‘Rather than frantic productivity for maximum impact, I am focusing on small contributions, done as well as I can and with as much care as I can give.’
… Republican electoral victory was a vivid reminder that I owe my life to a similar sweep. The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats; they lost fifty-four seats inthe House and eleven seats inthe Senate. …
“My brain is no longer a hive buzzing with new ideas for novels. My body tells me that seventy isn’t the new fifty or sixty. The immutable truth is that I’m old.”
Contrary to what is typically asked of him, the just man does not need imagination but attention. Poetry, too, requires a kind of pure, focused attention.
We are locked up in our own little worlds, trying not to get hurt too much or screw things up, and we have our backs to the fireworks going on all around us.
“It was important that I forgive her and all my former torturers because they were repositories of my childhood, living rosaries of shared, idiosyncratic memories.”
When living in fear, speaking our truth can be one of the hardest things in the world to do. And yet God still calls for our realest selves, and replies with love.
“Some days, although we cannot pray—because we are too busy, or because we are in too much pain, or simply because the words will not come—a prayer utters itself.”
Mary Ward’s trajectory proves an axiom in church history: it is often those who suffer humbly and patiently from the church’s contradictions who end up redeeming it.
What we find outside are physical manifestations of the holy, representative of the sloughing off of old skin, the salt of blood and the sea, signs of the divine.
