A Severe Mercy

‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’ In eternity there will be ‘time enough’.

My great recent discovery is that when I mourn Joy least I feel nearest to her. Passionate sorrow cuts us off from the dead

You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true & how v. frequent this is!) that you were jealous of God. So from US you have been led back to US AND GOD; it remains to go on to GOD AND US.

Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it—how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, th

And yet, after all, the clock is not always ticking. Sometimes it stops and then we are happiest. Sometimes — more precisely, some-not-times —we find ‘the still point of the turning world’. All our most lovely moments perhaps are timeless.

The future dream charms us because of its timelessness; and I think most of the charm we see in the ‘good old days’ is no less an illusion of

We shall come back, we said, and find it. We shall go back to the Islands and grasp the essence. We shall have the ultimate Grey Goose on a blue and timeless ocean. But there wasn’t time enough to go back, way leading on to way. And if we had gone back, there wouldn’t have been time enough then, either, for ahead there would be a terminus. Always.

‘Thou shalt not do anything contrary to love.’

‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; and if thou canst not yet love Him, thou shalt trust Him with all thy mind, soul, and heart.’