A Letter Makes Ordinary Things Seem Important.

There Is No Justice In Love, No Proportion In It, And There Need Not Be, Because In Any Specific Instance It Is Only A Glimpse Or Parable Of An Embracing, Incomprehensible Reality. It Makes No Sense At All Because It Is The Eternal Breaking In On The Temporal. So How Could It Subordinate Itself To Cause Or Consequence?

These People Who Can See Right Through You Never Quite Do You Justice, Because They Never Give You Credit For The Effort You're Making To Be Better Than You Actually Are, Which Is Difficult And Well Meant And Deserving Of Some Little Notice.

Families Will Not Be Broken. Curse And Expel Them, Send Their Children Wandering, Drown Them In Floods And Fires, And Old Women Will Make Songs Of All These Sorrows And Sit On The Porch And Sing Them On Mild Evenings.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

The Idea That The Universe Itself Is Physically Structured Around Hierarchy Was Sort Of An Integration Of Earlier Science And Theology That Was Made By People Like Thomas Aquinas, That Was Assumed Doctrinally In That Tradition. The Reformation Rejected That Model Of Reality And Created A Highly Individualistic Metaphysics In The Sense That It Located Everything Normative That Can Be Said About Reality In Human Perception, There Being, Of Course, No Other Avenue Of Knowing. There Is Scripture, There Is Conscience, There Is Perception Itself.