Pages tagged "Gratitude"

Now that bitterness and hard-heartedness were no longer a very real threat, I no longer needed to be bicycling, particularly in the heat and humidity of late June in North Carolina. I still needed to get on to Savanna, George, but I had no need of a bicycle any more. Nor did I need all the bicycle stuff: tools, helmet, panniers, etc. I thought I’d just leave it all on the steps of a church. I have done so before.

“Honor your father and your mother” can read:  “Honor all those whose actions, since before you were born, far off and up close, have brought you life.” Honor your debts. Celebrate life.

Dear Friends: We marvel at incarnation, at the way that Life walks the earth in carne, in these bags of flesh we call bodies. By some mysterious grace we are given the power to live and to think and to act. Then gravity holds us down. Biochemistry drives us. History and community constrain us. Information limits our imagination. A tangle of powers confronts us with a chaos of demands. It’s enough to drive you to drink. It’s enough to drive whole civilizations mad.

Dear Friends: During WW II, on February 14, 1945, I walked with my childhood friend from our school in Prague and he invited me to go to his house to play. For some reason, I decided rather to go home. When I came to the door of our apartment, suddenly an explosion occurred on the street I had been walking on just one or two minutes earlier. Had I been slightly delayed, an air bomb would have killed me. The following day I learned that another bomb had killed my friend on his way home. That day I escaped death twice.