The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses

In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience.

the lily and the bird are themselves what they teach; they themselves express the subject in which they give instruction as teachers. This is different from the straightforward and primal originality, that in the strictest sense the lily and the bird possess firsthand that which they teach—it is acquired originality. And of course this acquired ori

A human being needs to know that even if all human beings gave up on him, indeed, even if he were on the verge of giving up on himself, God is still the God of patience. This is incalculable wealth.

For to cast sorrow away, but not upon God, is “distraction.” But distraction is a dubious and ambivalent remedy for sorrow.

If the place assigned to the lily is really as unfortunate as possible, so that it can be easily foreseen that it will be totally superfluous all its life, not be noticed by a single person who might find joy in it; if the place and the surroundings are—yes, I had forgotten it was the lily of which we are speaking—are so “desperately” unfortunate,

The gospel, which is the wisdom of upbringing, does not get involved in an intellectual or verbal quarrel with a person in order to prove to him that it is so; the gospel knows very well that this is not the way things are done, that a human being does not first understand that what it says is so and then decide to obey unconditionally, but the rev

For if you cast away all sorrow, you of course retain only whatever joy you have. Yet this will avail but little. Learn, therefore, from the lily and the bird. Cast all your sorrow upon God, entirely, unconditionally, as the lily and the bird do: then you will become unconditionally joyful like the lily and the bird.

Yes, when you are surrounded by commotion or when you are immersed in diversions, this seems to be almost an exaggeration; there seems to be altogether too great a distance between loving and hating to permit someone to place them so close to one another, in a single breath, in a single thought, in two words that—without subordinate clauses, withou

For the lily and the bird are unconditionally obedient to God; in their obedience they are so simple or so lofty that they believe that everything that happens is unconditionally God’s will, and that they have absolutely nothing to do in the world other than either to carry out God’s will in unconditional obedience or to submit to God’s will in unc