About Us Always

"Where there is great love there are always miracles...[Miracles] seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." -Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop

We Were Made for God

"We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love." -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Give Birth to Yourself

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves." -Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

So Many Kinds of Failure

"The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God...The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure."

-E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

The Spiritual Grandeur of Man

"What is man in this boundless setting of sublime splendor? I answer you: Potentially now, actually to be, he is greater and grander, more precious according to the arithmetic of God, than all the planets and suns of space. For him were they created; they are the handiwork of God; man is His son! In this world man is given dominion over a few things; it is his privilege to achieve supremacy over many things.

"'The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork' (Psalms 19:1). Incomprehensibly grand as are the physical creations of the earth and space, they have been brought into existence as means to an end, necessary to the realization of the supreme purpose, which in the words of the Creator is thus declared:

"'For behold, this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man'" (Pearl of Great Price, page 4).

-James E. Talmage, "The Earth and Man"

Are YOU poet enough?

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches." -Rainer Maria Rilke

It Is Only a Door

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
By Adrienne Rich

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

Whom Does Love Concern?

"Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yes his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own--flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods. "Men did produce this," they will say, and, saying, they will give men immortality."

-E.M. Forster, Howards End

Song of the Lark

"I won't say that you can have everything you want--that means having nothing, in reality. But if you decide what it is you want most, you can get it...Not everybody can, but you can. Only, if you want a big thing, you've got to have nerve enough to cut out all that's easy, everything that's to be had cheap . . .

"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To win . . . or lose it all."

-The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather