Publisher @OrbisBooks, saint-whisperer @GiveUsThisDayLP. #TolstoysTalesofTrump. #MastersofSocialIsolation. Seeking meaning in the sacred and the absurd.
Joined December 2016
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A fitting symbol for the spirit of life submerged beneath the encrustations of our everyday existence, that capacity that lies within us, even when all seems cold and numb, like a tulip bulb in winter—not dead, after all, but merely sleeping.😷
Julian lived during the Black Death and other scourges. Yet her own sufferings generated a deeply hopeful confidence in God’s love—a force more powerful than sin and death. Her most famous line: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
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#MastersofSocialIsolation (4) Julian of Norwich, a 14th-cen English mystic, spent half her life as an anchoress, enclosed in a cell attached to her local church. From a small window she could receive food and offer spiritual advice, while from another she could view the altar.
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We know little of her previous life except that she had once prayed that she might fall sick and receive “3 wounds” of contrition, compassion, and longing for God.” This came to pass when she was 30–falling so sick that she received last rites.
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RIP Betty Williams. via @NYTimes nytimes.com/2020/03/21/world…
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The master reserved his harshest criticism for the mendacious and backstabbing press. Were it not for their constantly quoting his words, public confidence would be at an all-time high. #TolstoysTalesofTrump
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“Some keep the sabbath going to Church—/ I keep it, staying at home—/...God preached, a noted Clergyman—/ and the Sermon is never long./ so instead of getting to Heaven, at last—/ I’m going, all along.”—Emily Dickinson #MastersofSocialIsolation
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“What do you consider fun?”—Talking Heads. (We each have our own ways. Ravi was made for these times. Hero!)
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#MastersofSocialIsolation #3 Henry David Thoreau. In his classic “Walden” he described the 2 years he spent in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord MA. There he sought to escape the deadness of a world in which “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
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He was 25 at the time. As he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
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He provides a meticulous account of the details of his life and his attention both to the world of nature and his own inner world. He was never lonely in the company of Nature. Sitting in the rain, “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”
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For Thoreau his time of isolation provided the setting for a journey of inner discovery: “There are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him.” Eventually his retreat ended—he had “other lives to live.”
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