Quotable Sunday: January 1

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year,

and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are

going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things

we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or

worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long

thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why

not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find.

But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all

the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room

within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where

the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to

turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the

room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with

quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we

have lived.”

 

By Frederick Buechner, from "A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces"

Done