Emma Spence > Recent Status Updates

“… awe shifts are minds from a more reductionist mode of seeing things in terms of separateness and independence to a view of phenomena as interrelating and dependent.”

“Death can radically enable us to enjoy life. By relativizing all that we do in our days under the sun, death can change us from people who want to control life for gain into people who find deep joy in receiving life as a gift. This is the main message of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell: life in God’s world is gift, not gain.”

“Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do.
You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.”

“If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.”

“For Burke, feelings of beauty arise out of a sense of familiarity and affection; awe, by contrast, arises in our recognition of what is powerful, obscure, and dreadful. Current studies in the science of aesthetics align with this distinction.” Super cool to think about the differences there!

“For Burke, feelings of butt arise out of a sense of familiarity and affection; awe, by contrast, arises in our recognition of what is powerful, obscure, and dreadful. Current studies in the science of aesthetics align with this distinction.” Super cool to think about the differences there!

This book also mentions the Arabian Nights and Scheherazade !!! I think this is a sign that I need to read those as an adult here soon…

I would just like to update everyone to say that this book is not the science of how awe impacts us so much as a discussion of ways and areas in our lives that we have opportunities for awe. Maybe that is on me for having the wrong expectations, but I’m disappointed.

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do...
Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for...
I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.”

“We need homes, and a home is more than just the four walls where we eat and sleep and watch Netflix. It's a place that shapes and gives meaning to our lives. We need Places with a capital P, places that honor the community's history, the sacredness of creation, and our basic human need for beauty and nature.”

“To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.”

Genesis & Job ✅
It’s crazy rereading this back-to-back after reading through the whole Bible last year. I’m seeing the through-line more, and I’ve been especially blown away by God repeatedly blessing and giving the inheritance to the younger brother, foreshadowing that we are Christ’s younger brother and receive that too…Abel & Seth over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph, & Ephraim

“The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress…where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here.”

“The point, as ever, is spiritual. If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer and he past are the ground upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these.”

“…’Why awe?’ Because awe allows us to get outside of ourselves. And integrates us into larger patterns—of community, of nature, of ideas and cultural forms—that enable our very survival. Tears arise in our recognition of those larger patterns that unite. And the chills signal to us that we are seeking to make sense of such unknowns with others.”

“In times of conflict, whether our weapons are pikes or words, the temptation is always towards total war. But war is the Giant’s work, and like the Giant it will consume us all if it can. ‘The inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,’ wrote Robert Bly, ‘cannot be called down by anger. They are called by extremely elaborate practice—a stories.’”

“It is easy for me to imagine,” wrote Wendell Berry in his extended essay Life Is a Miracle, “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Berry wrote those words twenty years ago, and the great vision he foresaw is now upon us: Life versus the Machine. (p. 122)

“Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere. Ultimately, most of us accede to our sovereign, happily or otherwise.”

Why is this book so long grrrr

I knew it.

I have been waiting for these answers since the last book and I AM STILL WAITING

Part I ✅ I love this world…but a slow start with all the background to keep up with. But finally, I feel like I’m in it.

Reading this book so far has brought back memories of my imagination in childhood that I have not thought of in years… Memories of being the maiden gallivanting on my trusty steed (my bike) through the wooded lands not far from the castle (the roads in my neighborhood), a princess pretending to be a servant in her father’s kingdom. This writing feels just as whimsical and fun and imaginative as that.

I am definitely reading too many books and need to finish this audiobook, but I’m dragging the LOTR listen-to out as much as possible because finishing a good book is sometimes just too much of a heartbreak to handle right away.

✅ The Gospels

“So here we have terrible suffering—the slaughter of the Son of God—in the mind and plan of God before the foundation of the world. …Why? Because *the aim of God in creation and providence is to provide the fullest, clearest, surest display of the greatness of the glory of grace. And that display would be the slaughter of the best being in the universe in the place of millions of undeserving sinners.”