and transcend even while being fully engaged in its drama. Practitioners must prevail over spiritual materialism—the false sense of accumulating “higher” experiences. They can realize inner freedom only to the extent that even the goal of liberation is renounced. Liberation, or enlightenment, is not a thing to be attained or acquired. It is living in the moment from the most profound understanding and without egoic attachment to anything. Those who parade their extraordinary spiritual accomplishments in front of others are possibly the least illumined of all. They merely substitute material commodities for “spiritual” merchandise. The Indic heritage knows of many adepts who after years of intense practice achieved a high state of consciousness or astounding paranormal ability only to promptly plunge from grace. The higher the adept’s elevation, the steeper the drop into oblivion and misery. Therefore the authorities of Yoga ever admonish practitioners to be circumspect, to keep their attainments to themselves, to focus on the cultivation of moral integrity, understanding, self-transcendence, and not least service to others.

Those writings that are the guardians of ideas and virtuous love at least protect us from the arid sorrow born of loneliness, the icy hand that misery lays heavily upon us, when we believe we cannot arouse even the slightest compassion. Such writings can draw tears from people in any situation; they elevate the soul to more general contemplation, which diverts the mind from personal pain; they create for us a community, a relationship, with the writers of the past and those still living, with men who share our love for literature. In the desolation of exile, the depths of dungeons, and on the verge of death, a particular page of a sensitive author may well have revived a prostrate soul: and I who read that page, I who am touched by it, believe I still find there the trace of tears, and by feeling similar emotions I enter into some sort of communion with those whose fate I so deeply grieve.

Jesus, my God, my Redeemer, my Friend, my intimate Friend, my Heart, my Darling: here I come to tell you, from the depths of my heart and with the greatest sincerity and affection of which I am capable, that there is nothing in the world that attracts me except you alone, my Jesus. I do not want the things of the world. I do not want to console myself with creatures. I want only to empty myself and be free of all things in order to love you alone. For you, Lord, is all my heart with all its affections, all its loves, and all its delights. O Lord, I do not tire of repeating to you: I want nothing but your love and your trust. I swear to you, Lord: I promise to hear all your inspirations and to live your very own life. Speak very frequently in the depths of my soul, and demand much of me, for I swear always to do whatever your heart desires, as easy or as hard as it may be. How can I deny you anything if the only consolation of my heart is waiting for a word to fall from your lips, in order to satisfy your wishes. Lord, behold my misery, my weakness. Kill me before I deny you anything you wish of me. Lord, by your Mother! Lord, by your souls! Give me this grace. As the years went by, Arrupe’s prayers became more sober and profound, but not less ardent or sincere. We see in them his enormous joy and confidence: “I have great confidence in God, for we are in his hands. Things can never turn out badly if one follows the will of God, though one might have to suffer.” 8 Iturrioz, “Pedro Arrupe.” When

it is a striking feature of Sibbes’s preaching how strongly Christ-focused he is. And that is no accident: Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’.

Part of her wanted to bring him down further, find the depths of his misery and swim in it, revel in their mutual unhappiness.

At this stage in our discussion, the important thing has been simply to point out that our world is so religious that objects and actions of the most materialistic kind, those seemingly most devoid of depth, are transformed into religious phenomena. The whole person is now committed at that level. That is what makes the dispute on this ground so fundamental. It is very bad that some people should be undernourished while others succumb from overconsumption, that there should be misery and injustice. It is obvious that we should struggle against hunger, misery, and unequal distribution. But that reasonable proposition is rejected by the judges. According to them, what I have just written is the statement of a heartless man, who moreover is a rightist. Those things should be talked about at the height of excitement, of indignation, with sacred fury, with voice trembling and eyes flashing despair and fire. That people should go hungry is the absolute in suffering. That there should be inequality of consumption is an absolute evil. This fury, this urgency, the quality of the ultimate in the arguments in this domain, the totalitarian nature attributed to these things, which excludes everything else and treats other problems as secondary, which makes it possible to decide exactly what is good and what is to be condemned, which involves the whole of humanity in the application-all this attests, more than anything else, to the religious character of consumption. The debate over "have/have not" has become a war of religion (I said "over," not "between").

Her barrel of misery has depth enough to hold a thousand bushels of happiness.

Too often, however, these passing modes of relief proved insufficient. Among the all-too-scanty literary documents as yet unearthed, two dialogues on suicide significantly remain, one Egyptian and one Mesopotamian. In each case a member of the privileged classes, with every luxury and sensual gratification open to him, finds his life intolerable. His facile dreams are unsalted by reality. The Egyptian debate between a man and his soul dates from the period following the disintegration of the Pyramid Age, and betrays the desperation of an upper-class person who had lost faith in the ritualistic exaltation of death as the ultimate fulfillment of life, which rationalized the irrationalities of high Egyptian society. But the Mesopotamian dialogue between a rich master and his slave, dating from the first Millenium B.C., is even more significant: for the principal finds that no piling up of wealth, power, or sexual pleasure produces a meaningful life. Another seventh-century B.C. 'Dialogue About Human Misery' expands the theme: the fact that it has been called a Babylonian Ecclesiastes indicates the depth of its pessimism-the bitterness of power unrelieved by love, the emptiness of wealth condemned to enjoy only the goods that money can buy. If this is what the favored few could expect, in justification of thousands of years of arduous collective effort and sacrifice, it is obvious that the cult of power, from the beginning, was based upon a gross fallacy. Ultimately the end product proved as life-defeating for the master classes as the mechanism itself was for the disinherited and socially dismembered workers and slaves.

The Son of God, heaven’s glorious Commander, was touched with pity for the fallen race. His heart was moved with infinite compassion as the woes of the lost world rose up before him. But divine love had conceived a plan whereby man might be redeemed. The broken law of God demanded the life of the sinner. In all the universe there was but one who could, in behalf of man, satisfy its claims. Since the divine law is as sacred as God himself, only one equal with God could make atonement for its transgression. None but Christ could redeem fallen man from the curse of the law and bring him again into harmony with heaven. Christ would take upon himself the guilt and shame of sin—sin so offensive to a holy God that it must separate the Father and his Son. Christ would reach to the depths of misery to rescue the ruined race.

Birthed in a riotous sea of heat and violence, this world was never good, never peaceful, never without suffering, pain and anxiety. There was never an armistice between all living and not-so living things, nor can evidence be found to suggest there ever was—or still is—a loosely balanced war tumbling across Creation with the advantage swinging between the forces of light and happiness, and those of darkness and misery. Fire has always burned flesh, water has always drowned babies, and Creation has only ever exhibited but one impulse, one motive, one direction: towards increasing complexity, where complexity—across all systems, animate and inanimate—corresponds precisely to the degree and depth of potential suffering available to those contingent things whose participation in Creation was never solicited.

My Promise lives within each of you for you are the hope of all who seek light from within the darkness. No matter the misery of those who have given themselves over to evil, the fate of each man in his own hands: divergence from the path of Righteousness comes in many forms but the price of my eternal Peace is paid in compassion and humility. It is upon your Faith that wickedness will be vanquished, and suffering expelled eternally into the depths of the Pit so that all who seek it may dwell eternally in my House. Despair not of what is to come for your place is forever at my table.

What are you going to do if you can’t challenge him?” I asked, ashamed of the pathetic tone of misery in my voice. Drake smiled. His lips curled up, and his eyes went dragon as the smile grew in a way that made me thankful he was on my side. “I am wyvern of the green dragons.” “Yeah, so?” “Such a look of confusion in your beautiful face. What do green dragons do best?” “You’re not going to make love to him,” I said, scandalized for a moment even though I knew Drake couldn’t mean that. He gave me a long-suffering look. “Hardly.” “Well, good. Because I told you once I don’t share, not even with another guy, although I have to admit that…um…never mind.” One of Drake’s eyebrows rose. “Such unplumbed depths to you. I’m afraid that particular fantasy will never be fulfilled. I hold what is mine. No others will have you.” I smiled at the slightly outraged glint in his eyes. “Don’t worry, it’s not a fantasy. I always kind of wondered what it would be like to have so much attention, but then I met you, and, well, I don’t think I could survive more attention than what you give me.” “That was the correct answer,” he said, his voice rich with smugness. “Uh-huh. OK, so back to Fiat…” I pulled my mind from the delightful sensations Drake’s hands and mouth were giving me, and thought hard. If he couldn’t challenge Fiat, what could he do? Drake was a man of many talents, but I couldn’t think of one that would help him get me back without some sort of fight between him and Fiat. And then the penny dropped. I started laughing, causing Drake to pause as he unbuttoned my shirt. “Figured it out, did you?” “I’m allowed to be a bit slow. I’ve had a hell of a day. So, my darling green dragon…what treasure of Fiat’s are you going to steal?

Since all the calamities, fears, and sufferings in the world have arisen from self-clinging, what have I to do with that great demon? (BCA 8.134) This means that in this world, we harm each other and experience both physical and mental suffering, especially fear of the many terrifying things inside and outside ourselves. Every aspect of misery and suffering in this world actually arises from the view of a real personal identity, or the egotistic view. It is the devil in the depths of our mind that thinks: “I alone am the best. I alone am to be cherished, respected, and honored. I must be in control. Those who do not agree with me are evil; maybe they should be destroyed. How nice it would be if they did not exist.” Do you have this type of attitude or not? According to ⁄›ntideva, most people in the world do.

She wanted to sink into the depths of her soul and revel in her misery. Surround herself in empty darkness and silence.

By this conversion of the political privilege into a provision for the poor, a principle remarkable in a moral as well as in a historical point of view came for the first time into living operation. Civil society but slowly and gradually works its way to a perception of the interdependence of interests; in earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members from the public enemy and the murderer, but it was not bound to protect the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want, by affording the needful means of subsistence. It was the Attic civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian legislation, the principle that it is the duty of the community to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally and it was Caesar that first developed what in the restricted compass of Attic life had remained a municipal matter into an organic institution of state, and transformed an arrangement, which was a burden and a disgrace for the commonwealth, into the first of those institutions—in modern times as countless as they are beneficial—where the infinite depth of human compassion contends with the infinite depth of human misery.

Human enjoyment was a fragile skin drawn over a great depth of potential misery

The way of every Jew to God must not differ from the trail along which Abraham moved toward his destiny, which had to be blazed through the wilderness of a brute and nonsensical existence. The experience is attained at the cost of doubts and a restless life, searching and examining, striving and pursuing—and not finding; of frustrating efforts and almost hopeless waiting; of grappling with oneself and with everybody else; of exploring a starlit and moonlit sky and watching the majesty of sun-sets and sunrises, the beauty of birth and also the ugliness of death and destruction; of trying to penetrate behind the mechanical surface of the cosmic occurrence and failing to discover any intelligible order in this drama; of winning and losing and yet surging forward again; of conquering, giving up and reaching out again; of being able to put on a repeat performance of something which I had and lost; of asking questions and not finding answers; of ascending the high mount like Moses and falling back into the abyss, shattering everything one has received, and yet pulling oneself out of the depths of misery and trying to climb up the mountain again with two new stone tablets.

Just when all those around me were assuring me they loved me, cared for me, appreciated me, yes, even admired me, I experienced myself as a useless, unloved, and despicable person. Just when people were putting their arms around me, I saw the endless depth of my human misery and felt that there was nothing worth living for. Just when I had found a home, I felt absolutely homeless. Just when I was being praised for my spiritual insights, I felt devoid of faith. Just when people were thanking me for bringing them closer to God, I felt that God had abandoned me. It was as if the house I had finally had no floors. The anguish completely paralyzed me. I could no longer sleep. I cried uncontrollably for hours. I could not be reached by consoling words or arguments. I no longer had any interest in other people's problems. I lost all appetite for food and could not appreciate the beauty of music, art, or even nature. All had become darkness. Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn't know existed, a place full of demons.

I picture that girl from the winter of 1959, bound by pride to assert her will and fiercely determined to pursue goals that will gradually drive her into the depths of misery—to exercise a sort of unhappy will.