“In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if  life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain  itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be  the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.”

-From Renovation of the Heart, by Dallas Willard.

A key psychological insight.  The world is blind to its sin because it could not possibly be see it and remain as it is.  The world is blind by definition.  The options are either to deny or to repent, there is no third.  I am terribly afraid of this.  I hear the words of Nathan the prophet: “you are that man.”

“Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you  talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption   such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare….  There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.   Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and  their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom  we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors   or everlasting splendors.”

-C. S. Lewis

(Click to view a larger version)

One of my favorite Rembrandt paintings of all time, The Three Crosses.  The various groups, from Pharisees to soldiers to weeping women vividly portrays the equally varied types of relational stances toward the cross.  In the midst of controlled realism, Rembrandt’s faces always point the viewer toward the inner man.

“Professor Donnison has given  a vivid illustration of this from personal experience in the Navy. He  speaks of days spent in a transit camp where men were coming and  going all the time and no enduring bonds were formed between them.  In that camp, he says, one had to nail everything down or it would be  stolen. Then he speaks of life on board ship on active service. The same  men are his companions. But now he knows that any of his fellow crew  members would without hesitation risk his own life for one of his mates.  The same men were involved in both situations: in one they were bound  together by a common purpose; in the other they were not. In the two  different social contexts, their personal behavior was totally different”

-From The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, by Lesslie Newbigin.

I am almost done with Lilith by George MacDonald, and I am loving it.  Here are just a few of my favorite quotes so far:

“‘You have no right to make me do things against my will!’

‘when you have a will, you will find that no one can.’”

“The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.”

“I began to learn that it was impossible to live for oneself even, save in the presence of others–then, alas, fearfuly possible!  Evil was only through good!  Selfishness but a parasite on the tree of life.”

“I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man–that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility.  To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm.”

“Love is a fragile thing that  does not scale well.”

-From Culture Making by Andy Crouch.

This is from Crouches chapter on the vary small arenas where cultural creation is possible.  His numbers are 3:12:120.  While I think he is spot on with this observation, I think he could have done more to argue why this is the case rather than simply assert that it is the case is many situations.

Humans are shockingly limited in the scope of their relational capacity yet wonderfully limitless in depth.  Interestingly, I found this same observation from an unlikely source as I studied for Political Science class: “The Founders were profoundly suspicious of popular leadership as a means of soliciting power and sought to establish a forum of leadership that depended on character rather than personality. This is, of course, entirely dependent on a polity that is small enough to allow an individual’s character to be well known.” (From American Government by Matthew Kerbel.)

“You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies–which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world–what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”

- from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I can never quite figure out which side Conrad is on.  I could either hail him as a brother or repudiate his views as an aetheist.  Whatever position he fights for though, he certainly says it well.

“Truth is not a doctrine or a worldview or even a religious experience; it  is certainly not to be found by repeating abstract nouns like justice and  love; it is the man Jesus Christ in whom God was reconciling the world.  The truth is personal, concrete, historical.”

-from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin.

This is the intitial revelation that opens up worlds of understanding for me as I read Prov. 8, John 1, 1 Cor 2, Col 1, and Eph 1.

Horsetail Falls in Yosemite Valley is selectively backlit by the setting sun.

“This was an amazing spectacle to witness. Happening only two weeks out of the year, the setting sun falls behind the vertical face of El Capitan, selectively lighting this waterfall with its orange sunset light. Gradually growing in intensity and color for the last 5 minutes or so, it was like seeing a narrow strip of lava flowing down the face of El Capitan.”

Natural Firefall (via Jeff Sullivan)

“Born on this date in 1834 in the small village of Aremzyani, in what was then considered Siberia, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev would go on, in 1869, to publish the first periodic table of the chemical elements. Mendeleev used the periodicity he’d observed in the properties of then-known elements to accurately predict many of the properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium, which had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev died in St. Petersburg in 1907, at the age of 72. Element number 101 is named mendelevium in his honor.”

-Via Make