Archive for November 2018
Resurrection
Gentlemen, you and I cannot live naturally. . . You must die to your adolescence and just become men. And you have died already to your boyhood and now you are a student. And you have been a baby and you became a boy. And you will have to die to your manhood and become a father. And you will have to die to your fatherhood and become an ancestor. . . And you can’t help it. You have just the choice, to die or to live. That is, time overtakes you all the time, and makes you old. But you can . . . grow old with honor and you can grow old without honor. And you have all the idea that old age has just to be shunned and postponed and you want even to live 150 years, gentlemen. If you can live 70 years spiritually, thank your maker. That’s enough, because in 70 years you have to die perhaps five or six times. And anybody who can conquer death that often, you see, will then die like King David, satisfied with life, as you know. The Bible says that when King David died, he was satiated with life, and had no interest to live another 70 years. And you see how irreligious, how naturalistic modern man is that he actually thinks doctors should be allowed to prolong life to 150 years, old as Methuselah. . . .
Life cannot be arbitrarily shortened. It cannot be arbitrarily prolonged. But it can be mastered, and the mastery of life consists in conquering the deaths that occur in the meantime, in between. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
The secret of religion
Protestants are inclined to leave [education] more to the public school. It should be the other way around, because the living religious attitude is that part of our growth, or spiritual growth, is that we are becoming more and more the authority for our children, the more we are real fathers and mothers. . . .
The secret of religion [is] that it is a relation between two generations. . . .
Religion begins, gentlemen, with the point of contact between two lives separated by a death. . . And all religion is a victory over death. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. (Malachi 2:15 ESV)
Je ne sais quoi
A liturgy without the Supper is like a contract without signatures. It is (not just like) a wedding feast without food, a party without hors d’oeuvres, as if the Lord opens his house to extend hospitality but never offers food or cracks open a bottle of wine. —Peter Leithart
See also: Weekly communion
Joyful
Naw, I don’t think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors; for which all thanksgiving. I think it is impossible to live and not to grieve but I am always suspicious of my own grief lest it be self-pity in sheeps [sic] clothing. And the worst thing is to grieve for the wrong reason, for the wrong loss. Altogether it is better to pray than to grieve; and it is greater to be joyful than to grieve. But it takes more grace to be joyful than any but the greatest have. (Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, quoted in Ralph Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ–Haunted South, 214-215)
Count
The leveling of the water, its increase,
the gathering of many into much:
. . .—Wendell Berry, “The Winter Rain”
I gotta have my orange juice. 