And So We Are Kindred, You and I

Some ruthlessly torn-out-of-context quotes. Read the book, friends.

"Little by little he began to feel that he was catching at least an occasional glimpse of what all the shouting was about. It was something utterly out of reach up there in the sky where they were all rushing about in the street pointing at it, and yet it was apparently near enough to have set them on fire. It was something even more outlandish than they were who had fallen in love with it and yet it was at the same time so full of stillness and loveliness and ultimate sanity that to live blind to its existence, the way he always had, struck him as more outlandish still. He began to believe that it might even be worth burning your face off for if you became convinced that it was somehow your face that kept you from it."

"...occasionally to hear as plainly as though they were being whispered into his ear the words, 'I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart" as he stood in the shuffling line to receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest as gorgeously gotten up as Sarastro in the temple of Isis and Osiris."

                                                                               - Frederick Buechner, The Storm