To be a witness for God is to be a living sign of God’s presence in the world. What we live is more important than what we say, because the right way of living always leads to the right way of speaking. When we forgive our neighbours from our hearts, our hearts will speak forgiving words. When we are grateful, we will speak grateful words, and when we are hopeful and joyful, we will speak hopeful and joyful words.When our words come too soon and we are not yet living what we are saying, we easily give double messages. Giving double messages – one with our words and another with our actions – makes us hypocrites. May our lives give us the right words and may our words lead us to the right life. – Henri Nouwen

…but only if you’re standing in the eye.

If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.

– James Joyce, Ulysses

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender.
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

“We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did it—whether you did it willingly or unwillingly, sulkily or cheerfully, through fear of public opinion or for its own sake. But the truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a ‘virtue’, and it is this quality or character that really matters.”

C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity (Book 3, Chapter 2 – The ‘Cardinal Virtues’).

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I heard the old, old men say,
“Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.”
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
“All that’s beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.”

Happy birthday, William Butler Yeats