Sacred Nakedness
We are not human beings
on a spiritual journey.
We are spiritual beings
on a human journey.
— Stephen Covey
bringing truth in Sunday clothes
Why are we reading,
if not in hope of beauty laid bare,
life heightened
and its deepest mystery probed? . . . .
Why are we reading if not in hope
that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days,
will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage,
and the possibility of meaningfulness,
and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries,
so that we may feel again their majesty and power?
What do we ever know that is higher than that power which,
from time to time, seizes our lives,
and reveals us startlingly to ourselves
as creatures set down here bewildered?
Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love?
We still and always want waking.
We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen
and shake gourds at each other, to wake up;
instead we watch television and miss the show.
— Annie Dillard
About Annie Dillard:
After she survived a near fatal case of pneumonia, she started sitting by the creek every day, watching the ordinary bugs and birds and frogs and minnows, and writing about them in her journal. Along with her observations of the creek, she also began jotting down odd bits of information, interesting quotations, scientific data, and theological speculations. She eventually combined all of the bits and pieces in the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). She's gone on to write many other books of essays, including The Writing Life (1989), and For the Time Being (1999).
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
— Joseph Roux, French priest, writer.
from Meditations of a Parish Priest.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
The Winter garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly-and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
— Edward Fitzgerald, from book adaptation,
from the original Persian, of The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám.
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