Sometimes I would leave my office with a sense of the great unity behind and beyond the minute particulars of life (…) It reminded me of the sense I’d had (…) that our mortal lives were just incarnate metaphors, that we are stories being told about the living love that created us and sustains us. It made me wonder if maybe that was true of all history. Maybe all of history’s beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity’s relationship with the unseen spirit of love. We yearned for that spirit but we feared and hated it, too, because it shone it’s terrible light on us, we saw ourselves as we were, broken and shameful, far from what the spirit of love has made us. Maybe all our wars and rapes and oppressions were just our attempts to extinguish that light and silence that story.

Andrew Klavan

laat na het sterven
mijn woorden cremeren,
hun as verstrooien,
zodat ze zich,
door wind gedragen,
verspreiden over velden en steden.
en daar –
bij de bron
van hun ontstaan –
een rustplaats vinden.

Ber te Mebel

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare
From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument,
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:

For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

William Shakespeare
Sonnet 76

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.

–Kurt Vonnegut

Augustine offers one of the pithiest definitions of sin: it is the state of being incurvatus in se (caved in on oneself). The powers of the soul, which are meant to orient us to nature and other human beings and the cosmos and finally the infinite mystery of God, are focussed in on the tiny and infinitely uninteresting ego. Like a black hole, the sinful soul draws all of the light and energy around it into itself.

Robert Barron

A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the mystery of life—a life like the Scriptures, figurative…

John Keats