the Deepest intuition of Truth
”Like the fairy-tale world, the world of Jesus is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had his first meal in the dark at his mother’s breast, and he had his last meal in the dark too, the blinds drawn and everybody straining to catch the first sound of heavy footsteps on the stair, the first glint of steel in the shadowy doorway. In the garden he could hardly see the face that leaned forward to kiss him, and from the sixth hour to the ninth hour the sun went out like a match so he died in the same darkness that he was born in and rose in it, too, or almost dar, the sun just barely up as it was just barely up again when only a few feet offshore, as they were hauling their empty nets in over the gunnels, they saw him once more standing there barefoot in the sand near the flickering garnets of a charcoal fire.
In the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of Jesus it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant who more often not wear the fancy clothes and go riding around in sleek European jobs marked Pharisee, Corps Diplomatique, Legislature, Clergy. And the good ones, the potentially good anyway, the ones who stand a chance of being saved by god because they know they don’t stand a chance of being saved by anybody else? They go around looking like the town whore, the village drunk, the crook from the IRS, because that is who they are. When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crows and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.” - F. Buechner
“How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.” - Rilke
"Too good to be true implies a view of truth, of course. It does not have to imply that the truth is bad but only that it is so vast and shapeless and random that it is beyond the power of any adjective to qualify...the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have." Buechner, again.
In the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of Jesus it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant who more often not wear the fancy clothes and go riding around in sleek European jobs marked Pharisee, Corps Diplomatique, Legislature, Clergy. And the good ones, the potentially good anyway, the ones who stand a chance of being saved by god because they know they don’t stand a chance of being saved by anybody else? They go around looking like the town whore, the village drunk, the crook from the IRS, because that is who they are. When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crows and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.” - F. Buechner
“How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.” - Rilke
"Too good to be true implies a view of truth, of course. It does not have to imply that the truth is bad but only that it is so vast and shapeless and random that it is beyond the power of any adjective to qualify...the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have." Buechner, again.