Graffiti and Punctuation

"The great irony, of course, is what we recognize in our moments of of lucidity as unimportant eventually claims our entire attention, and we find ourselves wholly occupied with our wardrobes and cosmetics and careers and artifacts, knowing full well that these things are no more significant than our children's trinkets."

"But I could not think that in the figure of Jesus we saw Immanuel, that is, God, that is, Love. It was a figure who, appearing so inauspiciously among us, broke up our secularist and our religious categories and beckoned us and judged us and damned us and saved us and exhibited to us a kind of life that participates in the indestructible. And  it was a figure who announced the validity of our eternal effort to discover significance and beauty and inanition and horror by announcing to us the unthinkable: redemption."

"Just at the moment when we thought we had guaranteed our own standing in His good favor, He escaped us and returned with His hammer to demolish things. Try as we might, we could not own Him. We could not protect Him. We could not incarcerate Him. For He always emerged as our judge, exposing our punctilio and fright by the candor and boldness of His love."

"But I show you a different way. It is an alien and a frightening one. It is called Love. It asks that you forswear your busy effort to collect the bits of bliss and novelty that lie about. It asks that you disavow your attempt to enlarge your own identity by diminishing that of others. It asks that you cease your effort to safeguard your own claim to well-being by assuming the inferiority of others' claims. It asks, actually, that you die. For, paradoxically, it offers to your your very own best being beyond this apparent immolation of yourself."

"Return, return, and think again what I have asked of you: to follow justice, and love mercy, and do your job of work, and love one another, and give Me the worship of your heart--your heart--and be merry and thankful and lowly and not pompous and gaunt and sere."

"I tell you of the Springtime of which all springtimes speak. I tell you of the world for which this world groans and towards which it strains. I tell you that beyond the awful borders imposed by time and space and contingency, there lies what you seek. I announce to you life instead of mere existence, freedom instead of frustration, justice instead of compensation. For I announce to you redemption. Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years which you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheelchair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you though plunder, and the identity lost to your because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of. And I bring you to the Love of which all other loves speak, the Love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow."

Excerpts taken from Christ the Tiger by Thomas Howard