Nov 27, 2007

They always die on my lips


Sometimes I really want to know where I will be in five years. Other times I just say, "Surprise me."
Oh life, where are you going? It's okay, you don't have to answer. It is wonderful to live and I will live with an optimistic outlook. G.K. Chesterton closed his book, Orthodoxy, with this statement.
"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the
gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this
chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from
which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a
kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills
the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other,
above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.
His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient
and modern,were proud of concealing their tears. He never
concealed His tears;He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His
native city. Yet He concealed something.Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining
their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked
men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something.I say it with reverence;
there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid
from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt
silence or impetuous isolation.There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when
He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

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