IT'S TOO SIMPLE!
When asked by an inquirer if he were a God or a magician, the Buddha responded that he was neither. "What are you?" the person insisted. "I am awake," said the Buddha.
| |
| LIMELIGHT IN THE DESERT
Confound those who have said our witty remarks before us. |
| --St. Jerome
|
| BUT WE DON'T, DO WE?
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [one's] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. | |
| --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
|
| NO--JUST DIE FOR THEM
Cosimo de Medici: "We read that we are to forgive our enemies, but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends." | |
|
|
| IT'S THAT SIMPLE--AND TRUE
A bit of Scripture we sometimes forget: "For the whole of the law is summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another." (Galatians 5:13-14) | |
|
|
| ON PARISH COUNCILS
No sacralization without representation. | |
|
|
| REAR-VIEW MIRROR RIDES AGAIN
Heard over lunch: "'Postmodern' is a very modern description. It means I, a modern, don't yet know how to let the new thing be itself. It's like saying 'iron horse' in the early 1800s for locomotives, or 'horseless carriage' in the early 1900s for cars." | |
|
|
POSTMODERNISM REJOICES
...Upon this gifted age, in its dark hours,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts...They lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric... | |
| --Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
| GEE, I THOUGHT IT WAS THE POPE!
This new world order is being constructed not on behalf of the workers and their families but for the benefit of a corporate and financial elite that has no loyalty except to the bottom line. | |
| --Pat Buchanan,
Republican presidential candidate
|
| CUTTING REALITY TO FIT THE IMAGE
Ramsay Cook: "Nationalism is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering." | |
|
|
| KITCHEN WISDOM
A pinch of mothers is worth a pound of priests. | |
| --Ancient Portuguese proverb
|
| COMMON SENSE REVOLUTION?
American statesman Robert C. Winthrop wrote in 1881: "The poor must be wisely and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor want exasperated into crime." | |
|
|
| RARE HONESTY
James Carse on teaching as a vocation: "A professor [I] once had,...immediately after entering a lecture hall one day, looked at his students, closed his notes, and walked out saying, 'I'm sorry. I'm empty.' It was at that moment, with those memorable words, [I] knew that [I] wanted, above all, to be a teacher." | |
|
|
| WHY IS THAT MAN'S FACE RED?
Bernard of Clairvaux: "The person who undertakes his own spiritual direction has a fool for a teacher."
| |
|
|
| DESTRUCTIVE DUALISMS
I would like to purge my own mind and language of such terms as spiritual, physical, metaphysical, and transcendental--all of which imply that the Creation is divided by fault lines into "levels" that can readily be peeled apart and judged by human beings. I believe that the Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending simultaneously what we mean by "spirit" and what we mean by "matter." | |
| --Wendell Berry
|
 | |
| |
Points, Volume 14 #1
