Walter

“TRY THIS: DON’T stop beginning. Begin and begin and begin. Begin endlessly—that is, without the taint of even eventual ending. Don’t make the mistake of muddling into middle. Remain pristine and preliminary until the end is inconceivable: until beginning becomes being and being becomes enduring. Eternity isn’t just a demand of the market but also a demand of the heart.”
― Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

“It is not a gathering of 'escapees' from the world, bitterly enjoying their escape, feeding their hate for the world. Listen to their psalms and hymns; contemplate the transparent beauty of their icons, their movements, of the entire *celebration. It is truly cosmical joy that permeates all this; it is the entire creation - its matter and its time, its sounds and colors, its words and silence - that praises and worships God and in this praise becomes again itself: the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity, the sacrament of the new creation.”
― Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism

“A man is a man, no more, no less. The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“It is indeed one of th e grave errors of religious anti-secularism that it does not see that secularism is made up of verites chretiennes devenues folies, of Christian truths that "went mad," and that in simply rejecting secularism , it in fact rejects with it certain fundamentally Christian aspirations and hopes.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy