Before I went back to bed that night I’d been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood…I was special, one of the few. And before the end of the week, by late Saturday afternoon, I’d murdered my first rozzer…That was the plan: one dead man…Nothing too murderous; that was the order. The whack of a piece of wood [he hit him with his father's old wooden leg], almost an accident.

And the British would hit back; they’d over-react. They always did. Over the next four years, they never let us down. It wasn’t that they made bad judgements, got the mood of the country wrong: they never judged at all. They never considered the mood of the country worth judging. They made rebels of thousands of quiet people who’d never thought beyond their garden gates. They were always our greatest ally; we never could have done it without them. [p.188f]

And so have we: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran. We never considered them anything but the other, not worth considering, and the hatred goes on and multiplies.

Good theology is like fishing on a sunny summer afternoon, when you throw back most of the catch; bad theology is like a feverish hunt for the White Whale.

Arguments for the existence of God are a puzzle to the non-believer, a crossword puzzle to the believer.

Mistakes are part of any good description of God. Only heretical accounts of God are infallible.

As Pascal said, “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly without an iPad.”

When I was young, I thought that one day I would grow up. Yeah, and when I was a young minister, I thought that one day I would know what I was doing.

faith-theology.com/2012/01/doodlings-unrelenting.html

O God, let something essential happen to me.
Something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful.
Let something essential happen to me,
something awesome, something real.
Speak to my condition Lord and change me somewhere inside,
where it matters.
Let something happen which is in my real self, O God.

Monsieur Gillenormand, who was as alive as it was possible to be in 1831 was one of those men who have become a curiosity solely because they have lived a long while, and who are odd because once upon a time they looked like everyone else and now they don’t look like anyone. He was a peculiar old bird and a genuine specimen from another age, a true and complete bourgeois, a trifle haughty, from the eighteenth cenrury, wearing his good old bourgeoisness as marquises wear their marquisates. He was past ninety, walked tall, spoke loudly, saw clearly, knocked back his drink, ate, slept, and snored. He had every one of his thirty-two teeth and he wore glasses only to read… He did not belong…to that variety of malingering octogenarians who, like Monsieur de Voltaire, have been dying their whole lives, he was not the longevity of a chipped plate. [p. 494-5]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.

Two places of slavery; but in the first, deliverance is possible, a legal limit is always in sight, and there’s always escape. In the second, perpetuity; the only hope, in the extremely distant future, that glimmer of freedom mankind calls death.

In the first, you were chained up in mere chains; in the other, you were chained by your faith.

What emerged from the first? Endless malediction, the gnashing of teeth, hate, a desperate depravity, a cry of rage against human association, utter contempt for heaven. What issued from the second? Benediction and love. And in these two places, so similar and yet so different, these two species of being, so very different, accomplished the same duty, atonement.

Jean Valjean understood perfectly well the atonement involved in the personal atonement, atonement for oneself. But he did not understand atonement for others, that suffered by these creatures, blameless and without stain, and he asked himself with a shudder: Atonement for what? What atonement?

A voice in his conscience answered him: the most divine form of human generosity, atonement for others. [p. 471-2]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.

Cosette had permission to go and spend an hour each day with him. As the sisters were sad and he was good, the child compared him with them and worshipped the ground he walked on. At the appointed hour she would run to the shed. When she entered this hovel, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean flourished and felt his happiness growing from the happiness he gave Cosette. The joy we inspire has this wonderful feature, which is that, far from dimming like any reflection, it comes back to us more radiant. [p. 469]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.

This vessel, disabled as it was, for the sea had treated it badly, made quite an impression when it limped into harbor. It was bearing some flag or other—I can’t remember which—that earned it a regulation eleven-gun salute, rerurned by it blast for blast, making twenty-two in all. It has been estimated that in salvos, royal and military shows of politeness, exchanges of courteous din, signals of etiquette, formalities of harbor and citadel, sunrises and sunsets, saluted daily by all the fortresses and all the warships, openings and closings of gates, etc., etc., the civilized world all over the globe fires off 150,000 pointless cannon every twenty-four hours. At six francs a shot, that means that nine hundred thousand francs a day, or three hundred million a year, goes up in smoke. This is just a detail. And while this is going on, the poor are dying of hunger. [p. 307]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.

Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Psalm 111:1

Let them know that you, whose Name is YAHWEH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth. Psalm 83:18

I shall always wait in patience, and shall praise you more and more. Psalm 71:14

The same stone which the builders rejected has become the chief conrnerstone. Psalm 118:22

…ending with what has to be my favorite morning prayer:

Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought me in safety to this new day: Preserve me with your mighty power, that I may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity; and in all I do direct me to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.

[The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime, compiled by Phyllis Tickle (Doubleday, 2000), p. 290-1]

No one pries as effectively into other people’s business as those whose business it most definitely is not. ‘Why does that gentleman only ever come at dusk?’ ‘Why doesn’t what’s-his-name ever hang his keys on the hook on Thursdays?’ ‘Why does she always take the backstreets?’ ‘Why does Madame always get out of her fiacre before it drives into her yard?’ ‘Why does she send someone out for a block of writing paper when she has loads of stationery in the house?’ And so on and so forth. There are beings who, to find the answer to such teasing riddles, about which, furthermore, they don’t actually give a fig, spend more money, devote more time, go to much more trouble than ten good deeds would require…[p. 150]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.

There is nothing more commoner than a wagon or a cart outside the door of an inn. But the vehicle, or to be more precise, the remnant of a vehicle, that was blocking the street in front of the Seargent de Waterloo, on a night in the spring of 1818, would certainly have attacked the attention of any passing painter by its sheer bulk.

It was the front-axle section of one of those log carriers used in lumber country to cart sawn timber and tree trunks.

Why was [it] where it was, sitting there in the street? First, to obstruct passage; then, to complete the rusting process. In the old social order there were a host of institutions that you stumbled across on your path out in the open air, which had no other reason for being there. [p. 123-4]

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Translation by Julie Rose. Modern Library Classics, 2008.