Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.

 

…wherever it may be, you never understand a passage of Scripture to the end, and you do not comprehend all the truth it conceals. Although you may perhaps understand some or perhaps many things there, know that it is always there for you as a testimony of truth still to be revealed to you… Therefore it is always a matter of making progress in the understanding of Scripture.

 

She pulled it out and looked, wondering who ever saw this smooth hard thing that fell out of a chicken’s you-know-what and thought, I’m going to eat it? When you crack an egg open and see a sac of yellow oil surrounded by thick snot, what would give you the idea, now here’s a tasty little morsel?

It’s weird that despite the way an egg looks and the route it takes to open air, it is a nearly perfect food. You can serve it with almost anything that can be snipped, chopped, or grated. Fried, poached, scrambled, all good. Add it to any cookie or cake and it will be richer. Whip slimy whites to a tight froth, add them to butter, flour, sugar, and lemon and you get a soufflé that kills. And what crazy French person thought of beating olive oil into yolks until your arm breaks and suddenly you get mayonnaise? None of these things would exist if we had to rely on the way I look at things.

 

You are probably weary of people telling you that as a student you can change the world. Let me tell you what I have learned, though. When dictators think of 22,000 students, they think of what you might do. When power is threatened, it is students who are feared. When power is threatened, dictators don’t shut down the commercial districts, they close the schools. Than Shwe, the leader of the military junta in Burma fears you. He just arrested five student leaders from the 1988 democracy movement. And do you know why? Because he knows what you may only suspect: students change the world. The student movement in South Africa that ultimately precipitated the downfall of apartheid changed the world. Students threaten what is, because they have an anticipation of what might be and what should be, and from time to time they have been relentless about pursuing it, and the world changes. In part I think it is because the university makes everything seem possible. The world is opened to us—for many of us, for the first time…

 

Friends

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

 

Excerpt from Letters from Birmingham Jail

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.

 

O Lord my God, my one hope, listen to me lest out of weariness I should stop wanting to seek you, but let me seek your face always, and with ardor. Do you yourself give me the strength to seek, having caused yourself to be found and having given me the hope of finding you more and more. Before you lies my strength and my weakness; preserve the one, heal the other. Before you lies my knowledge and my ignorance; where you have opened to me, receive me as I come in; where you have shut to me, open to me as I knock. Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely.

 

The sins of our forefathers

They had a far smaller expectation of happiness, admittedly, and a far lesser tendency to regard happiness as a right. All our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy, have had their shadow side. Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it is not the adults who have paid it.

 

Luther even proposed that, to make sure we do not take our own virtues too solemnly, we should from time to time consciously exercise our Christian freedom in a harmless way: sleep too late, eat or drink more than usual, take part in a practical joke.

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer no which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.