Nathan M. Kilpatrick:

In imitation of the cry of dereliction from the Cross, Buechner writes that this desire to heal from loneliness is a prayer that asks,

My God, where the Hell are you, meaning If thou art our Father who art in Heaven, be thou also our Father who art in Hell because Hell is where the action is, where I am and the cross is. It is where the pitiless storm is. It is where men labor and are heavy laden under the burden of their own lives without you.

Crying to God to join suffering man in the depths of Hell reveals a desire for intimacy with the God who already entered into this state and showed us that even the most sinful person is not so isolated that he or she can’t meet God in those depths. To confront the seeming isolation of our darkest curvature inwards is to find God already waiting for us there.

 

This fact that there is neither height nor depth that can separate even the tragically alone from the love of God introduces the possibility that our isolation in sin can be overcome in the twinkling of an eye when the promise of God becomes real in time and eternity. The first of Buechner’s cross-references for laughter mentions the story of faith contained in Sarah’s laughter at the promise of a child in her old age, a promise so startling that it takes Sarah’s breath away. Buechner reminds us,

Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter. If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the old man in the joke, ‘Only when I laugh.’ But he wouldn’t have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.

Tucked between the doctrinal claim that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the possibility of Jesus Himself laughing through His assurance in the eventual defeat of His Passion’s suffering, Sarah’s laughter receives the child with a joke of a name that showed how little she believed that God would live up to His promise to her husband. When Buechner returns to the image of Sarah and Abraham’s laughter at God’s pledge, he notes that the laughter comes from their self-awareness that only a fool would believe this promise, yet they are these fools, and ‘[t]hey are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not even all that different.’ Again, Buechner shows the interconnection between those dry and empty years when Sarah and Abraham are caught up in the aching loneliness of a childless marriage that longs for more and the sudden possibility that the very desires of their hearts would be fulfilled long past the point of reasonable likelihood.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

The church confesses that it has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted. 

The church confesses its guilt toward the countless people whose lives have been destroyed by slander, denunciation, and defamation. It has not condemned the slanderers for their wrongs and has thereby left the slandered to their fate.

The church confesses that it has coveted security, tranquillity, peace, property, and honor to which it had no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.

The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognize its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guilty for the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ.

Is this going too far? Should a few super-righteous people rise at this point and try to prove that not the church but all the others are guilty? Would a few churchmen [Kirchenmänner] like to dismiss this as a rude insult and, presuming to be called as judges of the world, proceed to weigh the mass of guilt here and there and distribute it accordingly? Was not the church hindered and bound on all sides? Was not all worldly power arrayed against it? Should the church have endangered its ultimate purpose, its public worship and its congregational life, by taking up the struggle against anti-Christian powers? So speaks unbelief, which perceives confession of guilt not as regaining the form of Jesus Christ who bore the sins of the world, but only as a dangerous moral degradation. Free confession of guilt is not something that one can take or leave; it is the form of Jesus Christ breaking through in the church. The church can let this happen to itself, or it will cease to be the church of Christ.

Hannah Rowen:

But beneath the crunchy-conservative advice about how to get kids to eat organic lies a techno-optimism strikingly like that of the pediatrician prescribing semaglutide to sixth-graders. “What if we treated humans like rockets, equipping them with sensors before systems fail, to understand where dysfunction is arising so we can address it?” Means writes in Good Energy. The metaphor is borrowed from Josh Clemente, her co-founder at Levels, who is an alumnus of SpaceX. Reducing food to its component parts, and eating habits to an “individualized” health plan, makes it easy to turn the human body into a machine.

Yet Means sees her solutions for chronic disease as not mechanistic but spiritual, in contrast to those of the soulless medical establishment. “Everything is connected,” she writes in her book. And the “spiritual crisis” of America’s chronic disease epidemic is “an assault on the miraculous flow of cosmic energy from the sun, through the soil and plants, through bacteria in my gut, through my cells’ mitochondria to create the energy that sparks my consciousness.”

This is why individualized tech is so much more promising for her than the old wait-and-drug medical model, which waits until people get fat and sick and then charges them to treat their symptoms. “We have the potential to live the longest, healthiest lives in human history, but this will require optimization,” she writes.

André Trocmé:

On August 1, 1941, the parish openly said no for the first time. The week before, the town hall gave us an order from the government: “August 1 is a national holiday. Clergymen will have the bells of their churches rung at full peal for fifteen minutes starting at noon.”

I showed the order to Amélie, our tiny concierge, who worked in our home from time to time. “It goes without saying,” I told her, “that you will do nothing of the sort, even if someone tries to make you do so.” Amélie understood completely.

On August 2, I encountered Amélie in the village. The bells of the Catholic church had rung resoundingly, while those of our church had remained silent.

“Well, Amélie, did everything go well yesterday? No incidents?”

“Fine, Mr. Trocmé. No problems.”

“No visitors?”

“Oh, yes, two women from the villas in the hills. You know, women who were all made-up.”

“And?”

“They came looking for me. ‘You’re not ringing the bells, Amélie? Today is a national holiday.’”

“‘The pastor didn’t tell me to,’ I told them.”

“Well, given your pastor, that’s no surprise. Hurry up, Amélie. It’s already noon. It’s an order from the Maréchal.”

Amélie recounted these events with a sly, little smile.

“And how did you respond?” I asked her.

“I told them, ‘The bells don’t belong to the Maréchal, they belong to God. We ring them for God; otherwise not.’”

“Bravo! And what happened?”

“They ordered me to open the door for them so that they could ring the bells since I wouldn’t do it. I defended my church! I told them I would not open the door and they had no right to enter without the pastor’s permission. I stood firmly in front of the door. Wait, I’ll show you.” Amélie stationed herself squarely in front of me as she had before the two women, her short arms courageously spread wide apart to defend her church.

“How did everything end, Amélie?” Once again, she smiled mischievously.

“Oh, as you know, yesterday at noon, it was raining buckets. I was sheltered under the beam of the heavy door. They were in the courtyard. Soon they were drenched and left.”

Nothing had happened, Amélie had told me, since the bells had not rung. Her courageous resistance was nothing to her, hardly worth mentioning. If, like pulling teeth, I hadn’t drawn it out of her, I never would have known this story, so worthy of the Huguenots of old, who were unable to recant because they didn’t know how.

Nathan Gardels:

That it is has fallen to Germans to remind America of what the West is all about suggests we have come full circle to a point where the most ardent pupils of democracy must now tutor their mentors who seem to have forgotten the lessons they once taught so well.

Luigi Giussani:

We are distinguished from other creatures inasmuch as we are aware of that by which we live; this consciousness is not complete if it does not touch the foundation from which it arises; the arc of reflection does not realize its fullest dimensions if it does not arrive at the point from which the I with all its gestures breaks forth. The ideal person—a person who is completely realized- should possess this uninterrupted awareness. Jesus said, “Pray always.”

But this awareness, except for a very particular grace and therefore a very particular function, is impossible for us. The transparency of the presence of our own being is normally opaque. We find ourselves truly—that is, we see ourselves according to this dependence on God—only intermittently, more or less frequently. The ideal which Jesus dreamed of can be translated existentially like this: “pray more than you can.” It is the formula of a conscience in front of the ideal; it is the formula of freedom for one who is on a journey. It is a formula that comprises our entire existence, with all its various limitations and the mutability of its conditions, and at the same time is a formula that inexorably affirms the incessant demand of a duty, whose call no limit or condition can silence.

Carl Sandberg:

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Al Zolynas:

I sit down on my desk to wait,
and it hits me from nowhere — a sudden,
sweet, almost painful love for my students.

“Nevermind,” I want to cry out.
“It doesn’t matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything’s
a fragment and everything’s not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can’t separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we’ll ever know of tomorrow!”

Instead, I keep a coward’s silence.
The music stops abruptly;
they finish their work,
and we go through the right answers,
which is to say
we separate the fragments from the whole.

Lars Mytting:

Yet the return of the log fire can hardly be reduced to a matter of money. Many people feel that a living fire gives a rich experience. We are drawn to the fire, just as we once gathered around the flames in former times. For many there is a qualitative difference in the heat supplied by a radiator and that provided by a woodburning stove. A stove can glow with heat. Your feet won’t get warm when you turn on the inverter, and a radiator has to be on for quite some time before it will drive the chill from a cold house. Electric radiators seldom deliver more than two thousand watts, whereas even a small woodstove is easily able to generate six thousand watts, and many stoves as much as fourteen thousand watts. Scientifically speaking, there is no measurable difference between the heat generated by electricity and that produced by combustion, but the body reacts in a different way to the more intense heat from the stove, not least because modern fireplaces with glass doors radiate heat. An ordinary electric radiator or heat pump warms only the air in the room, but flames and glowing embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation that has much the same characteristics as sunlight. Warming occurs in the skin and the body as the radiation arrives, with an immediacy and an intensity that bring a feeling of well-being and security. The indoor climate is also slightly changed. The consumption of oxygen encourages a degree of air circulation, and the stove absorbs a quantity of dust. These factors, combined with the smell of wood and a little woodsmoke, and the sight of the ever-changing play of flames, connect us with the primordial magic of the fireplace.

Something else to consider is the way the woodburning stove brings people into a very direct relationship with the weather. You are your own thermostat, you are the connecting link between the subzero temperatures outside and the relative warmth within. When you heat with wood you have to go out to the woodpile, come back in again, and start your fight against the cold. It’s bitter, and it bites, but you can do something about it. In this one small but vital arena you are in touch with the bare necessities of life, and in that moment you know the same deep sense of satisfaction that the cave dweller knew.

…wood is [not merely] a source of energy; it is … an extremely adaptable form of energy. It can be shared with your neighbor, it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t need cable, a match will light it, it can be stored for year after year, and even inferior-quality wood will still do the job for you. There is peculiar security in the fact that this is energy in solid and tactile form. You can carry it into your house and know that the weight of what you are carrying represents exactly the amount of heat you will be getting.