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“That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”

“That is why in adult life, people generally tend to relive rather than live, that is, to repeat the patterns of the past and defend the primary fantasy in the defiance, and avoid the real gamble or real adventure of taking a chance on something new. They are afraid that if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they'll be in the same panicky frightened state they were in when they were little.”

“That is why it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else. We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us. We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession. We carry our chains with us; we are not entirely free. We keep returning our gaze to the things we have left behind; we fantasize about them constantly. Our malady grips us in the soul, and the soul cannot flee itself. So we must bring and draw it back into itself. That is true solitude: it can be enjoyed in towns and royal courts, but more conveniently apart. The solitude which I love and advocate is primarily about bringing my emotions and thoughts back to myself, restricting and restraining not my footsteps but my desires and my anxiety, refusing to worry about external things, and fleeing for dear life from servitude and obligations: retreating not so much from the crowd of humanity but from the crowd of human affairs.”

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

“That is why, reflecting on that nauseating possible future, I am so grateful to Gorbachev for having done away with it. Not that meant to. He goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for...He overlooked the fact that inviting everyone into the garden would not lead to deferential discussion with an elite, full of allusive hints and skirting around contentious matters. On the contrary, realizing that they now could speak out without getting beaten up, the denizens of the basement would climb up to the roof en masse and state bluntly that they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. The weight of their words, the reverberation of their stamping boots, and the indignation in their hearts would make everything come tumbling down. I didn't regret that in the slightest. After all, what had I lost? Russia, my country, was still there. I still had my language, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moscow and Kazan and Rostov. The army was still there, and the state. Even the bureaucrats were still where they had been. Kiev, Tallinn, and Riga did not vanish into thin air. Everything was as it had been. You could go to those cities if you wanted to. What had changed was that now you had a choice, you had freedom. What remains of that freedom in Putin's Russia today, which is trying to pretend it is the U.S.S.R., is in fact much more than there was then. You can now choose your profession, where you want to live, and your lifestyle. You no longer have to tie yourself in knots in a competition to see who can be the more two-faced in order to be allowed a trip abroad. You can just buy a ticket and go. At this point someone almost always says, "Only nowadays you have to have enough money," and then reminisces about the social guarantees and equality in the U.S.S.R. In reality there was nothing of the sort. The social gulf between a collective farm worker and a member of the regional Communist Party committee was no less than the gulf we have now between an oligarch and one of today's many average workers. Housing and cars were, by an order of magnitude, less accessible than they are today. Sure, many people received accommodation for free, but to get it they had to wait twenty years. Of course, there is a huge difference in the ceilings for luxury and wealth then and now. In the U.S.S.R. the ceiling was on the first floor of a dacha in the "writers' village" outside Moscow. Now there is no ceiling; it has disappeared unimaginably far away, bursting through the roofs of French chalets and skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park in New York. That, of course, is annoying But it does not alter the indisputable fact that although the mass of the population might indeed have been moved by grim tectonics, as Tolstoy would have it, it was nevertheless Gorbachev who started patching something up, but in the end hammered a nail in the wrong way and everything fell down. On its ruins, everyone was given the chance to live a decent life without the perpetual lying and hypocrisy. If, of course, they wanted it.”

“That is why self-attunement is so essential because consciously being in tune with our inner and most Highest Self will provide us with an elevated level of self-awareness. Connecting us to a magnificent amount of wisdom. This allows us to trust our own intuition, instead of grasping at any person's spiritual guidance.”

“That is why the second coming of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment. Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom. This must be regarded as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and that no one can escape giving an account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is in any case also necessary in order to draw the line between faith and false dogmatism or a false Christian self-confidence. This line alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. ... Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to a life of faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of grace that frees helpless man and,no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the Christian enjoys, on the one hand, the liberating, detached tranquility of him who lives on that excess of divine justice known as Jesus Christ. ... This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God's unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. ... At the same time, the Christian knows, however, that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game that God allows him and does not take seriously. He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward of what has been entrusted to him. There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions. Faith in the Last Judgment holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment. Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialize the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity.”

“That is why, though Jesus healed individuals, he simultaneously critiqued the systems that made them need healing. In fact, the best way to interpret most of his healing stories is to look at the whys. Why was a man chained in the cemetery (Luke 8:26–39)? Why were the women Jesus loved so often adulterers and prostitutes (John 8:1–11)? Why has a woman with chronic bleeding given all her money to doctors (Mark 5:26)? If you read these stories as if Jesus is only performing miraculous medical cures, you might think “Wow!” for five seconds. But when you ask why the healing was needed, you have a whole new way of seeing what needs to change, which is invariably the bigger power structure: the institutionalized evils that no longer look evil;”

“That is why, to come to our question, for leaders and for people, the real purpose of the Clinton acquittal, as of the release of Barabbas, is to get rid of Jesus. The Clinton acquittal is a battle not only in a culture war but in a religious war. The people want to sin. They want money, materialism, and all the pleasures money can buy. They want no restraints upon their sinful ways. This is why they want power to the moneymen and to corrupt politicians. That is why Barabbas was released and Clinton was acquitted. (letter #183 March 1999)”