"One of the major discoveries of the post-Newtonian sciences is that objectivity is, in fact, impossible. To look at something is to change it and to be changed by it" (94).
[The Zen story in which a monk carries a girl across a river, and then a young monk questions the appropriateness of this act for a celibate monk.]
"How easy it is for us to project our own weaknesses onto other people.
"I was once criticized for telling this story because it is a Buddhist story and therefore had to contradict Christianity. But does it? Should we not learn from each other?" (95).
"I wish the church would be brave enough to acknowledge that there are questions to which, during our mortal lives, we have no answers. Too many answers lead to judgmentalism and to human beings (rather than God) deciding who can and cannot go to heaven" (97).
"The storyteller is a storyteller because the storyteller cares about truth, searching for truth, expressing truth, sharing truth" (103).
"And Henry James: 'Our task is to render, not report.' Show; do not tell. Thus, in fiction the verbs are active, not passive; 'did,' not 'was.' 'She lost her balance,' not 'Her balance was lost.' The great writer does not tell us what ought to be done, or what we think. The true writer shows what is done, avoiding author's comment. The storyteller doesn't talk about the story, but shows it, immediately locating the characters in time and space. [Example: the beginning of Anna Karenina.]" (104).
"Our Father which art in heaven. And where is heaven? It too is a word which has been abused. The good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. But who are the good and who are the bad? Only God knows that, and when we try to make such judgments we invariably blunder" (142).
"[The workmen outside my window] were certainly using the Lord's name in vain, but it was not a deliberate vanity. 'It's just their paucity of vocabulary,' I said. Such casual, careless language is not good, but it is far less evil than deliberate cursing, consigning someone to hell, rather than leaving that judgment to God" (143). Am I the only one who thinks that L'Engle is herself making a judgment here? This is bad but not as bad as this. All of this talk is outside orthodox Christianity, which states that the only right any of us have to get into heaven is to claim the righteousness of Christ, for all our righteousness is like a filthy rag, and every sin makes us guilty as a law-breaker.
"Today one of the temptations is to feel that we must be either politically correct, social activits, or that we must be withdrawn from the world in order to pray. Why should these two be exclusive? Won't our action more likely be God's will if we have prayed about it first? Won't we be more likely to correct some of the terrible social inequalities with which we are surrounded if we ask ourselves what Jesus would have done, and how? Don't we need to withdraw from the world for a while to ask God what we should do?" (153).
"Getting literal about the mighty acts of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ leads to dead ends.
"...But because Jesus Christ was wholly God as well as wholly human, he rose form the grave, to the astonishment not only of the Roman overlords and the powerful Jews in the Sanhedrin, but to the astonishment of all those who had been with him during his earthly life. The Resurrection, too, is beyond the realm of fact (Do you believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection? No! I believe in the Resurrection!) and bursts into the realm of love, of truth, for in Jesus, truth and love are one and the same" (174). So why can't we believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection AND in the Resurrection ["beyone the realm of provable fact and into the realm of mystery and marvel" (175)]? False dichotomy, I say.
"One of the many things the Bible stories have taught me is that God loves me, just as I am. I don't have to struggle for some kind of moral perfection impossible to attain. It is the biblical protagonists who, like us, far from perfect, show us how to be truly human. I don't believe God deliberately made me with one leg considerably longer than the other, but that is how I am, and I am loved that way resultant clumsiness and all" (175).
"What upsets me most, I think is that the anti-communists were against communism, rather than for democracy. And the Anti-New Agers are against the New Age rather than for Christ. It's being against rather than for the frame of mind which produces terrorism?....As I read the Gospels, one of the strongest messages is for; for love, for warmth of heart, for that love which dissolves hate and coldness of heart. When our religion brings hate to our hearts, it becomes terrorism, not religion" (186).
"The way we handle our little griefs, the petty irritations of daily living, is an indication of the way we're going to handle the larger griefs" (193).
"Fulfill yourself, that's what the world says is important."
"But the people I know, in literature and in life, whose chief concern is fulfilling themselves, are always empty" (202).
"I can't explain how these gifts come to me--at least not in the language of provable fact, but that is the language of human control, not the language of faith. And acceptace of the wonder of such gifts helps me to understand what Ezekiel is saying, or Daniel, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! I read their stories with sublime wonder, with rapturous joy, acknowledging that reality cannot be organized by us human creatures. It can only be lived" (214).
"Story helps us understand our humanness and our mortality. All grief is mourning over death--the death of a friendship, of a hope, of a career, of a marriage, of a love. If we try to circumvent the right and proper period of mourning, or repress it, then it will fester within us, and hurt both us and everybody we come in contact with" (267).
"With the discovery of antibiotics we have saved a lot of lives, but we have also come to think of death as unnecessary. We no longer have a mandated or permissible period of mourning. Though it is futile to assign a timetable for grief, it is eased if it is expressed" (270).
"Only discipline and obedience to the strict law of love allow us to be free" (273).
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