Tom & Alissa

I’m doing research in my “spare time” for projects; in the process, I’ve run across a few things too good not to post.

First, Flannery O’Connor:

If you shy away from sense experience, you will not be able to read fiction; but you will not be able to apprehend anything else in this world either, because every mystery that reaches the human mind, except in the final stages of contemplative prayer, does so by way of the sense. Christ didn’t redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but because incarnate in human form, and he speaks to us now through the mediation of a visible church. All this may seem a long way from the subject of fiction, but it is not, for the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

. . .

There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn’t mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn’t try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.

- From Mystery & Manners, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers”

And Linford Detweiler:

The Gospel According to Helena

Damn
She loves to write
She knows she may not even be that good
What does it mean when somebody
Loves to do something
So much
She
Doesn’t care
Whether or not
It makes any sense to the world

What does it mean when somebody
Does something just because
It makes her feel more alive

What does it mean when somebody
Does something just because
It opens her eyes

What does it mean when somebody
Does something just because
She’s missing God

And knows she always will