Quotations, thoughts, and incomplete half-baked musings I found worth recording while I read a bunch of books. Mostly on spirituality, Christianity, philosophy.

April 2, 2025

The garden grows where sense has been interred. The Logos bleeds, and what it speaks is this: Give all. Then give the one who gave. Then burn. Then turn. Then nothing. Then begin to learn.

April 1, 2025 the Logos being “self-emptying love” is the most radical thing that has ever been said. Not because it’s cute. Because it’s absurd. It’s an inversion of power, an epistemological nuke. It tells you that the ultimate principle—the unconditioned, pre-existent ordering logic of the universe—is not control, not might, not will-to-power, not reason in a mathematical sense. It’s kenosis. Pouring out. Letting go. Losing. The Logos isn’t just love—it’s the logic of giving away what you are so something else can become. The universe is cruciform.

April 1, 2025 Heraclitus’s “logos” - a principle spoken eternally by the universe, for those with “ears to hear” and reflected, more or less less accurately, in the teaching of the sages. Epicharmus of Syracuse: “The logos guides men and keeps them on the straight and narrow. A man has reasoning, but also there is the divine logos. Human reasoning is born of the divine logos.” **What is the principle itself? The perspective-less perspective; the non-relative viewpoint, the Truth with a capital “T” unqualified by any ignorance or relativism. The circle who’s center is its circumference. For Christ to be “The Logos incarnate” is for every action that he takes to embody that Truth, what he tells us to be of absolute importance, and (most of all) for our relationship to him to be the ultimate one. And Christ has revealed one thing unmistakably: that self-giving love is the essence of Truth. The Logos isn’t just love—it’s the logic of giving away what you are so something else can become.

March 30, 2025 “To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.” - Virginia Woolf, TtL

March 28, 2025 “In nature there’s no blemish but the mind. None can be called deformed but the unkind.” Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

March 27, 2025 “To comprehend everything is to forgive everything”

March 26, 2025 You want Great Books to smack amateurs in the face with their weirdness. Historical background blunts this very useful tool. Once you get smacked, and once you finish reeling, and once you confront and maybe fight back a little from the text's effect on you and start to harbor a higher level of respect for the claims the text os making - then, by all means, dive into the literature.

March 22, 2025 “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” But: “man is weak, me must receive a task which is suited to his hands,” says the doubter. It as if there are two points, and we want to go between them. One point is our broken humanity in need of redemption, and the other is heaven. Christ is saying: “the best path is the shortest path — a perfectly straight line.” But Nature abhors a straight line. And so it is impossible for us, they say. Better to find a curved line, or even better, simply remain at the point we have.

The Church is a straight edge.