"Create Depth"
The length of our life is less important than its depth.
Mary David Fisher
"Live!"
Death twitches my ear. "Live," he says, "I am coming."
Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro]
"The Increase of Life By Death"Christ's single miracle of Destruction, the withering of the fig-tree, has proved troublesome to some people, but I think its significance is plain enough. The miracle is an acted parable, a symbol of God's sentence on all that is 'fruitless' and specially, no doubt, on the official Judaism of that age. That is its moral significance. As a miracle, it again does in focus, repeats small and close, what God does constantly and throughout Nature. We have seen [...] how God, twisting Satan's weapon out of his hand, had become, since the Fall, the God even of human death. But much more, and perhaps ever since the creation, He has been the God of the death of the organisms. In both cases, though in somewhat different ways, He is the God of death because He is the God of Life: the God of human death because through it increase of life now comes--the God of merely organic death because death is part of the very mode by which organic life spreads itself out in Time and yet remains new. A forest a thousand years deep is still collectively alive because some trees are dying and others are growing up. His human face, turned with negation in its eyes upon that one fig-tree, did once what His unincarnate action does to all trees. No tree died that year in Palestine, or any year anywhere, except because God did--or rather ceased to do--something to it.
C.S. Lewis
"Don't Fear The Reaper: Fill Well Your Years"
Our repugnance of death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain."
William Hazlitt
"Even Vegetables Reveal The Grand Plot"
They [miracles] are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and ever been muttered in conversations between such minor characters...as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about? --- that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? ...It is easy to make mistakes in such matters.
C.S. Lewis
"Death, Thou Shalt Die"
One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
John Donne
John Donne
"Precious In The Sight Of The Lord"
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.
Cherokee Proverb
"To Die Is Gain"
'My desire is to depart...and be with Christ, for that is far better.' That is what death does: It takes us into more intimacy with Christ...Daily Christian living is daily Christian dying. The dying I have in mind is the dying of comfort and security and reputation and health and family and friends and wealth and homeland...we bade farewell to friend after friend. And faring well is exactly what we believed they did.
John Piper
"A Reminder Of Life Every Fresh Morning"
Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Arthur Schopenhauer
"Accepting The Beauty of Mortality: A Prayer"
When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly
awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is You
(provided my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
Teilhard De Chardin
"Feeling The Shortness Of The Tether"
The second enemy is frustration -- the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say "No time for that", "Too late now", and "Not for me". But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord". It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
C.S. Lewis
"Cease Your Little Gleam of Time"
One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore!
Thomas Carlyle
"Even Unto Death"
Major, tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.
I.E. Avery
"Goodbye O Marvelous You"
...I prefer to lie spooned with you until I'm ninety or ninety-five
Still crazy about you, and say goodnight one night
and dream I am saved by grace and then dive
swanlike into a spacious tunnel of celestial light.
Out with old and in with the shining new
Hello Jesus, goodbye O marvelous you.
Garrison Keillor
"Fare Forward"
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
T.S. Eliot