Chris
https://www.goodreads.com/cktison
The fact that her life had turned into this: this lifeless hush, this faint but elusive whiff of decay. This absolutely-nothing-to-complain-about.
“You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. ”
― On Beauty
― On Beauty
“God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.”
― Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
― Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
“Beyond a certain degree of hardship or misery, life often revives and heals the scars. As time passed, deportation [to the concentration camps for the young woman] had become a kind of voyage and even, thanks to the almost terrifying capacity of memory to transform horror into courage, a voyage that she could easily mention. Any way of seeing the world is good, as long as one returns.”
― The Way of the World
― The Way of the World
“And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”
― On Beauty
― On Beauty
“At home what is ‘wonderful’ tends to be an exception that’s arranged; it is useful, or at least edifying. In Persia it might just as well spring from an oversight, or a sin, or a catastrophe which, by breaking the normal run of events, offers life unexpected scope for unfolding its splendours before eyes that are always ready to rejoice in them.”
― The Way of the World
― The Way of the World
Chris’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Chris’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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