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Both Jack and Tollers regularly wrote in their correspondence about personal experience of cowardice. I have felt...well, encouraged!--by their vulnerable longings for courage as they felt great fear of loss.

Yet the moral blindness of the twentieth century represented something entirely novel: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life. Tolkien and Lewis believed that only an outlook rooted in the ancient truths could resist it. "The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds," Lewis wrote, "and this can be done only by reading old books." p.115

But in a sustained relationship, you can trust that, as long as your mutual indebtedness keeps circulating, things work themselves out over the long run. The frequency with which debts, gifts, and favors are exchanged reduces the gravity of any single transaction--it's the relationship that persists. I wanted to enter into the intimacy of slight imbalance...

"When you ask for help from a friend or relative, the help you receive deepens your relationship. You may feel you owe them a favor--a meal when they're the one sick, a witness when they are the one in labor. But more than that...you have been intimately & vulnerably seen by them, & that disclosure of weakness colors your friendship. [Do] you see that weakness as continuous with your ID or as a jarring aberration?"

😍

This is a really beautiful book.

[regarding Satan, in Paradise Lost:] Persisting in his striving and clinging to self-deception, he loses his ability to take joy in his own original goodness and in the goodness of the world and robs himself of the possibility of redemption.

"To rest transparently means to be at one with ourselves in relationship to another--the way we are at one with ourselves when we are engrossed in music or when we are in the flow while working on something we love. We are healthy, Kierkegaard states, when we are willing to be ourselves by being at one with ourselves in relationship with the God in whom we have our being and before whom we live." (p. 38)

Vintage port & Nam communion & Tony's birthday 😭

"Baby, they's justice and they's mercy. If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don't hurt nearly like bad justice, and always remember, the eye of God can see."

Had anyone walked in at the right moment and listened carefully, they might have heard her whisper, "Good morning, St. Minnette. You are strong. And you are brave. And you are kind. Even when you are sad."

"Shifting seasons of need can feel like they erode that foundational equality. If one person starts to fall behind, to need more, he or she can feel like the junior partner. It's hard to tolerate interdependence if one is working from the assumption that a grown-up balances their books and doesn't ask more than he or she can repay." p. 36

"Someone stands right here, right now, or we all fall." He glanced back at his still motionless blond sons.

"I'll be a minute. Now go on. And if I'm longer, help each other walk the right road, whatever the toll.

Kneel for no evil.

Treat your heartbeats like pennies and your souls like gold."

(ch. 5)