EyeJunkie Feature: Eye Opening Quotes

Curveball

November 1st, 2008

“November resembles a curveball.  Just when you think you know where the ball will go over the plate it shifts on you and you’re swinging wind.”

~ Outfoxed by Rita Mae Brown

Ornament

October 5th, 2008

“When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appelations.  He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All.  He did not style her wife, but simply mother,–mother of all living creatures.  In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of a woman.”

~ Martin Luther

steady

August 14th, 2008

“troubles they may come and go
but good times, they’re the gold
if the road gets rocky, girl
just steady as we go” 

~ Dave Matthews
“Steady As We Go”

Single Days

July 30th, 2008

“Single days experienced fully add up to a lifetime lived deeply and well.  Today is your life–not yesterday and not tomorrow.  If we have tomorrow, it will be a gift, but what we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all our tomorrows.”

~ Alexandra Stoddard
Living a Beautiful Life

A New Birth of Freedom

July 3rd, 2008

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

 ~ Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Gettysburg, PA

Ironically, President Lincoln was not actually the featured speaker at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg.  He was only asked to attend the ceremony seventeen days before the event.  He followed a more than 2 hour oration by Edward Everett with this 2 minute speech that is now recognized as one of the most powerful in American history.

The battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3, 1863 (144 years ago today) with the blood-soaked ground holding more than 7,500 Union and Confederate soldiers who gave the “full measure of devotion” for their respective understandings of freedom. At least 4,700 of those were Confederate soldiers who fought, in part, for the “right” to hold other human beings as possessions.

Some say that Americans have no right to speak to the world on human rights, given some of the atrocities in our own history.  I say, who better to tell the tale of each human’s value than those who have walked through the consequences of our own devaluing?  We can not change the past, but we can not live in it either.  Our voices can not be bound by it.  We can acknowledge it, take responsibility for it, learn from it, and move forward from it.  And, we must share the consequences of it.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work…”

“If I speak…”

June 9th, 2008

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

~ the Apostle Paul (1 corinthians 13:1-3)

Nelson Mandela

May 28th, 2008

“Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, ‘who am I to be brilliant gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t save the world.”

Henry David Thoreau

May 8th, 2008

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
~ Walden, 1854

ABCs

W is for Whole

October 28th, 2008

A whole defies mathematics.  It adds up to so much greater than two halves, especially in hearts.  Just the added “w” makes it the opposite of hole.  Where a whole is given, there can be none of the empty void of hole.  A whole is full and complete–the thing in its entirety.  A whole lends importance to anything it touches.  I should do, see, love with my whole, or not at all.

S is for Squiggles

July 16th, 2008

Squiggles are squeal-fueled giggles–the language of toddlers who haven’t quite learned the words.  Some sneak out, burst, or even explode.  They have an uncanny power to multiply without effort.  They are joy that needs no articulation

C is for Cobwebs

May 15th, 2008

Cobwebs are what creep up in corners when you’re not paying attention.  A moment of shame. A mistake. Something you can’t remember or can’t forget.  They are sticky and catch things that brush against them by accident.  It helps to sweep out your cobwebs.

Eye Candy

October

November 2nd, 2008

I Was Born.

October 28th, 2008
CultureSpeak

“Unspeakable”

August 15th, 2008

Cultural Context: The word used by Peter Geren, secretary of the U.S. Army to describe the sights seen by Private James Hoyt on April 11, 1945 when he was one of four American soldiers to discover the Buchenwald German concentration camp.  Mr. Hoyt died on Monday, August 11 and was the last surviving member of the four man team.

“Unspeakable” was right, for the CNN news account/tribute to Mr. Hoyt’s heroism indicated that he had kept his involvement in the liberation secret from many he knew for much of his life.  The story indicates that Mr. Hoyt still suffered nightmares and attended post-traumatic stress disorder support meetings for veterans 63 years after his experience.  Mr. Hoyt had begun to share his memories with author Stephen Bloom.

From the article:

“It’s important that we don’t allow ourselves to lose him,” Geren told CNN by phone. “It’s the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they’ve done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.”

Captain Fredrick Keffer, commander of the small mission to locate Buchenwald later wrote:

“Memories of evil get erased, for life must go on, and new generations cannot be locked in the past. But they would do well to remember the past.”

It was interesting to me that when army files about the liberation were located, Mr. Hoyt, who was a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and the recipient of the Bronze Star, had been asked to account for his greatest achievement.  He listed his accomplishment as the 1939 Johnson County Iowa Spelling Bee champion.  The word he spelled to win, ironically was “archive.”  As his story, his sights are now archived, I’m confronted by our need to speak the unspeakable.

We don’t want to.  We want to “lose” the memories, to push them away, to look away from ourselves and the realities of who humans are.  But, history shows us–today’s media shows us–that there is no depth to the unspeakable that man can and will perpetrate on man.  God tells us through the prophet Jeremiah that the human heart is “more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (jeremiah 17:9)

I have always been fascinated by history and mystified by the surreal circumstances of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II.  The accounts are overwhelming in their depravity.  But, they are not unlike countless other situations in the history of our world.  And, it is not easy to point a finger and single out perpetrators over there somewhere in the great category of “someone else”–not when you see the seemingly endless reports of bizarre and cruel crimes that grace the rotating “featured stories” of today’s news.  For all the writing and teaching on our race’s “evolution” toward the best of ourselves, we remain depraved.  And, if “evolution” is man’s way, a chance betterment of our species, then we are doomed to depravity.  For, survival of the fittest inevitably means the destruction of the weaker.  Even the rules of the theory of evolution don’t allow for the possibility that our deceitful and sick hearts can be made truthful, healed, compassionate toward one another.

Beyond the hopelessness of our own evolution, there is a cosmic intervention available.  It’s not by chance.  It’s not accidental.  It’s a desire by a Creator God to take his beloved handiwork back to the communion of Eden.  It’s the new ancient reality that all is not lost, and we can change.  We can BE CHANGED.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes… so you will be My people, and I will be your God.” (ezekiel 36:26-28)

Eye Opening Quotes

Curveball

November 1st, 2008

“November resembles a curveball.  Just when you think you know where the ball will go over the plate it shifts on you and you’re swinging wind.”

~ Outfoxed by Rita Mae Brown

Ornament

October 5th, 2008

“When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appelations.  He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All.  He did not style her wife, but simply mother,–mother of all living creatures.  In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of a woman.”

~ Martin Luther

steady

August 14th, 2008

“troubles they may come and go
but good times, they’re the gold
if the road gets rocky, girl
just steady as we go” 

~ Dave Matthews
“Steady As We Go”

Word Pictures

The Vendors

August 21st, 2008

as I come from the train, they all appear
offering their wares to see and buy:
a cup of hurry, a bag of fear,
a handful of nothings, a schedule to apply.

I stand at their carts distracted and drawn
from my chosen route to the vendor’s stand
I spend all I have on what is shown
and go my way with my nothings in hand.

along the path there’s a merchant I meet.
a craftsman, he too has items to sell:
a coat made of love, jewels of peace,
shoes full of wisdom, treasures avail.

I stand at the treasures, empty, unkept.
I long to buy, but I’ve nothing to spend.
I stopped at the vendors, and all that is left
is a fist full of nothings piercing my hand.

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