A Few Things

Dear Reader:

I’ll be starting a new part of this column involving two different pincer movements—all for your enjoyment, and possibly understanding. The first will be, hopefully, one or two quotes that have caught my fancy and may catch yours as well. Secondly, and more importantly, sometime in the not too distant future, I will be inking my thoughts on the subject of ‘marriage’. I know that everyone out there has a perfect one, and one of my sons has made the comment that I really don’t know what I’m talking about---but I think I’ll take my chances.

So two quotes I’ve run across in the past few days, the first being an old Turkish saying which was applied at one point in time to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia fame). He being a Colonel at the time and having a love of the spotlight and yet not liking some of the side effects of fame, was admirably quoted in a Turkish newspaper circa 1919 in this way, “He had a genius for backing into the limelight”. I thought it was clever.

Number two is from George Orwell, who wrote “1984” among other novels. He remarked of all saints, and in particularly Ghandi, ‘…that all saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.”

On a more serious note and because it is Lent this is from Benedict XVI titled:

The Temptations of Christ

The temptations are a descent into the perils besetting mankind, for there is no other way to lift up fallen humanity. Jesus has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission; he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths, in order to find the “lost sheep”, to bear it on his shoulders, and to bring it home….At the heart of all temptations is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms. Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation…It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism: What’s real is what is right therein front of us—power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs. God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he? Is he good, or do we have to invent the good ourselves: The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence.