“Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years
ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and
to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not
even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words
tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human,
the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which
are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.”
Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember
Arrives now golden October with
the sun’s brilliant spotlight on the fire tinted oaks and tulip poplars back of the chalet. The front of the house is
now and will remain in shadows until the earth tilts and rotates into April. Sometimes I am overwhelmed when I ponder the
immensity of these celestial events that makes marvelous the glory of the seasons. The Supreme Intellect who created and orchestrates
all this wonder would have us simply find the joy manifest in each new day. Scholars have made what I believe will someday
be known as simplistic stabs at trying to explain the cosmos. James Stewart wrote that “the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God is on the face of Jesus Christ.” To make our world comprehensible and know anything about the glory
of God is to rely on nothing hearsay but to “go and see Jesus for yourself.” Walt Whitman was listening one night
to an astronomer lecturing on the stars. The hall was stuffy and the lecture was dull with charts and diagrams incomprehensible,
until, says Whitman, “I could bear it no longer, and I rose and wandered out into the night and looked up at the stars
themselves!”
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“Finally, there is this – keep loving. For if love is
the most Christlike thing in the world, and if you love some one with all your being, does it not follow that Christ cannot
be far away? If you have begun to realize that the ultimate meaning of life is love, and if you are allowing a spirit of compassion
to banish hardness and censoriousness from your heart, must you not be nearer than you think to Him who was the greatest Lover
of all, and to the God who so loved the world that Jesus was His gift?….That it is not outside your friendships, but
precisely in them, that Christ comes close, and may be found? That the love you have seen shining in some one’s eyes
and on some dear human face is actually God’s love in Christ for you? That “he that dwelleth in love dwelleth
in God, and God in him,” and that therefore Christ is there, an intimate personal possession? Keep following, praying,
loving. And when you call Him Saviour, Lord, and King, you will not be repeating what others have told you. You will be saying
it of yourself. And so shall all things be made new. James Stewart, The Gates of New Life