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Prayer
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
Courage To Pray
Our deep reality may take over in moments when we are so carried away by joy that we forget who might be looking at us, . . . or when we are unselfconscious in moments of extreme pain, moments when we have a deep sense of sadness or of wonder. At these moments we see something of the true person that we are.
February 2011Sy Safransky’s Notebook
July 2010
I admit it: My memory isn’t what it used to be. I forgot what number we’re supposed to dial when we see the Supreme Court leaving the scene of a crime — for what else to call yesterday’s 5–4 decision to kill campaign-finance reform?
July 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Prayer For The Dead
My car died today in Catskill, New York. Her name was Rhonda: Rhonda the Honda. My wife had her in reverse when we suddenly heard a loud CRONK and the front of the car sank to the ground. A ball joint had broken, and the left front wheel had fallen off. (Three people later told me we were lucky: if we’d been driving on the highway, our car might have flipped over!)
July 2010
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Figure In Black And Gray
What they all have in common is a weakness: an inability to say no to a deeply imprinted call — a call to poverty, chastity, and obedience, strange virtues that had to be flushed out from their hiding places, shown to us, and somehow made desirable. We’re men who, for the most part, had good jobs and degrees but were brought low by something many of us hadn’t really asked for, and to which we all eventually yielded. In the end concession and surrender may be our greatest accomplishments.
March 2010
Quotations
Sunbeams
April 2009You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometime fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
Every Eye Beholds You
To expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse. In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spend very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe. Indeed, it is only since the Enlightenment that faith has been defined as intellectual submission to a creed.
April 2009Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Whiskey Robe
On the screened-in porch of my in-laws’ house in central Massachusetts, I am reading a book. Sipping from the tumbler in my hand helps fight the unseasonable chill in the June air. The ice cubes are shrinking, diluting the alcohol, and clinking every time I raise the glass to my lips.
December 2007
Quotations
Sunbeams
April 2007I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.
Readers Write
Praying
A hundred-dollar bill, lemon cookies and a Wink soda, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
April 2007
Poetry
The Word That Is A Prayer
One thing you know when you say it: / all over the earth people are saying it with you; / a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, / a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
April 2007
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