On Living

"I know sometimes it seems difficult..." I began.

"Difficult!" All she seemed able to do was echo my words, spitting them out as if they tasted bitter.

"Yes, I know, but we are alive," I argued, "Think how alive we are. It isn't like Southstone where we just went on and on and nothing ever happened. Here I can feel us living. Don't you feel as if you were being stretched?"

"It hurts to be stretched."

Greengage Summer, Rumer Godden

Living right now is just like that quote. The type of Living that stretches and stretches, pulls and pulls. There's just so much. I can't put my thoughts in order, so I'm leaning on quotes.

"We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then, if only the hope of another human presence to be with us and for us." (Clown in the Belfry, Frederick Buechner)

"The characteristics of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality." (The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis)

If pain makes life real, it also makes hope unmistakably real. Hope becomes something to hold, something to wield. Also, something to lose. But it's there, undeniably there.

Sometimes, I have to pull myself out of my narrow world and just laugh. It's not a cynical laugh or a despairing laugh, but a laugh of pure joy. A laugh that realizes how small I am and how great God truly is.

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(God's Grandeur, Gerald Manley Hopkins)