Month: March 2009

• Conversations Never Stop

  To build a comment fully on my friend’s comment — comment, subsume it and then add to it, requires all discipline and creativity.  Nothing is more difficult.   We either subsume or we evade. Tradition is just a long conversation, and a conversation is a microcosmic picture of  how tradition works — by a canonical respect…

• Conversation: All That is in Your Heart Matters

  Say something, say anything. Which means nothing in your heart is unimportant. Yes, you are right. There was a time when nothing in your heart was important. Now, it is the opposite. It usually comes after a few months. You’re seeing that the slightest twinge in your heart – the slightest flicker of a feeling,…

• “Backtalk” and Authentic Prayer

  It seems the sweetest of children eventually hit a stage when they mouth off about everything.    Some parents call this “backtalk” and generally think it is to be suppressed as much as possible, or maybe just ignored.  [Note:  “Backtalk” may be a regional term.  It’s familiar to me from growing up in small-town West…

• Bluebird box and cows (colored pencil)

  

  Bluebird box and cows Originally uploaded by Timothyone Colored pencil, 15 X 18

• Watercolor: Belle and her babies

  

• Flannery O’Connor: “…stifled with all deliberate speed…”

  “Everywhere I go I’m asked if  I think the universities stifle writers.   My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.   There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.  …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are…

• Flannery O’Connor: “…the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.”

  “From my own experience in trying to make stories “work”, I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered.  And frequently it is an action in which the…

• Flannery O’Connor: “…too stupid to enter the past…”

  “Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. “ Flannery O’Connor, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade

• Flannery O’Connor: “the Price of Restoration”

  “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.  The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it.  His sense of…