Tag Archives: quotes

Fair Sunshine, Fair Samuel

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What shall I say in this great day of the Lord,
where in the midst of a cloud,
I have found a fair sunshine.
I can wish no more for you,
but that the Lord may comfort you,
and shine upon you as He does upon me,
and give you that same sense of His love in staying in the world,
as I have in going out of it.

~ Archibald Campbell, on the day of his execution

I slipped out of bed early this morning, filled the wood stove, picked up my highlighter and these two books.  I’m half way through Fair Sunshine, a book I was introduced to by my daughter-in-law Taryn, on her first visit to our home. 

This is the perfect pairing of two books. Fair Sunshine is the story of 13 Scottish Covenanters, men and women who died with uncommon grace, people who boldly articulated their faith up to the moment the noose was put around their neck.  Samuel Rutherford, most famous as the author of Lex Rex, was a pastor in prison. Many of the recipients of the Letters of Samuel Rutherford are the subjects of chapters in Fair Sunshine. 

Reading these books is like looking at aliens who are somehow familiar.  The strength, the clarity, the courage they displayed is beyond the beyonds.  Who were these people?  What kind of love is that? One can only wonder. 

My breath is caught reading about the two Margarets, sentenced to death by drowning.  One was 70, one was 18.  They were tied to stakes where the tide would eventually cover their heads.  The older was placed so she would be submerged first. 

So came the hungry waters up and up, every wave splashing death, until she was choking in their cold, cold grasp.  As she struggled, before she became a poor limp thing lying in the swirling flood, they said to young Margaret, “What do you think of her now?” “Think!  I see Christ wrestling there,” said she.  “Think ye that we are sufferers?  No; it is Christ in us, for He sends none a warfare at their own charges.”

Astonishing words from an 18 year old girl. 

I’ll be quoting more from these books…

It Pays to Read the Endnotes

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One never knows what curiosity will be found in footnotes, sidenotes or endnotes.  Collin and I are slogging through a tedious and tiresome Great Book.  The greatest delight has been finding this astonishing quote in the endnote.  Bet you won’t ever in your lifetime guess who wrote it! (Answer in the comments.)

Those who know Calvin only as a theologian much underestimate the extent of his genius.  The codification of our wise edicts, in which he played a large part, does him no less honor than his Institute.  Whatever revolution time may bring in our religion, so long as the spirit of patriotism and liberty still lives among us, the memory of this great man will be forever blessed.

Bet you can’t guess,

Nurturing Appetites

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And should I die
before you wake,
there’s something I would want to say:

Love life with all your might
Love peace but be willing to fight
Love beauty and train your sight
Nurture your appetite for beauty, goodness and truth
Be strong and be brave, believe and be saved
For there is a God.

~ Wes King, words for his kids, written on a airplane sick bag
after violent turbulence on a flight

from There Is a God on the CD What Matters Most

We never tire of listening to this exceptional CD.  The phrase, nurture your appetite for beauty, goodness and truth, keeps turning over in my mind, gently clanging like the metal rivets and buttons from jeans tumbling in the dryer. 

What does it mean to nurture an appetite?  “Tastes are developed” writes Elisabeth Elliot. 

1. We must distinguish beauty from ugliness, goodness from mediocrity, truth from cleverly couched lies.  I tend to shy from evaluation – that’s my husband’s department – but nurturing an appetite involves evaluation all the day long.  It is good to ask


Why do we love this movie?
Why don’t you like this type of music?
What makes this wonderful?
Where is this weak?
How could this be improved?
What is the point?
What would complement this?
Is this good?

This is one of those inescapable truths.  Whenever we feed ourselves and our children – food, words, sounds, images – we are developing appetites.  If I raise my family on a routine of chicken nuggets, french fries and pop while I drive in the van, they will not learn to appreciate sitting down together to a crisp green salad, a crusty loaf of bread and Quiche Lorraine.  When I buy 20 39¢ hamburgers from McDonalds to scarf down together (which I’m humiliated to admit we did on Sundays coming home from church for, um, years) what kind of appetite am I nurturing?

A steady diet of sitcoms trains the mind to expect quick fixes, shallow character development and short attention spans.  This is my beef with Sesame Street type shows.  It develops a taste for quick takes, easy images, multiple camera shots, and overstimulation: all directly opposed to the patience required to sit, listen to a book, and form the pictures in your own imagination.

2.  We (as parents and as self-monitors) must monitor the inflow and make the decisions.  If a child is offered a choice between ice cream and oatmeal, that child will assuredly choose the ice cream.   If, whenever there is a lull, we pop a DVD in or turn to a computer game, we are nurturing an appetitie for easy entertainment.  Many folks have praised the television writer’s strike because it was the enforced restriction they needed to find better ways to spend their evenings.  Carrie’s comments (see below) illustrate how effective complete withdrawal can be. 

3.  Begin introducing tiny tastes of what is wonderful to your family.  Start small.  Put on Bach while you are getting ready for a meal.  Read a short poem after the meal.  Get on your belly on the grass (or the beach) with a toddler and a magnifying glass. Turn over on your back and look for faces (eagles, mountains) in the clouds.  Read through the psalms in the Authorized Version.  Pick flowers and put them on the table.  Teach your son how to make Dutch Babies. Buy postcards of fine art and study them together.  Look for the funny things of life and laugh.

These “nurturing appetite” threads are intertwined with the idea of furnishing our minds.  This Wendell Berry interview has also been tumbling in the dryer of my mind for over a year.

The country in front of us now falls off steeply toward Cane Run and
the horse barn. Berry says he hunted squirrels here as a boy. As we
begin to descend, I am thinking about boyhood and Berry’s poetry, and I
ask Berry if he agrees that school children should be reintroduced to
the lost institution of memorizing and reciting poems.

“Yes,” he replies, “you’ve got to furnish their minds.”

The idea of poetry as furniture expands within my imagination and for
weeks, I think about a poem committed to memory as an old chest of
drawers in the corner of a child’s room. At first the thing is simply a
place to put clothes. With time, the grown man, or grown woman learns
to see more of it: toolmarks left by the hand of a long-dead craftsman,
a cornice molding around its top in a shape found on ancient Greek
temples. And by gazing at its sturdiness for so many years, he or she
knows something about how to make things that last.

Yours,

Economics at Ground Level

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from Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:

From the standpoint of society as a whole, the “cost” of anything is the value it has in alternative uses.

That cost is reflected in the market when the price that one individual is willing to pay becomes a cost that others are forced to pay, in order to get a share of the same scarce resource or the products made from it. … The real cost of building a bridge are the other things that could have been built with that same labor and material.  This is also true at the level of a given individual, even when no money is involved. The cost of watching a television sitcom or soap opera is the value of the other things that could have been done with that same time.

Ouch.  Substitute Sudoku for sitcom and you’ve nailed me, Thomas Sowell.

God’s Sticky-Notes

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We also want to continue throughout the day
expressing gratefulness for the innumerable
manifestations of God’s grace.

It’s as if God is placing sticky-notes in our lives
as daily reminders of His presence and provision.
They’re everywhere.
How alert and perceptive of them are you?
Are you a thankful observer of the
countless indications
of His provision,
His presence,
His kindness,
and His grace?

C. J. Mahaney in Humility: True Greatness

Economics á la Hazlitt

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Cindy is hosting a book group for folks who are interested in learning more about economics.  We’re reading through Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a short book available to read online.  Dana found this t-shirt with the key quote of the book. 

What a delicious time to read this little book! Presidential elections, tax season – it’s the perfect context! 

I’m going to do a little Economics for Dummies version.  Here’s my distillation of this week’s reading. 

~ Think beyond today, beyond next month, beyond next year.

~ Consider the invisible blanks (my word, not his): what doesn’t or can’t happen because of a particular economic decision.

~ need ≠ demand

~ Demand = need + purchasing power

~ Everything must be paid for.  My mom used to say, “Nothing is free in this world, except salvation.”

~ Inflation = a vicious form of taxation

~ All credit (as in credit card, store credit, credit line) = debt 

We ought to change the way we speak, giving names which are more accurate: debt card, debt line, etc. 

The Broken Window chapter was especially interesting to me: a gust of wind blew out a 10′ x 6′ window at the pharmacy where I work.  I read the chapter with my own broken window in mind.

I learned something:

~ dipsomaniac: insatiable craving for alcoholic beverages

~ Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)  an French economist whose major contribution was the admonition to take into account “the full picture”.    Oh, what a find!  My journal is filling up with quotes from this man! 
 

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

His Candlemaker’s Petition is a hoot!  In this satire the candlemaker’s petition for trade protection from the unfair competition of the sun.  You can listen to it here.

~ Norris Dam  referenced by Hazlitt as an example of a government project

This interview with Henry Hazlitt was helpful. He was an autodidact!

“Anyway, I picked up my economics, not by taking any course in it, but by reading economics books.”  

Interviewer:   But wasn’t Keynes a very brilliant man?

Hazlitt:   A very brilliant man, indeed, a very brilliant writer, a very witty writer. But being a brilliant writer was confused with being a brilliant economist.  He wasn’t. We should never confuse wit with profundity.

I Wanted to Slap Him!

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Can you imagine who?  John Bunyan!  Gracious!  I was reading his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding, the true story behind the allegory in Pilgrim’s Progress. The two books are natural companions.  According to W.R. Owen in the introduction, “Conversion, according to Bunyan’s view of it (unlike that of some later evangelicals) was no instantaneous event or abrupt redirection of the spiritual life but a long and arduous progression.” 

Arduous, indeed!  His pilgrimage to grace was a tortured, tormented, harrowing, distressing, despairing, vexing, perplexing, troubled, tossed, afflicted, wringing, gnashing, twining, twisting, trembling, pining, grievous, groaning and moaning journey [descriptive words taken from the text].

Dotted among trials and temptations of the soul were a few moments of relief, some words of comfort which assuaged his fears, a sprinkled punctuation of hope.  But did they last?  No, no, no  – back to the miry bog we went.  I laughed aloud (in sympathy) when after one of those moments of sweet relief  Bunyan wrote,

Where I said in my soul with much gladness, well, I would I had a pen and ink here, I would write this down before I go any further, for surely I will not forget this, forty years hence; but alas! within less than forty days I began to question all again.  p. 26 emphasis mine

Reading this book felt like reading and watching The Two Towers.  A year of dark nights, a constant battle with darkness, a weary, dreary struggle.  I came to the point where, I admit, I wanted to slap him and say, “Stop It!”  Bunyan did eventually come to the point where the chains fell off, temptations fled away and he had assurance in the work of Christ to keep his soul. 

And you know what?  His great struggles made him a better pastor.  The section about his ministry (265 – 339 – the paragraphs are numbered) should be required reading for every pastor, really for every serious Christian.  Bunyan writes that one of the causes of his protracted struggle with assurance was

…that I did not, when I was delivered from the temptation that went before, still pray to God to keep me from temptations that were to come:  p. 61
 

Compare that to this to a reflection from Christiana:

Alas, said Christiana, we were so taken with our present blessings that dangers to come were forgotten by us;   ~ Pilgrim’s Progress p. 255    

* Grace Abounding is available to read on the internet here.*

Finished Kristin Lavransdatter

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Previous posts on Kristin here and here.

I just finished the last page of the last book in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.

I read the first book in one day, the second over a few weeks and then bogged down in the third.  I think the third book was difficult because Kristin was reaping the results of decisions made in her youth.  The hot/cold relationship with her husband went mostly cold/cold.  Kristin watches as her boys follow in the sins of their father or their mother. She sees herself in her sons and begins to understand what it is her own parents went through.

It didn’t exactly make for jolly fireside reading. However, the insights I knew would be there compelled me to pick it up and finish.  Revived, I marveled again at the powerful prose which  distilled everyday emotions into their essence.

In her father’s soul there had dwelt somewhat else besides that deep, sweet tenderness.  She had learned, with the years, to understand it — her father’s wondrous gentleness came not therefrom that the saw not clear enough the faults and the vileness of mankind, but that he was ever searching his own heart before his God and bruising it with the repentance for his own sins. p.224

I find myself wanting to loan my copies out to this friend and that; and yet, simultaneously, wanting to hold on to the books so these sentences are at my beck and call.

I think of my friend Btolly who loves her cow when I read this:

She went to the byre herself to help in the milking.  It was ever pleasant to her, this hour when she sat in the dark close in to the swelling cow-flank, and felt the milk’s sweet breath in her nostrils. p.20

…and my friend Tanabu Girl, who learned Latin with me from Magister Dilectus and now teaches it:

And the year Björgulf and Nikulaus were at Tautra cloister with Sira Eiliv, they had sucked–so said the priest– at the breasts of Lady Knowledge with fiery zeal.  The teacher there was an aged monk, who, busy as a bee, had gathered learning his whole life long from all the books he could come by, Latin or Norse.  Sira Eiliv was himself a lover so wisdom, but, in the years at Husaby, he had had little chance to follow this bent towards book-lore.  For him the fellowship with Lector Aslak was like sæter-pasture to starved cattle.  And the two young boys, who, among the monks, clung to their home-priest, followed, open-mouthed, the two men’s learned talk.  And brother Aslak and Sira Eiliv found delight in feeding the two young minds with the most delicious honey from the cloister’s bookshelves, whereto brother Aslak himself had added many copies and excerpts from the choicest books.  Soon the boys became so skilled that the monk had rarely need to speak to them in the Norse tongue, and, when their parents came to fetch them, they both could answer the priest in Latin, glibly and without many slips. p.138

Oh, if you have a thoughtful reader on your list, especially–but not necessarily–a young woman, these books would be a wonderful gift.

I gave the new translation  to my sister Dorothy for her birthday.  I’m eager to talk with her about it.  I am ready to read the trilogy again in that translation in 2008.

Kristin Lavransdatter.

In the top three of the best books I’ve ever read.