What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Søren Kierkegaard
If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.
Wendell Berry
“Terroir has become a buzz word in English language wine literature. This lighthearted use disregards reverence for the land which is a critical, invisible element of the term. The true concept is not easily grasped but include the physical elements of the vineyard habitat – the vine, subsoil, siting, drainage, and microclimate. Beyond the measurable ecosystem, there is an additional dimension – the spiritual aspect that recognizes the joys, the heartbreaks, the pride, the sweat, and the frustrations of its history.”
James Wilson, Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and Culture in the Making of French Wines
One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark
“Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations.
Place is space in which important words have been spoken, which have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny.”
Walter Bruggemann, The Land: Place as Gift
“The dominant story of our age, undoubtedly, is that of adultery and divorce. This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that were once joined.
This story obviously must be told by somebody. Perhaps, in one form or another, it must be told (because it must be experienced) by everybody.
But how has it been told, and how ought it be told?
This is a critical question, but not a question merely for art criticism. The story can be told in a way that clarifies, that makes imaginable and compassionable, the suffering and the costs; or it can be told in a way that seems to grant and easy permission and absolution to adultery and divorce.
Can literature, for example, be written according to standards that are not merely literary?
Obviously it can. And it had better be.”
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle
History is a crowded bar, so keep your eye on the bartender.
Jim Meehan, Meehan’s Bartender Manual
This is the beginning of a new day.
God has given me this day to use as I will.
I can waste it or use it for good.
What I do today is important,
because I’m exchanging a day of my life for it.
When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever,
leaving something I have traded for it.
I want it to be gain, not loss;
good, not evil;
success, not failure;
in order that I shall not regret
the price I paid for it.
Heartsill Wilson
Paul “Bear” Bryant famously carried this prayer in his wallet.
The central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity - a belief that makes us greedy, mean, and unneighborly.
Walter Bruggemann
“The doorway into anything meaningful in life is trust.”
Fr. Vince Hovley, S.J.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ