CONSIDER THIS. . .

This morning, I opened the door, stepped across the threshold and was warmly welcomed by ‘no temperature’ – it was ‘zero’ outside.  I woke with a start.  I was to travel today but, thankfully, my hosts had already rescheduled our time together for mid-March.  So I settled into my ice-mobile and drove off to one of my favorite coffee shops.  It is quiet here this morning; there are a few folks gathered around the fire-place (yup, you got it, a fire-place) speaking softly as if the fire were inviting them into slower, quieter voices.  I sit nearby and can see the fire if I turn my head 90 degrees to my left.

As I settled in with my heated mug full of my favorite coffee I took out my little black book and opened it.  I wanted to savor some quotations and notations.  As I was savoring them I asked, ‘Why not share some of these with your gentle readers?’  Why not, indeed?

So, gentle reader, here are some ideas to consider and perhaps savor; they might even stimulate you to pause, reflect and write.

St. John Chrysostom noted that the words ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle the fire of greed.

The historian, Will Durant (he and his wife, Ariel, are two of my favorite historians) noted that ‘. . .it was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves.’  Consider that Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable (O.K. he was a pagan and a philosopher. . .) AND St. Paul, on numerous occasions gave his blessing to slavery – he even returned a slave to his owner.  Jesus never, not once, condemned slavery.  It did appear to them that slavery if not, natural, was inevitable.

Will Durant noted that: ‘Man is not willingly a political animal.  The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society as much as he fears solitude.  He combines with other men because isolation endangers him and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world.  If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state.  Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least.  If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.’

Consider that societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword. (Will Durant)

One more from Will Durant: ‘Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual.  It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.’

The wonderful Muslim poet, Hali, wrote in 1879: The rain cloud of adversity is spreading over their heads.  Calamity is showing itself. . . From let and right is coming the cry; “Who were you yesterday, and what have you become today!  Just now you were awake, and now you have gone to sleep!”

C.S. Lewis offers us: ‘The real labour is to remember, to attend.  In fact, to come awake.  Still more, to remain awake.’