Quote Of The Day
SNOBS ARE PEOPLE who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?
Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.
-Originally published in Beyond Words
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MY BROTHER AND I were walking up a flight of stairs somewhere when I suddenly stopped and asked him what the smell reminded him of. Without a moment's hesitation he said our grandparents' house in Pittsburgh when we were children, and he was right. It was a comforting kind of smell, faint but unmistakable—freshly laundered sheets, applesauce simmering with nutmeg in it, old picture books. More than any sight or taste or sound, it brought back in its totality the feeling of being a child there all those years ago—the excitement of it, the peace of it, the unutterable magic of it.
Dogs have it right. Frantically zigzagging along, their tails in a frenzy, they miss nothing as they go, not a hydrant or trash can or curbstone, not a tree or hedge or flower pot. And it's not just the good smells that send them into raptures either, but smells we would recoil from in horror. "O taste and see that the Lord is good," says the Psalmist (34:8), to which their refrain is, "Oh sniff and smell!" More fragrant even than grandparents' houses is the Quarry they track with their noses to the ground.
-Originally published in Beyond Words
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SLOTH IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED with laziness. Lazy people, people who sit around and watch the grass grow, may be people at peace. Their sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting.
Slothful people, on the other hand, may be very busy people. They are people who go through the motions, who fly on automatic pilot. Like somebody with a bad head cold, they have mostly lost their sense of taste and smell. They know something's wrong with them, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes they hardly notice them. They are letting things run their course. They are getting through their lives.
-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
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SLEEP IS A SURRENDER, a laying down of arms. Whatever plans you're making, whatever work you're up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you're enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you're in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere, close your eyes, and wait for sleep.
All the things that make you the particular person you are stop working—your thoughts and feelings, the changing expressions of your face, the constant moving around, the yammering will, the relentless or not so relentless purpose. But all the other things keep on working with a will and purpose of their own. You go on breathing in and out. Your heart goes on beating. If some faint thought stirs somewhere in the depths of you, it's converted into a dream so you can go on sleeping and not have to wake up to think it through before it's time.
Whether you're just or unjust, you have the innocence of a cat dozing under the stove. Whether you're old or young, homely or fair, you take on the serenity of marble. You have given up being in charge of your life. You have put yourself into the hands of the night.
It is a rehearsal for the final laying down of arms, of course, when you trust yourself to the same unseen benevolence to see you through the dark and to wake you when the time comes—with new hope, new strength—into the return again of light.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
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THE POWER OF SIN IS CENTRIFUGAL. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing at all is left. "The wages of sin is death" is Saint Paul's way of saying the same thing.
Other people and (if you happen to believe in God) God or (if you happen not to) the world, society, nature—whatever you call the greater whole of which you're part—sin is whatever you do, or fail to do, that pushes them away, that widens the gap between you and them and also the gaps within your self.
For example, the sin of the Pharisee is not just (a) his holier-than-thou attitude, which pushes other people away, but (b) his secret suspicion that his own holiness is deficient too, which pushes part of himself away, and (c) his possibly not so subconscious feeling that anybody who expects him to be all that holy must be a cosmic SOB, which pushes Guess Who away.
Sex is sinful to the degree that, instead of drawing you closer to other human beings in their humanness, it unites bodies but leaves the lives inside them hungrier and more alone than before.
Religion and unreligion are both sinful to the degree that they widen the gap between you and the people who don't share your views.
The word charity illustrates the insidiousness of sin. From meaning "a free and loving gift" it has come to mean "a demeaning handout."
Original sin means we all originate out of a sinful world, which taints us from the word go. We all tend to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from that center everything that seems to impede its freewheeling. More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, it is what Jesus said he came to save the world from.
-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
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