Quote of the Week

Brought to you by…

Christian Wiman (again)

I’ve been thinking about life lately.  Big picture.  “You only have one life” kind of thing.  Maybe it’s encroaching middle age?  Or just having too much time to think now that the boys are both in school?  Either way it’s giving (gifting?) me a sense of urgency in my day-to-day existence.  Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives and I definitely don’t want to spend my life  browsing Facebook and buying stuff off Amazon Prime.

I’ve also been wrestling with a sense of the absurd when I go to church on Sundays and feeling the spiny edges of doubt spidering over the rims of the dykes I’ve built to keep disbelief at bay.

Whenever I feel edgy and prone to existential angst of this sort, I turn to Christian Wiman.  This quote, from My Bright Abyss, manages to speak to both of these things — life and faith, or lack of each.

“What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit,
not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives
we are not quite living, God dormant in the world
to which we are not quite giving our best selves.”

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Past Quotes

Last week — Annie Dillard
And the week before that — Elizabeth Gilbert