hermit's chronicles

Only You Could have inspired This Salt Doll To Dive Into the Ocean. - offered at the feet of my Guru on his birthday, May 25, 2009

I'd known bad men in Paris, and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose. I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation... After all He created men: if He so created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into my backyard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so. - Larry Darrell in W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge

He [Father Ensheim] softly drummed his fingers on the table as though he were turning a notion over in his mind. "Our wise old Church," he said then, "has discovered that if you will act as if you believed, belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy, the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you." - From W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge