Into Thy Calm: The Twelve Days of Christmas (sort of)

Classic Christmas cheer from "Straight No Chaser":

The Calm

The Calm is beyond all things, and in all things. It is the source and goal, the beginning and the end. It fills up and consumes all things. It is the land beyond all lands, and in all lands, possessed by and possessing of the mightiest angel of heaven and smallest speck of dust. The whole world is full of its glory.

The Calm is ever sought by all and in all. Only the indifferent are silent. All else sing their songs of faith and doubt, anger and love, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. To hate it is to seek it; to love it is to seek it. To ignore it is death.

The Calm is ever seeking, flowing, moving, living, loving, bleeding, dying. It hunts and it woos. It thunders and it whispers. It strikes and it caresses. Its ravishings restore innocence, and its slavery supplies freedom. To embrace it is death.

The Calm is dancing, the universe dances to its love. To reject that dance is death; to dance that dance is death. Those who die in that dance live, and live happily. Those who die without the dance die, and are lost, are lost, are lost.

The Calm is here, and is coming. It is the magic, and the Magician. The song, and the Singer. The dream, and the Dreamer. The loved, and the Lover. The known, and the Knower. The taken, and the Taker. The heavens and the earth declare its glory.

The Calm is waiting for you to enter in...

The Voice

"For it is in closest union with [God] that we live and move and have our being; as in fact some of the poets in repute among yourselves have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'"
-Acts 17:28 (Weymouth New Testament)

"I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done."
-Psalm 78:2-4

Voices

"People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy."
-G.K. Chesterton

"The one thing for which we are all being disciplined is to know that God is real. As soon as God becomes real, other people become shadows. Nothing that other saints do or say can ever perturb the one who is built on God."
-Oswald Chambers

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"While [Christianity] is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error."
-G.K. Chesterton

"It is the Divine life [that] continually makes more and more discoveries about the Divine mind."
-Oswald Chambers

"Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him."
-Aristotle

"Throw your soul's fresh, glowing ardor
Into the battle for truth.
Jesus has set the example:
Dauntless was He, young and brave."
-Howard B. Grose

"True religion is not a series of guesses at truth, but 'we speak what we do know, and testify what we have seen.' That which your experience has proved to you, that which you have clearly seen to be the word of God, that which the Spirit beareth witness to in your consciousness, that hold you with [an] iron grasp."
-Charles H. Spurgeon

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist; and the less the artist does, the better."
-Andre Gide

"This is something for which [I] have struggled [for]--a Christianity which has balance, not only exegetically and intellectually, but also in the area of reality and beauty; an insistence that beginning with the Christian system as God has given it to men in the verbalized propositional revelation of the Bible, one can move along and find that every area of life is touched by truth and a song."
-Francis Schaeffer

"Be always drunken. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken."
-Baudelaire

"Maybe redemption has stories to tell."
-Switchfoot

"[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
-T.S. Elliot

"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder."
-G.K. Chesterton

"If you be born near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, so that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry...[then this] curse I must send you in behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory [will] die from the earth for want of an epitaph."
-Sir Phillip Sydney

"[A] story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be 'like real life' in the superficial sense; but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region."
-C.S. Lewis

"Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

"I am not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human beings towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."
-Albert Einstein

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Into Thy Calm

Monday, December 16, 2013

The Twelve Days of Christmas (sort of)

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