alan jacobs

Alan Jacobs, “To Have and Have Not,” The Hedgehog Review (Mar. 2, 2022)[link] (concerning the relative “value” of owning physical books versus being granted a license to read Kindle books — and similar issues):

• “I have come to think that the prospect of passing my library along helps me to avoid the twin specters of pure ownership and pure consumption. My books are lent to me for a while; I am their caretaker, their steward, not really their owner. Even the ones I have most deeply loved, a love marked with many notes and queries, I will someday be parted from.”

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember (1984) (via frederickbuechner.com blog — Reading for Ash Wednesday (Mar. 2, 2022) [link]):

• “The church is intact in many ways, and at their best most of the things the church does serve their purpose—sometimes, we pray, serve even Christ’s purpose—and at their worst are probably at least harmless. But is it possible that something crucial is missing the way something crucial was missing in the Temple at Jerusalem in 586 B.C., which is why it fell like a ton of bricks? “You are the body of Christ,” Paul said, and if you stop to think of it at all, that is a most fateful and devastating word. Christ on this earth was the healer of the sick, the feeder of the hungry, the hope of the hopeless, the sinners’ friend, and thank God for that because that means he is also our hope, our friend. Thank God for every time the church remembers that and acts out of that. But Christ was also a tiger, the denouncer of a narrow and loveless piety, the scourge of the merely moral, the enemy of every religious tradition of his day, no matter how sacred, that did not serve the Kingdom as he saw it and embodied it in all its wildness and beauty. Where he was, passion was, life was. To be near him was to catch life from him the way sails catch the wind. He was the Prince of Peace, and when he said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” what he presumably meant was that it was not peacefulness and passivity that he came to bring but that high and life-breathing peace that burns at the hearts only of those who are willing to do battle, as he did battle, to bring to pass God’s loving, healing, forgiving will for the world and all its people.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Patience” (c. 1888).

PATIENCE, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
    Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
    And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness?–He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.