Sublime

Jay is the ideal trekking partner. Not only does he have all the requisite backcountry skills; he also has a good attitude—that essential attribute for this kind of endeavor. He keeps his sense of humor even when he is hurting, and he carries his weight, literally and figuratively. He is there when you need him, but he never steps into your solitud

I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton. Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.

18. Lamb of God

The man I came to know well, over burgers and coffee and old photos and worn bible pages, was a man childlike and growing to the end, proof that the “good news” he always preached could be lived for a lifetime and remain good. His faith and life’s accomplishments did not produce a dour moralism. It did not produce a Graceland-sized ego. For all his

Character

we may know that the soul, which sees yet is not seen, is revealed through its actions.

animal, cycles of this kind

Campbell says, “Pauline mysticism or union with Christ does not compromise the integrity of an individual’s personhood.

But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced, with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions, the way of a man who wished to walk nameless and alone.