I Listen To Bach A

That Odd Capacity For Destitution, As If By Nature We Ought To Have So Much More Than Nature Gives Us. As If We Are Shockingly Unclothed When We Lack The Complacencies Of Ordinary Life. In Destitution, Even Of Feeling Or Purpose, A Human Being Is More Hauntingly Human And Vulnerable To Kindnesses Because There Is The Sense That Things Should Be Otherwise, And Then The Thought Of What Is Wanting And What Alleviation Would Be, And How The Soul Could Be Put At Ease, Restored. At Home. But The Soul Finds Its Own Home If It Ever Has A Home At All.

There Are A Thousand Thousand Reasons To Live This Life, Everyone Of Them Sufficient

I Don't Know Exactly What Covetous Is, But In My Experience It Is Not So Much Desiring Someone Else's Virtue Or Happiness As Rejecting It, Taking Offense At The Beauty Of It.

Then There Is The Matter Of My Mother's Abandonment Of Me. Again, This Is The Common Experience. They Walk Ahead Of Us, And Walk Too Fast, And Forget Us, They Are So Lost In Thoughts Of Their Own, And Soon Or Late They Disappear. The Only Mystery Is That We Expect It To Be Otherwise.

That's The Strangest Thing About This Life, About Being In The Ministry. People Change The Subject When They See You Coming. And Then Sometimes Those Very Same People Come Into Your Study And Tell You The Most Remarkable Things. There's A Lot Under The Surface Of Life, Everyone Knows That. A Lot Of Malice And Dread And Guilt, And So Much Loneliness, Where You Wouldn't Really Expect To Find It, Either.