stained glass and Buechner

Here's a conglomeration of things that have moved me this past week. The stained glass windows are from a church in the nearby town of Staatsburg. The quotes are from Frederick Buechner's book, "The Hungering Dark."


...selfhood in the sense that you are one self and I am another self begins to fade. You begin to understand that in some way your deepest self is the self of all men--that you are in them and they are in you. You begin to understand not as an ideal but as a reality, an experience, that their pain is your pain, their need your need; that there can really be no getting ahead at their expense, there can be no joy for you until there is joy for them. And whatever your religion is, or your lack of religion, in this sense I think that the soul of every man is Christian and that the man on the cross [i.e. sacrificing self for the good of others] who finds peace and fullness and true life is at the very least a symbol of the deepest truth about everyone of us. I believe that by God's grace it is our destiny, in this life or in whatever life awaits us, to discover the face of our inmost being, to become at least and at great cost who we truly are.


Alluding to Noah and the Flood...
The waters came scudding in over forest and field, sliding in across kitchen floors and down cellar stairs, rising high above television aerials and the steeples of churches, and death was everywhere as death is always everywhere, men trapped alone as they are always trapped, always alone, in office or locker room, bedroom or bar, men grasping out for something solid and sure to keep themselves from drowning, brother fighting brother for the few remaining pieces of dry ground. Maybe the chaos was no greater than it has ever been. Only wetter.


Despair and destruction and death are the ancient enemies. Even our noblest impulses and purest dreams get all tangled up with them just as in Vietnam, in the name of human dignity and freedom, the bombs are falling on both the just and the unjust and we recoil at the horror of little children with their faces burned off, except that somehow that is the way the world has always been and is, with nightmare and noble dream all tangled up together.


...in the year that King Uzziah died, or in the year that John F. Kennedy died, or in the year that somebody you loved died, you go into the temple if that is your taste, or you hide your face in the little padded temple of your hands, and a voice says, "Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people died?" and if you are not careful, you may find yourself answering, "Send me."