Scott Cairns Quotes

May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.

I turned and beheld seven rows of plasma screens, each bearing seven vivid scenes, each flickering, each pulsing with a light revealing distant terrors, conflagrations, sufferings - and all thereby brought so close, and all thereby kept far away.

He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay.

Centuries of dire prophecy have taught us all to be, well, unconvinced. And there have been decades, entire scores of years when, to be frank, wholesale destruction didn’t sound so bad, considering. You remember, we were all disappointed. That the world never ended meant we had to get out of bed after all...

Scott and Terry created a political theatre in which a Hanovarian English monarch could appear on the stage of Edinburgh to act the part of a Stuart king.

You have a poem called “Bad Theology.” What would you call a bad theology? I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We’ll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I’m not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end.

although implementation has been problematic.

God is, finally, unknowable. Still, while he is not to be absolutely known, he is apparently willing to reveal something of himself to us at nearly every turn. Think of it like this: he cannot be exhausted by our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested. He cannot be comprehended, but he can be touched.

The heart’s metanoia, on the other hand, turns without regret, turns not so much away, as toward, as if the slow pilgrim has been surprised to find that sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.

Regardless of our situations, we are inevitably partaking of something or other at every moment. The catch is that we will either partake of what is , or we will partake of the absence of what is. We partake either of life (all that has true being by way of its connection to God) or of death (all that has opted to sever that connection).

Recreation And when we had invented death, had severed every soul from life we made of these our bodies sepulchers. And as we wandered dying, dim among the dying multitudes, He acquiesced to be interred in us. So when He had ascended thus into our persons and the grave He broke the limits, opening the grip, He shaped of every sepulcher a womb.

Even the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut Only the poor—who are with us always—only they continued in the hope.

Theology is a distinctly rare, a puzzling study, given that its practitioners are happiest when the terms of their discovery fall well short of their projected point; this is where they likely glimpse their proof.

Sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.