Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice ... what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.”
No higher cause can trump that obligation — not a church, and certainly not a football program. And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.
John Zmirak/Ross Douthat
"In all the world is no place hidden from the glory shed by hundreds of myriad rays from the heart of every flower of Paradise"
Shinran Shonin, the 10th century Japanese monk /Buddhist Psalms, by S. Yamabe and L. Adams Beck, [1921], at sacred-texts.com
Joseph CAMPBELL: "That is the way it feels, but this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world, The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance".
Experience is a 'time frame scenario'. The ability to extrapolate meaningful data from such a 'time frame scenario' is not dependent upon age, but upon flexibility, open-mindedness and the willingness to look as objectively as possible at 'experience'.
gg
"[Y]ou can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
-- Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.
"Kindness is our greatest asset".
An excerpt from the speech given by Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, at the Norwegian National Remembrance Day ceremony 21st August 2011 – in loving memory of all who died on 22nd July 2011
"It was better that I died trying than that I did not attempt to save her"
I wonder what kind of world we could have if we could only have some of this young man's sacrificial and determined compassion.
Full story in Norwegian here:
http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/01/nyheter/utoya/terror/innenriks/terrorisme/17519239/
