The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote.4 “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Gregory Boyle ministers to gang members in Los Angeles and captures the difference between a life lived for self and one lived for others: “Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.” It’s one of the inescapable truisms of life: You have to lose

Those who shape the manners and mores are the true legislators of mankind—they wield the greatest power and influence.

“Wish for something,” she whispered. Then the falcon turned its head and locked his eyes with Wiman’s, and Wiman felt some bottom fall out within him. He later wrote a poem about that moment, which includes this stanza: For a long moment I’m still in8 I wished and wished and wished the moment would not end. And just like that it vanished.

I look at those dear friendships with a gratitude mixed with shame, and this pattern—not being present to what I love because I prioritize time over people, productivity over relationship—is a recurring motif in my life.

This combination can lead, for example, to the first wall: the siege mentality. Many Christians notice that there are widening gaps between their values and secular values, especially on matters of sexuality. This can slip quickly into a sense of collective victimhood. The “culture” is out to get us. We have to withdraw into the purity of our encla

C. S. Lewis: There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock

In living out a commitment, each party understands the fickleness of feelings, so they bind their future selves to specific obligations. Spouses love each other, but they bind themselves down with a legal, public, and often religious marriage commitment, to limit their future choices for those times when they get on each other’s nerves.

God is, He is not that. Some cosmologists say there are an infinite number of universes, and in one of them there’s a person just like you sitting in a place just like the place you are sitting. That’s a weird idea, but even that idea is not as weird and incomprehensible as God.