The idolization of the ‘changed life’

The idolization of the ‘changed life’
Great Article..

Joy

Joy

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one comer of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

"Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. . . . There was something that [Jesus] hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon the earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth."

G K Chesterton,  Orthodoxy.

yea... that my baby...Ohy Vay

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Yum yum

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Hope.

Hope

Hope seems a strange bedfellow when paired with the likes of faith, love and other paramount virtues. Hope is an expectation, a desire for fulfillment, but it only seems to make us anxious in the present. We hope for our dreams to be fulfilled, yet wonder what we will have left to hope in once they are. It almost seems cruel to tell a friend that you love them, have faith in them, and have hope in them, as though they are not yet the best friend you might like them to be.

And yet God assures us that we should faithfully place our hope in him. While it may seem a recipe for disappointment, as our earthly hopes most nearly always are, the virtue's classification with such noble aspirations as faith and love remind us that God's promises are truly worthy of our deepest hope.

author unknown

Leaving Charlotte on the noon train

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Pipers St. Patrick's Day Parade

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Raleigh St. Patrick's Day Parade

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Dividing line between Good and Evil

During the life of any heart this line [dividing good and evil within the heart] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

"The Bluecaps", The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People/ Dogs and Kids Enjoying the Great weather

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Wow... They ground the beans and brewed the coffee after I ordered it... Great Coffee...

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Someone who loves soccer has defiled Sir Walter Raleigh

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Beautiful Day in Raleigh for a walk

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