and the hours after that

[hours]

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”

— François de La Rochefoucauld

[hours]

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“[J]ust as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“[A]s much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: ‘Be yourself.’ ‘Follow your heart.’

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?”

— James Hobart, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“[M]aybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“God’s love helps us receive and interpret our circumstances instead of having our hearts controlled by them. . . . And we don’t need to wonder whether God’s love for us is going to fade or fail; God’s love is just as steadfast as he is. As Jeremiah wrote, ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.’ God’s love and mercy, the prophet tells us, are ‘new every morning.’”

— Matthew Westerholm, Evaluate Your Day Before It Begins

[hours]

“[T]his was another thing about [Pippa]; she listened, her attention was dazzling—I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”

— Theodore Decker, in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[hours]

“Through the teaching, support, sacrifice, worship, and commitment of the church, utterly ordinary people are enabled to do some rather extraordinary, even heroic acts, not on the basis of their own gifts or abilities, but rather by having a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue. The church enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices.

So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial—something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, be that person a child or an adult, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-year-old, ‘Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.’ Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, honestly to examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek such responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the Body of Christ.

[. . .] The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs—although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason or will our way out of our mortality. So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.

As [Karl] Barth says, ‘[The Church] exists . . . to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise’ (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2).”

— Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, “All Christian Ethics Is a Social Ethic,” Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

[godthings]

[hours]

Excerpt:

“God gives people the dignity of carrying the consequences of their bad decision. But that’s not the only way God responds to avon [the Hebrew word for ‘iniquity’] in the Bible; He also offers to carry the avon of corrupt people as an act of sheer generosity. In fact, carrying avon is the most common Hebrew phrase for God’s forgiveness, like Psalm 32, where the poet says, ‘I didn’t hide my avon but confessed it, and you [God] carried the avon of my sin.’ [v5]

This is actually shocking, if you stop and think about it. God forgives people by taking responsibility for their avon. This idea reaches its high point in the Book of Isaiah, where God appoints a figure called the Servant: he will embody God’s forgiving love by carrying the avon of many and allowing it to crush him. This Servant will absorb humanity’s crookedness, letting it overwhelm and destroy him. But that’s not the end of the story. The Servant will emerge out the other side of death, alive and well, so he can offer his life to others [Isaiah 53].

[. . .] Paul the Apostle identified the Servant as Jesus, and he said our great God and Savior, Jesus the Messiah, gave His life on our behalf in order to redeem us from all of our. . . crooked behavior and its consequences. And so, the whole biblical story is about God’s desire to take crooked people and the twisted world that we’ve created and to make everything right. Through Jesus, God invites us to become whole humans once again—people who can walk upright with God and with each other.”

[hours]

“There are times when a thoughtful, loving, critical response is the most appropriate one. But before we jump in to offer it, we should examine our hearts and consider what is most beneficial, being willing to say nothing if it tears others down and hinders the Gospel of Christ. What we say matters. Choose carefully.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

[hours]

“Unveiling flaws outside of ourselves requires little to no personal sacrifice. Examining the depths of our own brokenness requires vulnerability and risk, both of which are essential for growth.

Life in Jesus involves the death of self (Mark 8:34-35). This is difficult to do while clinging to the belief that we know more than someone else. But as we move into a space of grace, our eyes are opened to lessons we were blinded to before, and we begin to find the places in our hearts God longs to address. If we are too busy discussing the ways everyone else needs to change, we lose the ability to see our own need for restoration and we get stuck rather than grow.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

[hours]

“Identifying problems is easy. Following [the Apostle] Paul’s call [in his letter to the Philippians] to focus on what is good, lovely and admirable takes intentional work, and it breathes new life into our relationships. If God can choose to no longer look on our sin, we can choose to stop focusing on the things we would change in others and get busy loving them instead.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches