Unfallen.

“Only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life… In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world.” J. R. R. Tolkien, Letters

Jim Elliot.

“Is it not, for all its sting, a wonderful way to live, Betty? To dream, and want and pray, almost savagely; then to commit and wait and see Him quietly pile all dreams aside and replace them with what we could not dream, the realized Will?” -Jim Elliot in a letter to Elisabeth Elliot

Rumor.

“Rumor, swiftest of all evils in the world. 

She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,

slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air,

she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds. 

She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced. 

Bursting in rage against the gods, she bore a sister

for Coeus and Enceladus: Rumor, quicksilver afoot

and swift on the wing, a monster, horrific, huge

and under every feather on her body–what a marvel–

an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes

and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news.

By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky,

whirring across the dark, never closing her lids 

in soothing sleep. By day she keeps her watch,

crouched on a peaked roof or palace turret, 

terrorizing the great cities, clinging as fast 

to her twisted lies as she clings to words of truth. 

Now Rumor is in her glory, filling Africa’s ears 

with tale on tale of intrigue, bruiting her song 

of facts and falsehoods mingled…” 

-Virgil’s Aeneid 

don’t lock it away.

“Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that his teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.…

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

flawed.

Emma: But I feel so full of error, so mistaken in my make up to deserve you.

Mr. Knightley: And what of my flaws? I’ve humbled you, and I’ve lectured you, and you have born as no one could have born it. Perhaps it is our imperfections that makes us so perfect for one another.

how easy it is to forget.

“Just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden came loose from his shoulders and fell off his back. It began to tumble and continued to do so until it came to the mouth of the Tomb. It then fell into the Tomb, and I saw it no more.” – John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

love words.

“Verbal relish… today we’re a bit apt to fight shy of it. But until we love individual words we cannot love language, and if we don’t we won’t be able to use it properly.” -John Barton, Playing Shakespeare