the tramp of sacrificial animals says good-bye
they go carnal and bright carrying warmth on their necks
and ignorance of fate on foreheads marked with horns
they fall on their foreknees very surprised at their own blood
The elements the animals shout to you the road is open
-from “Altar” by Zbigniew Herbert

Me falta tiempo para celebrar tus cabellos.
I don’t have time enough to celebrate your hair.

-Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XIV from 100 Love Sonnets

Behold, I make all things new.
-The Book of Revelation

We are not only permitted but required to believe that cosmic time as we know it, through all the immensity of its geological ages and historical epochs, is only a shadow of true time, and this world only a shadow of the fuller, richer, more substantial, more glorious creation that God intends; and to believe also that all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness.
-David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we

may see and remark, and say Whose? – Walt Whitman, from “A child asks, what is the grass?”

Against Angels

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see his grandchild.”

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I think that with very important things we do not overcome our obstacles. We look at them fixedly for as long as is necessary until, if they are due to the powers of allusion, they disappear. – Simone Weil, from her letters

In the opening sequence of the latest X-Men movie, a young boy, Erik, is asked to move a coin across a table before the count of three or his mother will be shot. It is Poland, 1944, and Erik’s mother, emaciated and terrified and brutalized, tries to calm her son as he attempts to save her life. The ruthless Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon speaking in German!) begins the countdown. Erik concentrates, his face contorted, fingers trembling, watching the gun, then the unmoving coin, glancing over his shoulder at his mother, who tries in vain to reassure him (“everything is okay,” she repeats, mother to the last, knowing that they’ll both lose this battle). Erik tries desperately to use an extraordinary and unexplainable gift that the Nazis discovered during the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto, when he bent an iron gate as his parents were being dragged away. He cannot do it; the stress is too great. He fails the test and Shaw shoots his mother in the heart.