closed doors

"June and I were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and re-create the passion. The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being..." Anais Nin -- from the Diary of Anais Ni

Pathways

Psa. 37:23-24
"The steps of a man are established by the LORD,

And He delights in his way.

When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong,

Because the LORD is the One who holds his hand."

He plans the paths of our lives. He delights as we walk them. When, not if, we fall He holds our hand. Even the steps that are falls are ordained and delight him. We are never hurled beyond his tender grasp.

Areopagitica

Marc Chagall's Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1954-67)

"It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world. And perhapse this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill...He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: what which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary... Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason?"

My rational for freedom of expression and the Christian freedom to experience that expression was borrowed from Milton, whom I discovered through Prof. Horner, who said "The highest form of censorship is a discriminating mind."

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