"Call  a life worse," [Plato] said, "if it leads a soul to become more unjust,and better if it leads the soul to become more just."

We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's.  But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope.  Humility because if we chose our lot in life there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth.  A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato.  Though the first act of the play was obscure its hidden details make any judgments in this second act so much foolish speculation.  So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension at another's misfortune?  And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60-61

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

Adam and Eve became more, not less, like God insofar as they came to see the same moral distinctions He did.  This was precisely what He confirms, saying Adam and Eve have "become like one of us, knowing good and evil."  In all the centuries of Christian hand-wringing and breast beating that have followed int he wake of the Adamic decision, this fact seems to have disappeared entirely.  Humankind and God now share a common moral awareness, a common capacity to judge between right and wrong, a common capacity for love.

We are continuing with tragic and devastating exceptions, on the trajectory inaugurated by Adam and Eve, becoming ever more like god, as we become ever more adept at discerning good and evil, and nourishing the wellsprings of human love.  And in so doing, we grow more capable of discerning a kind and merciful God among His many counterfeits.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 20

Dennis Johnson - On Introversion

God needs the hermit in the woods as much as he needs theman in the pulpit.

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams pg. 95

"The structure of the world is such as to favor the prosperity of men. without this belief nothing is possible. What we are at arms against are those philosophies that claim the fortuitous in mens' inventions. For we invent nothing but what god has put to hand."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 10)

"In another life--this isn't what I know, but how I feel--these mountains [the Himalayas] were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one's own true nature is a kind of homegoing."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 239)

"Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern."

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Quoted by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 42)

"Hast thou attuned thy being to humanity's great pain, O Candidate for Light?"

-Mahayana texts (Tibetan)

Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 34)

"All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky."

-OVID, Metamorphoses

"I read a psychology book last week in which the author said that the most mysterious thing in the universe is man himself. We're blind about the most important thing in our lives, our own selves."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 156)