Poems, Paintings, Cantatas, Prayers, Sculptures, Photographs, Symphonies, Axioms, Prophecies, Analects, Proverbs....

From Parabola:



Photograph by by Rene-Jacques






Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.





―C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Paul Reynard, "The Cross," 1986





From the spiritual point of view, heaven is as much down as up, and as much up as down; as much behind as before, and as much before as behind, and as much to one side as to any other. In fact, whoever has a true desire to be in heaven is in heaven spiritually at that very time.





―Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Carl Mydans, "Shot of Hands Belonging to an Old Woman," Photographic Print - 12 x 16 in.





It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.



The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.



―Wendell Berry





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Painting by Jan Mankes





Old Men Ought to Be Explorers





Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.



Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning…(more)



—Excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s, “East Coker”