Paul wrote a beautiful hymn to charity, which the King James translators rendered in part, "For now we see through a glass darkly."  By "glass" they meant a looking glass, a mirror.  The original actually reads, "We see in a mirror dimly" (NRSV).  In other words, we are the mystery yet to be revealed.  It is our own identity that we must struggle to discern, before we can rightly perceive our place in the cosmos and our relation to the Divine.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 38

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 102

As the heat mirages on the river in front of me danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns from my own life joining with them.  It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.  But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water.  And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

The fisherman even has a phrase to describe what he does when he studies the patterns of a river.  he says he is "reading the water," and perhaps to tell his stories he has to do much the same thing.  Then one of his biggest problems is to guess where and at what time of day life lies ready to be taken as a joke.  And to guess whether it is going to be a little or a big joke.

For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 63-64