“a world in which no sparrow falls unknown, but-so much for the neatness of our diagrams-it is the Father's will that sparrows fall.”

“For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”

“But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.”

“The Christian religion is not about the soul; it is about man, body and all, and about the world of things -with- which he was created, and -in- which he is redeemed. Don't knock materiality. God invented it.”

“Man wills to make of earth, not one Jerusalem but two; this sacramental blood de- clears the double mind by which he wills to lift both lion and lamb beyond the killing to exchange unaccount- able and vast.Man's priestliness therefore bespeaks his refusal of despair; proclaims acceptance of a world which, by its murderous hand, subscribes the insupportable dilemma of its being—the war of lion and lamb having no other, likely outcome here than two im- possibilities:The one, a pride of victors feeding on the slain; but leaving the lion as he was before, trapped in ancient reciprocities by which at last all power falls to crows;And the other, a hymn to despair no victim will accept; it is not enough, in this paroxysm of two martyrdoms, to stand upon the ship- wrecks of the slain and praise the weak for weakness; the lamb's will, too, was life; he died refusing death.Sacrifice thereforeNot written off, but recognized, a sign in blood of the vaster end of blood; a redness turning all things white; an impossibility prefiguring the last exchange of all.The old order, of course, unchanged; the deaths of bulls and goats achieving nothing; Aaron still ineffectual; creation still bloody;But haunted now by bells within the veil where Aaron walks in shadows sprinkling blood and bids a new Jerusalem descend.Endless smoke now risingLion become priestAnd lamb victimThe world awaitsThe unimaginable unionBy which the Lion lifts Himself Lamb slainAnd, Priest and Victim,BringsThe CityHome.”

“prepackaged slices or the Supermarket swiss (which has the texture but no where near the flavor, of rubber gloves)”

“... the divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't.”