Brett

“χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά

Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Remember, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, “I’ve got it.” Always and forever, mystery gets you!”
― Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

“n fact, there is no way to "return to the faith of your childhood," not really, unless you've just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life--which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.”
― Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God