The Sunset Juggler (formerly The Dragon's Mouth)

In his “Readings in St. John’s Gospel” William Temple says the following (in his commentary on John 1:29-34):  “The Sin of the World.  How utterly modern is this conception!  It is not “sins”, as by a natural early corruption of the text [we] were led to suppose, but “sin”.  For there is only one sin, and it is characteristic of the whole world.  It is the self-will which prefers “my” way to God’s – which puts “me” in the centre where only God is in place.”

This passage came to mind this morning while I was reading an excerpt from St. Augustine’s “The City of God” (In “Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church” by J. Robert Wright):  “[God] foreknew that some of the angels, in their pride, would wish to be self-sufficient for their own felicity, and hence would forsake their true good; and yet [God] did not deprive them of this power, (more…)

I came across the following in Robert Raines A Time to Live:

E. B. White watched his wife Katharine planning the planting of bulbs in her garden in the last autumn of her life and later wrote about it:  ‘There was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance …  The small hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.’  There is room for all of us in the resurrection conspiracy, the company of those who plant seeds of hope in dark times of grief or oppression, going about the living of these years until, no one knows quite how, the tender Easter shoots appear.