‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we – you and I and others like us – have brought up from the slime.
John Williams, Stoner
Dialogue is born from a respectful attitude toward the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of view, their opinion and their proposals. Dialogue entails a warm reception and not a pre-emptive condemnation. To dialogue, one must know how to lower the defences, to open the doors of one’s home and to offer warmth.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now also known as Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
Some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wonderful and inspiring book The Sabbath, first published in 1951:
There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.
Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives.
Commenting on the sanctification of time, Heschel notes:
Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
Six days a week we wrestle with the world, … on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
… perfect rest is an art. It is the result of an accord of body, mind and imagination.
… the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual goals. It is a day of the soul as well as the body; comfort and pleasure are an integral part of the Sabbath observance.
The seventh day is the armistice of man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man …. The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.
I found the following thought particularly remarkable:
One must abstain from toil and strain on the seventh day, even from strain in the service of God.
The Sabbath … is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above. All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God.
Heschel’s life- and creation-affirming theology is on display in these words as well:
Rabbi Shimeon’s doctrine was: There is only heaven and nothing else; but heaven contradicted him and said: There is heaven and everything else.
One must live and act as if the fate of all of time would depend on a single moment.
One good hour may be worth a lifetime; an instant of returning to God may restore what has been lost in years of escaping from him.
When I fed the poor, they called me a saint.
When I asked why they were poor, they called me a Communist.
Dom Helder Camara
Some admittedly rather varied passages from Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of:
The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
Here’s one that made me laugh:
We can compare the number of synapses that fire during the female and the male orgasm – very bad news for competitive blokes …
Barnes complains about the bureaucracy that has replaced folklore in hospital dying and tells the following story:
Registering my mother’s death, I was dealt with by a woman with a metronomic delivery and no skill – or luck – in human contact. All the details had been given, the signatures provided, the duplicate copies obtained, and I was rising to leave when she suddenly uttered four soullessly otiose words in a dead voice: ‘That completes the registration.’ She used the same mechanical tone employed by the humanoid bosses of the Football Association, when the last of the ivory balls has been drawn from the velvet bag, and they announce, ‘That completes the draw for the quarter-final round of the FA Cup.’
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Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary:
The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and remained almost indifferent to the noise the world made or the stamp the previous days had left on us.
On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth.
Mary, the narrator, also reflects on ‘the peaceful night after the day when we had renewed ourselves, when our love for each other, for God and the world, had deepened and spread’.
Karl Möller 