In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.
Atomised
Michel Houellebecq
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
The Great Divorce, Preface
C.S. Lewis
And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.
The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis
‘Ah, the Saved… what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water!
The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis
Where else can we find rest other than the church, and of course, the altar? I remember my second day as a priest. I was ordained on Sunday, and then Monday night I spent the night at St. Mary in Dallas. The next morning, we prayed the Divine Liturgy, and there was a priest visiting. I actually—please forgive me—I don’t remember his name, but I remember his advice.
After we prayed the Liturgy, I think during the Liturgy, he saw me. I didn’t have a beard, nothing, so he said to me:
“There are some things that have no solution. What are you going to do? You’re going to take it, and you’re going to put it on the altar. And that’s it.”
And I never forgot this. I wish I remembered his name, but I don’t. I remember the advice: “There are some things that only the altar can solve.”
If life is good, why wish for a different life? And if life is not good, why hope for another life? You might say, we are hoping for a better life than what we have now, but why do we insist on life? Those who hope for death, are hoping for something better and not for an end.
The Lord’s Prayer
Fr. Mina Dimitri
Everyone who enters into the covenant knows the world to be a spiritual arena in which the love of God manifests itself. He walks no longer on a sodden earth and under a gray sky, for he knows that, although all people misunderstand him, he is understood, and followed with loving sympathy, in Heaven.
The Art of Being a Good Friend
Hugh Black
