This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

From horoscopes and the Enneagram to the social archetypes of the high school cafeteria, we are desperate for ways to make sense of who we are in relation to the world. It’s troubling that the answer would not be immediately clear to us. But there are parts of us we’ve managed to hide even from ourselves.

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness,

I say you have to learn how to be with and a part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can ever be free to explore the solitary.

To find a manner of anonymity, to experience that dreadful thing we call “blending in,” can be a kind of haven. It is not to become untethered but to become a part of. To walk a street apprehending you are one small refrain in a holy cacophony, and as the place becomes more familiar, your own selfhood becomes more lucid.

Our dignity may involve our doing, but it is foremost in our very being—our tears and emotions, our bodies lying in the grass, our scabs healing.

This I believe. That I come from pain as much as beauty. And I don’t have to make the pain beautiful in order to get free. We took the sweetest part of the fruit and we cut it off.

But even with the things I will become, I am called to them because on some deep plane of the soul, they are already true of me. I choose them out of a fidelity to self, not an aspiration toward an idealized self.

He sees people in such a manner that they crave nearness to him.

Children are made of awe. We have much to learn from them, but we seldom aim to. When we encounter the freedom of a child, we can choose to participate in their liberation or we can grow to resent the freedom in them.