The Sun Looks Down

C.S. Lewis

“As long as we are thinking of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit. Collective activities are, of course, necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary.”

— C.S. Lewis, “Membership” in The Weight of Glory

What is the Question?

Truman G. Madsen

We Bore Their Teaching Within Us

Marcel Proust

“All that can be said is that everything in our life happens as though we entered upon it with a load of obligations contracted in a previous existence. There is no reason arising from the conditions of our life on this earth for us to consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be tactful, even to be polite. … All these obligations whose sanction is not of this present life, seem to belong to a different world, founded on kindness, scruples, sacrifices, a world entirely different from this one, a world whence we emerge to be born on this earth, before returning thither, perhaps to live under the empire of those unknown laws we have obeyed because we bore their teaching within us without knowing who had taught us.” (Marcel Proust, La Prisonniere, as quoted in Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel.)

When They Are Near

What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense

"In a mobile age, people want continuity. Our spouses — permanent breakfast partners, reliable sources and objects of interest and affection — anchor us. What we do alone has less verve than what we share. Spouses are witnesses to our adulthoods; they are our living and dynamic diaries. We want knowing consolation and informed advice: Spouses have license to plumb our past and present and our most private ambitions. We want the security of a first responder in emergencies, ready counsel in distress, company in defeat, and, for every personal victory, a two-way tie. Spouses typically provide all these goods.

Besides, marriage itself is a school of virtue. As fear gives way to surrender, as the exhilaration of surrender gives way to laboriousness and then to the serenely familiar, we mature. Stretched across another life’s peaks and troughs, our ego is unraveled. What we want from our spouses, we learn ever more to give. In vacations and bedside vigils, grand projects and modest self-denials, our spouses call forth in us new excellences, somehow making us feel all the while that we are most at ease, and most ourselves, when they are near."

- Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George, and Sherif Girgis, "The Marriage Debate" (and What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, pp. 88-89)

He Was Ever Master

Jesus the Christ

"The incident of Christ’s forcible clearing of the temple is a contradiction of the traditional conception of Him as of One so gentle and unassertive in demeanor as to appear unmanly. Gentle He was, and patient under affliction, merciful and long-suffering in dealing with contrite sinners, yet stern and inflexible in the presence of hypocrisy, and unsparing in His denunciation of persistent evil-doers. His mood was adapted to the conditions to which He addressed Himself; tender words of encouragement or burning expletives of righteous indignation issued with equal fluency from His lips. His nature was no poetic conception of cherubic sweetness ever present, but that of a Man, with the emotions and passions essential to manhood and manliness. He, who often wept with compassion, at other times evinced in word and action the righteous anger of a God. But of all His passions, however gently they rippled or strongly surged, He was ever master. Contrast the gentle Jesus moved to hospitable service by the needs of a festal party in Cana, with the indignant Christ plying His whip, and amidst commotion and turmoil of His own making, driving cattle and men before Him as an unclean herd."

- James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, p. 158