“The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.”

“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.”

“...there is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom?”

“It turns out that what makes history come out in triumph is some dumb sheep that couldn't find its way home.”

“cover each with plastic wrap (you see, I hope, that I am no mere antiquarian, insisting on barefoot walks through unimproved sculleries. I am as grateful as anyone for real progress as any modernist. More so, perhaps. Anything that preserves freshness for the pot is on the side of the angels.”

“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.”