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“Perfect joy could not be joy alone but must be a joy that somehow contains our past grief and sadness and longing.”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
“There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch.
"This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come."
"Why is that?" says Frog.
"No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me."
Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together."
Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later.
Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship.”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
"This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come."
"Why is that?" says Frog.
"No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me."
Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together."
Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later.
Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship.”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
“My dad has always told me that all feelings of peace come from the Lord and all anxiety from the enemy. I think I might alter that statement slightly to say that peace comes from abandonment to providence, while anxiety comes from my determination to wrench providence according to my own desires.”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
“I have been so afraid that our friendship will not survive Clare's death. I can sense this in your voice, too, when we talk. . . .
When I talk to Mark about this, he tries to console me with Aristotle (I hope you are smiling). Aristotle, he tells me, describes three types of friendship: friendship based on utility, on pleasure, and on virtue (the pursuit of good). The third type is the highest and most stable form. Mark says that we pursue the good, and that sharing new motherhood alone could not possibly replace that.
Maybe right now we are confusing our friendship with a friendship of pleasure, since we have given each other so much of it (hilarity and clogs and dreams of Italy). And we are worried since these friendships fade when pleasure fades (and Clare has taken so much pleasure with her). But surely that's not all we've shared.
The highest friendship, Aristotle wrote, 'requires time and familiarity; for, as the proverb says, it is impossible for men to know each other well until they have consumed together much salt, nor can they accept each other and be friends till each has shown himself dear and trustworthy to the other.' I guess we are now in the phase of eating much salt. . . .
I am not sure what it means to eat much salt, but it doesn't sound pleasant. It makes me think of tears rolling down our faces into our mouths. . . .
Yet this time is not merely that. When I see you or read your letters, I am suddenly made happy. I see that I still love you, take pleasure in your ways, and yearn for your good and for mine. If this load of salt can’t kill our pleasure or desire for good, then I doubt anything can. And maybe this very salt will make us all the more dear and trustworthy to each other.
With much love and salt,
Amy”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
When I talk to Mark about this, he tries to console me with Aristotle (I hope you are smiling). Aristotle, he tells me, describes three types of friendship: friendship based on utility, on pleasure, and on virtue (the pursuit of good). The third type is the highest and most stable form. Mark says that we pursue the good, and that sharing new motherhood alone could not possibly replace that.
Maybe right now we are confusing our friendship with a friendship of pleasure, since we have given each other so much of it (hilarity and clogs and dreams of Italy). And we are worried since these friendships fade when pleasure fades (and Clare has taken so much pleasure with her). But surely that's not all we've shared.
The highest friendship, Aristotle wrote, 'requires time and familiarity; for, as the proverb says, it is impossible for men to know each other well until they have consumed together much salt, nor can they accept each other and be friends till each has shown himself dear and trustworthy to the other.' I guess we are now in the phase of eating much salt. . . .
I am not sure what it means to eat much salt, but it doesn't sound pleasant. It makes me think of tears rolling down our faces into our mouths. . . .
Yet this time is not merely that. When I see you or read your letters, I am suddenly made happy. I see that I still love you, take pleasure in your ways, and yearn for your good and for mine. If this load of salt can’t kill our pleasure or desire for good, then I doubt anything can. And maybe this very salt will make us all the more dear and trustworthy to each other.
With much love and salt,
Amy”
― Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
“The church is a community of doubters struggling to believe, relying on one another to make it real.”
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“One thing that does seem clear to me is that love comes before reformation. Loving God awakens in us a desire to love what is good. This is not external change, an artificial grasping after some sort of holiness we cannot see or understand; it is not self-flagellation but an internal change that happens slowly. The mechanism of change is love, not shame.”
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“Lately, I've been trying to think of spiritual truths more like the laws of physics than like human laws. If we are selfish, it is not that God will punish us or that we would be just fine if God eased up the rules a bit. It's that being selfish chips away at our happiness the way a river washes away rock.”
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“I didn't even try to drum up the doubts so that I could reason past them; I just knew that I should marry him and discover the reasons later.”
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“We are so dependent on one another for faith. We hold faith communally, but there is no such thing as faith held communally but by no one in particular. There is nothing that completely transcends the individual. It is true that this or that person may waver from time to time. But at all times there must be someone holding it up.”
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“Death wakes a person up, she thought, like a wound in the side.
She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness.”
― The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor
She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness.”
― The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor
“I would not take back her life. Even if someone told me that I could go back and erase her, do it a different way so that some other child would live and I would never have to bear the loss of Clare, I would not accept the offer.”
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