"I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the greatest heights. It is when things go wrong, when the good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present....
We need to say 'Thank you' whenever possible, even if we are not able to reconcile the human creature's free will with the Master's working out of the pattern. Thanks and praise are, I believe, some of the threads with which the pattern is woven.
...Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being."
-Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention
"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you create mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.
...The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility."
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
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