When Something Ought To Be True Then

[john] Calvin Treats Experience As Essentially Visionary And Revelatory From Moment To Moment, Addressed To The Individual Perceiver, The Individual Soul. Where This Is Assumed Preconceptions Can Only Distract And Obscure, Though, Of Course, As Human Beings We Can Never Wholly Free Ourselves Of Them.

You Never Know When You Might Be Seeing Someone For The Last Time.

That Is How Life Goes--we Send Our Children Into The Wilderness. Some Of Them On The Day They Are Born, It Seems, For All The Help We Can Give Them. Some Of Them Seem To Be A Kind Of Wilderness Unto Themselves. But There Must Be Angels There, Too, And Springs Of Water. Even That Wilderness, The Very Habitation Of Jackals, Is The Lord's.

Theologians Talk About A Prevenient Grace That Precedes Grace Itself And Allows Us To Accept It. I Think There Must Also Be A Prevenient Courage That Allows Us To Be Brave - That Is, To Acknowledge That There Is More Beauty Than Our Eyes Can Bear, That Precious Things Have Been Put Into Our Hands And To Do Nothing To Honor Them Is To Do Great Harm. And Therefore, This Courage Allows Us, As The Old Men Said, To Make Ourselves Useful. It Allows Us To Be Generous, Which Is Another Way Of Saying Exactly The Same Thing.

We Have Opted For Petty Determinisms - Childhood Trauma, Genetic Inheritance, Social Conditioning, Etc. - That Have Made Us Comparatively Passive. We Seem To Prefer To Find Excuses - Which Are Really Nothing More Than The Embrace Of Determinism, A Sort Of Stockholm Syndrome Relative To Whatever We Can Claim As Limitation. I Am Fascinated By The More Enabling Self-understanding. It Has Helped Me To Find My Way Out Of The Cloying Comforts That Are Offered By Prevalent Psychological Models.