Letters to a Young Poet

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnesses with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us; our feelings, shy and inhibited, fall silent, everything in us withdraws, a stillness settles on us, and at the centre of it is the new presence that nobody yet knows, making no sound.

We should not always be forced to fall back into the toil and sorrow that it cost him to ‘redeem’ us

And for this reason they do not dwell in Christ either, the stubborn at heart who are always re-creating him and live from setting crosses which are crooked or have been blown completely over upright again.

They have made a of the Christian purpose, a bourgeois occupation,

this Christ who meddles with everything. Who knows nothing about us, nothing about our work, nothing about our needs, nothing about our joys as we achieve, go through and summon them up nowadays – and who nevertheless, it seems, always demands to be the first person in our life.

the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers – perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life.

demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous.

It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something

Everything that makes more of you than you have hitherto been in your best moments is righ

And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them