Where Love Goes

You cannot conceive...nor can I or anyone -- the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

~ Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Two writers, both of whom in their work explore that portion of the landscape of the Christian religion ignored by those who prefer to pass the whole thing off as a saccharine enterprise of love unadulterated by reality ~ I suppose it's time to stop dabbling and read their entire corpora of work.

The experience of the cross is a bitter and bleak one. The invitation to accompany Jesus there is a window into an unsettling and strangely brilliant universe.

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I am working hard on understatement here.

Found Things

Found this on the site of someone I love very much:

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.

~A. Schopenhauer

The Extremes (Two of Them, Anyway)

. . . grace rarely comes as a gentle invitation to change. More often than not it appears in the form of an assault, something we first are tempted to flee.

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Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter.

~ Beldon C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (1998)

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I don't know whether I agree with either of these two statements or not. I would like to. But I find that everything is up for reassessment these days.