miscellany of muse

Larry Norman

Tucks — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:20:18 +0000

Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor.
I wish we’d all been ready.
Children died, the days grew cold,
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.
I wish we’d all been ready.
There’s no time to change your mind,
The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.

A man and wife asleep in bed,
She hears a noise, she turns her head, he’s gone!
I wish we’d all been ready.
Two men walking up a hill,
One disappears and one’s left standing still.
I wish we’d all been ready.
There’s no time to change your mind,
The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.

There’s no time to change your mind.
How could you have been so blind?
The Father spoke, the demons dined,
The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.
You’ve been left behind
You’ve been left behind!

1 Corinthians 15:51-53

⁵¹ ¶ Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, ⁵² In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

George Steiner

Tucks — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:40:22 +0000

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Walter de la Mare

Tucks — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:25:17 +0000

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Gaius Petronius (died AD 66)

Tucks — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:31:24 +0000

“We trained hard – but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”

The above quote is attributed to Petronius. I guess we do not learn from history, or maybe we can’t help ourselves!!

A W Tozer

Tucks — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:53:09 +0000

“In my opinion, the great single need of the moment is that light-hearted superficial religionists be struck down with a vision of God high and lifted up, with His train filling the temple. The holy art of worship seems to have passed away like the Shekinah glory from the tabernacle. As a result, we are left to our own devices and forced to make up the lack of spontaneous worship by bringing in countless cheap and tawdry activities to hold the attention of the church people”. (Keys To The Deeper Life, 87 & 88).

“In the majority of our meetings there is scarcely a trace of reverent thought, no recognition of the unity of the body, little sense of the divine Presence, no moment of stillness, no solemnity, no wonder, no holy fear”. (God tells the Man who Cares 4,5).

Ambrose Bierce

Tucks — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:46:58 +0000

Education. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Corrie Ten Boom

Tucks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:42:46 +0000

“Some people think you can use faith as a passport to God’s favour or as a coin with which you can purchase his gifts. Faith is not in the least like this; it is nothing at all tangible. It is simply believing God and, like sight, it is nothing apart from the object.”

George Wither

Tucks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:36:05 +0000

The Marigold

When with a serious musing I behold
The grateful and obsequious marigold,
How duly, ev’ry morning, she displays
Her open breast, when Titan spreads his rays;
How she observes him in his daily walk,
Still bending towards him her tender stalk;
How, when he down declines, she droops and mourns,
Bedew’d, as ’twere, with tears, till he returns;
And how she veils her flow’rs when he is gone,
As if she scorned to be looked on
By an inferior eye, or did contemn
To wait upon a meaner light than him;
When this I meditate, methinks the flowers
Have spirits far more generous than ours,
And give us fair examples to despise
The servile fawnings and idolatries
Wherewith we court these earthly things below,
Which merit not the service we bestow.

But, O my God! though groveling I appear
Upon the ground (and have a rooting here
Which hales me downward) yet in my desire
To that which is above me I aspire;
And all my best affections I profess
To Him that is the sun of righteousness.
Oh, keep the morning of His incarnation,
The burning noontide of His bitter passion,
The night of His descending, and the height
Of His ascension ever in my sight,
That imitating Him in what I may,
I never follow an inferior way.

John Donne

Tucks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:44:10 +0000

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

from Meditation XVII

Erma Bombeck

Tucks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:31:37 +0000

“Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.”

“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”