Thoughtfulness

On the Metro

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages
beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and
barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and
notice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she
“affirms herself physically,” that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t
moved, she’s allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual
perception, so I can’t help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young
women can look at the end of summer.)
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes
mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on
both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive,
bring news of someone touched, someone sensed,
and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in
truth I have no desire for more,
but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth
then of something like its opposite:
a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from
me in the library in school now,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with
all I craved that touch to mean,
my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming
time had pressed, but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying
against the lurch of the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing
again, asserts her bodily being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and
descends, not once looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that
though I must be to her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling,
perhaps there was a moment I was not.

by C. K. Williams

Walking...

The Perfection of the Father

Nothing has done greater damage to our Christian testimony than our trying to be right and demanding right of others. We become preoccupied with what is and what is not right. We ask ourselves,Have we been justly or unjustly treated? and we think thus to vindicate our actions. But [as Christians] that is not our standard. The whole question for us is one of cross-bearing. You ask me, "Is it right for someone to strike my cheek?" I reply, "Of course not! But the question is, do you only want to be right?" AS Christians our standard of living can never be "right or wrong," but the Cross. The Principle of the Cross is our principle of conduct. Praise God that he makes his sun to shine on the evil and the good. With him it is a question of his grace and not of right or wrong. But that is to be our standard also: "Forgive each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32). "Right or wrong" is the principle of the Gentiles and tax gathers. My life is to be governed by the principle of the Cross and the perfection of the Father: "Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
[...]
So, my brethren, don't stand on your right. Don't feel that because you have gone the second mile you have done what is just. The second mile is only typical of the third and the fourth. The principle is that of conformity to Christ. We have nothing to stand for, nothing to ask our demands. We have only to give. When the Lord Jesus died on the Cross, he did not do so to defend our "rights"; it was grace that took him there. Now, as his children, we try always to give others what is their due and more. [Why? but for out own selfish ambition.]


from:"Sit, Walk, Stand"
by: Watchman Nee

Simpler

“Our Highest Activity”

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sake. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving – the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.
C.S. Lewis - The Screw Tape Letters

Normal is to me...

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman

Free Response

“The Need to Die”

Gentlemen:

It pleases me to inform you, by means of these lines, that death, more than punishment, penalty or limitation imposed on man, is a necessity, the most imperative and irrevocable of all human necessities. Our need to die surpasses our need to be born and to live. We could do without being born but we could not do without dying. Until now no one has said: “I have a need to be born.” However, one frequently does say: “I have a need to die.” On the other hand, to be born is, so it seems, very easy, since no one has ever said that it was very difficult for him and that he put forth a lot of effort to enter this world; whereas dying is more difficult than one thinks. This proves that the need to die is enormous and irresistible, since it is well known that the more difficult it is to satisfy a necessity the larger it looms. One yearns more for that which is less accessible.

[…]

Ruben Dario has said that the sorrow of the gods lies in not reaching death. As for men, if, from the moment they are conscious, they could be sure of reaching death, they would be happy forever. But unfortunately, men are never sure of dying: they feel an obscure desire and a yearning to die, but they always doubt that they will die. The sorrow of men, we declare, lies in never being certain of death.

{Cesar Vallejo, from “Four Prose Poems” Paris, 1926}