Gravity And Grace Quotes

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

For Equilibrium, a Blessing: Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul. As the wind loves to call things to dance, May your gravity by lightened by grace. Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth, May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. As water takes whatever shape it is in, So free may you be about who you become. As silence smiles on the other side of what's said, May your sense of irony bring perspective. As time remains free of all that it frames, May your mind stay clear of all it names. May your prayer of listening deepen enough to hear in the depths the laughter of god.

She closed her eyes and jumped. For a moment she felt herself hang suspended, free of everything. Then gravity took over, and she plunged toward the floor. Instinctively she pulled her arms and legs in, keeping her eyes squeezed shut. The cord pulled taut and she rebounded, flying back up before falling again. As her velocity slowed, she opened her eyes and found herself dangling at the end of the cord, about five feet above Jace. He was grinning. 'Nice', he said. 'As graceful as a falling snowflake.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Distance is the soul of the beautiful.

Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, from death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.

Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

L’amour n’est pas consolation, il est lumière.

Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking.

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.

Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

Man's great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.

gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace, we think it is kind.

To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success.

Silent our body is a sacred temple, A place to connect with other people. Can't we just stay any younger? Really, we might keep it stronger, Elated, rather than so tilted or feeble!!

Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don’t age so quickly—they’ll live longer than we do.” Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the unusually delicate bone structure.

When I'm asked for the 'elevator speech' that sums up my work, I always respond, 'I always take the stairs, so I don't have an elevator speech. If you'd like to walk with me awhile, I'd love to talk.' I don't know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite." (40)

There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.

Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.

Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.

Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There's the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.

There is no doubt that here below matter and evil exercise 'all the causality which belongs to them'; the spectacle of the innumerable horrors of history is enough to prove that the kingdom of God is not of this world (does not Scripture describe the devil as the prince of this world?). Nevertheless God remains mysteriously present in creation: without in any way changing the calamities which weigh upon us, his grace plays upon the laws of gravity like the sun's rays in the clouds.

Miss Temple, perhaps you will demonstrate the proper curtsy for us?" Without ado, Cecily temple, She Who Can Do No Wrong, settles to the floor in a long, slow, graceful arc that seems to defy gravity. It is a thing of beauty. I am hideously jealous. "Thank you, Miss Temple." Yes. Thank you, you little demon beast. May you marry a man who eats garlic with every meal.

It is incontestable that the void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction is from on high, for we grasp it the better the more we sharpen our natural faculties of intelligence, will and love. The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.

Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention.

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide In me, no lunar power can reverse; But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied A sightlessness tonight: or something worse, A disregard that made me feel unmanned. Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath To think I saw my future traced in sand One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,” And pray for an oblivion so deep It ends in transformation. Only dawn Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn: Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to trace The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.

How long did it take to become a gracious person? One who could accept help and give thanks without being resentful of it?

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

At a certain moment, the pain is lessened by projecting it into the universe, but the universe is impaired; the pain is more intense when it comes home again, but something in me does not suffer and remains in contact with a universe which is not impaired. - Simone Weil

The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around -everything- we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, "I am -all- of the above." If we can't embrace the whole of who we are--embrace it with transformative love--we'll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world's complex mix of shadow and light.

An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges, the overflow finally giving way - he could not longer suffer his own cowardice.

What am I? The modest narrator who accompanies your triumphs; the dancer who supports you when you rise in your lovely grace; the branch upon which you rest a moment when you are tired of flying; the bass that interposes itself below the soprano’s fervour to let it climb even higher—what am I? I am the earthly gravity that keeps you on the ground. What am I, then? Body, mass, earth, dust and ashes.—You, my Cordelia, you are soul and spirit.” —Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_

The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.

Humility consists in knowing that in what we call ‘I’ there is no source of energy by which we can rise. Everything, without exception, that is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift, but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life(there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and with athleticism, the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc....Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire (when was it easier to understand Juvenal?). Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy - it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things...It is therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo...(but without an echo, no art).

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not ‘What is the aim?’ It is ‘What is the origin?

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

If we apply to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality, it pierces right through to the eternal.

Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous.

It is better to accept the limit, to contemplate it and savour all its bitterness.

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.

The fact of dying for what is strong robs death of its bitterness—and at the same time of all its value.

Gravity overcomes grace and form at a certain mass level.

Her wild tumbled hair - he loved those curls that defied gravity and rules with uniform indifference. Her head held, she swanned with a graceful saunter. She took his breath away.

They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.

Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing

I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really loves is something other than nothingness.

Minä on vain synnin ja erehdyksen luoma varjo; synti ja erehdys pysähdyttävät Jumalasta säteilevän valon. Ja tätä varjoa minä luulen olennoksi. Vaikka voisikin olla Jumalan kaltainen, olisi sittenkin parempi olla liejua, joka tottelee Jumalaa.

The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds… This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in this practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our ‘practicing’ we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits – not the law of gravity – and can be broken… A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the pole star of our inward beings.

The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature, which infinitely exceed him when in inaction; there is only equilibrium in action by which man recreates his own life through work.

He killed Nadab and Abihu. He killed Uzzah. He commanded the slaughter of the Canaanites. It is as if He were saying, “Be careful. While you enjoy the benefits of My grace, don’t forget My justice. Don’t forget the gravity of sin. Remember that I am holy.

Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so

Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so.

I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could. For helping me understand this—and for imbuing

We enjoy the poetics but also know we can’t always live off our feelings. We’ve long intuited that a long-distance marathon like ours must be run on more than romance. We delight in each other enough that when we don’t, we still push each other to push through the pain barrier. To try to make it to the next level. Ali calls this “the work of love,” and maybe some days that’s shorthand for me being hard work. But she’s right: love is work. Good work. We may let the scaffolds fall, but we have built our wall. Ali gets fidgety when I get too serious. As I am now. Struggling to express how every day that we give to each other adds both weight and … weightlessness. Gravity and grace. Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband? I have the most to learn from this relationship, and one of the profoundest lessons it has taught me is in raising children. I’d had that blood-brother compact with my childhood friend Guggi to never grow up, but as Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child. I really don’t like goodbyes, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.

I move like I'm gravity, like it's not a decision. Standing on my toes, on the edge of the high dive, the water looks as clear and blue as the sky. In my head there's the possibility that this moment isn't here yet, that maybe I'm not born. I could be an idea. Or I could be realized, and life is standing still. For this moment, the world has stopped. I have a perfect balance. The wind moves around me. My heart is as light and bright as the sun. I am as light as a sparrow bone, and for one moment I am everything that can't be caught and held. Then I'm passing through the air, turning, arms drawn in, toes pointed. My chin rests on my chest. I believe I have a chance at anything: one full revolution. I spread my wings. I arch my back. I remember why swans are graceful, why someone would name this for something beautiful. I think I'm touching the clouds. For a long time they keep me from breaking the blue. I don't hear the shattering surface. I belong behind this sky, all-silent and calm, and part of the world where butterflies live after they give up their feet and dream of flight. I can stay, if I pretend the fire in my chest doesn't burn, if I pretend the world is upside down, if I pretend water is the air I breathe.

Translation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle. For Marina, this law of gravity dictating bilingualism confirms what she’s always suspected: that if gringos were drawings, they’d be drawn with markers. And

Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it’s needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again—if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words.

I no longer ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?” Instead I ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?” The desire to “hang on” comes from a sense of scarcity and fear. The desire to “give myself” comes from a sense of abundance and generosity. That’s the kind of truth I want to wither into.

If it’s true, as I claimed in the Prelude, that old is just another word for nothing left to lose, then taking the risk of a deep inward dive should get easier with age. It’s a risk we need to take. Aging and dying well, like everything else worth doing, require practice—practice going over the edge toward “the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest.

Nöyryys on samaa kuin tieto, ettei siinä mitä sanotaan "minäksi" ole lainkaan sellaista energiaa, jonka avulla pääsisimme kohoamaan. Kaikki mitä minussa on arvokasta, on poikkeuksetta peräisin muualta; eikä se ole lahjaa vaa lainaa, joka on alituisesti uudistettava. Kaikki mitä minussa itsessäni on, on poikkeuksetta arvotonta; ja jos anastan omakseni muualta saamiani lahjoja, nekin heti muuttuvat arvottomiksi.

It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort.

If you don't know Beck's humor, or Vivian's grace. Their riotous, righteous anger. That's what girls are made of. I would know, because I've seen it and because, for a brief time, I was made of all those things, too. And I have also seen the way they bent time and space, like their grief held a gravity that could not be denied. And when it gave in, the strangest thing happened. It let me come back to them, for a time, perhaps just long enough to remind the world what we girls are capable of. Like when Cassandra saw the future, when Ariadne escaped the maze, when Circe cursed the men, and Helen started a war, when Medusa was hunted, and Andromeda was sacrificed for her city. If you already know the truth about girls (if you've been lucky enough to see it) then you already know it is possible for three girls to be at the center of the their own stories- to be at the center of everything. You already know that we can be heroes.

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not ‘What is the aim?’ It is ‘What is the origin?’ ‘I was naked, and ye clothed me.’ This gift is simply an indication of the state of those who acted in this way. They were in a state which made it impossible for them not to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked; they did not in any way do it for Christ, they could not help doing it because the compassion of Christ was in them. It was the same with Saint Nicholas who, when going across the Russian Steppes with Saint Cassian to meet God, could not help being late for the appointed time of meeting because he had to help a poor peasant to move his cart which had stuck in the mud. Good which is done in this way, almost in spite of ourselves, almost shamefacedly and apologetically, is pure. All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will. Goodness is transcendent. God is Goodness.

What am I? The modest narrator who accompanies your triumphs; the dancer who supports you when you rise in your lovely grace; the branch upon which you rest a moment when you are tired of flying; the bass that interposes itself below the soprano’s fervour to let it climb even higher—what am I? I am the earthly gravity that keeps you on the ground. What am I, then? Body, mass, earth, dust and ashes.—You, my […], you are soul and spirit.” —Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_

His last words hung in the air, their gravity slowly sinking in. After a few heavy moments, I spoke. “Then what hope is there for us, David?” David smiled reassuringly. “Only the grace of God.” “But why would He give me His grace?” “Because He loves you.” “Why would He love me, a sinner?” “Because He’s your Father.” David’s words hit me powerfully. I had heard Christians call God “Father,” but it never clicked. Only when trying to figure out why God would give me mercy and grace when I deserved none did the gears start turning.

To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those af f orded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace (‘Depart from me, O Lord. . . .’). It is one of those things which are added unto us. Every dream of friendship deserves to be shattered. It is not by chance that you have never been loved. . . . To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue). We must have done with all this impure and turbid border of sentiment. Schluss!

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation—no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down. To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death. ‘He emptied himself of his divinity.’ To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time—that is to say, to nothing. To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.

Si nadie se aviene a prestar atención a los pensamientos que, sin saber cómo, se han depositado en un ser tan insuficiente como yo, quedarán enterrados conmigo. Y si, como pienso, contienen verdad, será una lástima. Yo soy perjudicial para ellos. El hecho de que se hayan encontrado en mí impide que se les preste atención, [...] Me resulta muy doloroso el temor de que los pensamientos que han descendido sobre mí estén condenados a muerte por el contagio de mi miseria y de mi insuficiencia. Nunca leo sin estremecimiento la historia de la higuera seca. Me parece que es mi retrato. También en ella la naturaleza era impotente y, sin embargo, no por ello se la excusó.

William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going—used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn’t really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn’t, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William must’ve been waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn’t lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. Erik Erikson called this kind of reaching out “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair. 2. Move toward whatever you fear, not away from it. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I was frozen with fear on a rock face in the middle of a 100-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear “the other,” get into his or her story face-to-face, and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands. 3. Spend time in the natural world, as much time as you can. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor—like the messes in my own life— has an amazing integrity and harmony to it.

The consequence model, the logical one, the amoral one, the one which refuses any divine intervention, is a problem really for just the (hypothetical) logician. You see, towards God I would rather be grateful for Heaven (which I do not deserve) than angry about Hell (which I do deserve). By this the logician within must choose either atheism or theism, but he cannot possibly through good reason choose anti-theism. For his friend in this case is not at all mathematical law: the law in that 'this equation, this path will consequently direct me to a specific point'; over the alternative and the one he denies, 'God will send me wherever and do it strictly for his own sovereign amusement.' The consequence model, the former, seeks the absence of God, which orders he cannot save one from one's inevitable consequences; hence the angry anti-theist within, 'the logical one', the one who wants to be master of his own fate, can only contradict himself - I do not think it wise to be angry at math.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

Playing off a short story by H. G. Wells, Simone Weil drew an analogy to a land of blind people in which scientists could devise a complete system of physics leaving out the concept of light. Weightless, pressureless, undetectable by the senses — ​why believe in light? To the blind, it need not exist. Occasionally, however, questions might arise among the blind. What makes plants grow upwards, defying the law of gravity? What ripens fruits and seeds? What warms the night into day? Light in a country of the blind, says Weil, parallels the role of God on earth. Some of us sense traces of the supernatural, yet how do we prove it to people who can’t detect it?

defects. I escape the force of gravity again when

Se että pienimmänkin teon suorittaminen usein tuottaa minulle suunnattomia vaikeuksia, on erityinen armonosoitus, joka on tullut osakseni. Sillä siten minä voin aivan tavallisia tekoja tehdessäni, kenenkään huomioita herättämättä, saada puun juuret katkotuksi. Vaikka emme antaisikaan arvoa ihmisten mielipiteille, emme mahda mitään sille, että epätavallisilla, huomattavilla teoilla aina on kiihottava vaikutuksensa. Tavanomaisiin tekoihin ei liity moista kiihoketta. Kun jonkin tavanomaisen teon suorittaminen tuntuu tavattoman vaikealta, on kyseessä armonosoitus. josta on oltava kiitollinen. Ei saa rukoilla, että tuo vaikutus katoaisi, on rukoiltava, että osaisi käyttää sitä oikein. Yleensä emme saa toivoa, että pääsisimme vajavaisuuksistamme, vaan että armo kirkastaisi ne.

Weil supplants these contradictory images of God (the omnipotent willing God versus the good and loving God) with her version of Plato's dual causality. The real dilemma, for Weil, is that God is simultaneously the author of all that is and only that which is good. Her solution is to transpose Plato's dual causality of Reason and Necessity (Timaeus 48a) into two faces of God: (i) love or grace, as God the Son, the eternal self-renouncing sacrificial Lamb and (ii) necessity or gravity, as God the Father's created order of mechanical secondary causes. The distance between necessity and the Good in Plato thus becomes the distance between God the Father and God the Son in Weil, bridged by the Cross. She then offers this hermeneutical key: 'power' is always a metaphor for necessity or natural and supernatural consequences rather than a direct act of miraculous intervention. Thus, the 'power of God' (whether in wrath or deliverance) in the Bible is an existential description of secondary causes. The reality, she says, is that God is impartial (i.e., 'God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust' or 'Zeus's golden scales' ). 'Force' as we experience it is the mechanism (necessity) of the world (like gravity )—not arbitrary intervention. Beyond that, force is evil, because it is the opposite of love, which is consent.

The answer to the question - what causes gravity? - is Self desiring not to be by itself. So it is. The Cause of Gravity is Self (not wanting to be by Itself). Very true, truly simple. Now I am certain that Self is alone but desires not to feel alone. what does Self do? Self chases itself; its own tail. Remember my dog called Ouroboros? Ouroboros is a good dog. Ouroboros is by itself. Ouroboros does not like to be by itself. Ouroboros likes companionship. But Ouroboros is alone. What does a good dog like Ouroboros gotta do to get a girl in this town? Aha. That's where imagination comes in. Ouroboros sees its own tail and starts chasing it. Round and round Ouroboros goes. Merrily, merrily indeed for Big (badda) Bang; here's Grace called Earth. That's how Earth appears round by the way. But let's return to Ouroboros. Man and WoMan are Ouroboros. I kid you not. There is no separation. There is no division. All that is here is Ouroboros not wanting to be alone. All that is here is Ouroboros desiring Companionship. All that is here is Ouroboros seeking to Love and Be Loved in reTurn. Hence the name Universe. Is the above correct? Yes. Very correct. The fundamentals of astrophysics in a nutshell. The nature of the stars is Love. In conclusion. Gravity is caused by Self desiring Companionship aka Love.