IMAGINE THE MYSTERY and delight of not only hearing but seeing the story of Jesus for the first time, almost as an eyewitness.
That’s what happened to a primitive tribe in the jungles of East Asia, when missionaries showed them the Jesus film. Not only had these people never heard of Jesus, they had never seen a motion picture. Then, all at once, on one unforgettable evening, they saw it all—the gospel in their own language, visible and real.
Imagine again, then, how it would feel to see for the first time this good man Jesus, who healed the sick and was adored by children, held without trial and beaten by jeering soldiers. As they watched this, the people came unglued. They stood up and began to shout at the cruel men on the screen, demanding this outrage stop. When nothing happened, they attacked the missionary running the projector. Perhaps he was responsible for this injustice! He was forced to stop the film and explain that the story wasn’t over yet, chat there was more. So they settled back onto the ground, holding their emotions in tenuous check.
Then came the Crucifixion. Again, the people could not hold back. They began to weep and wail with such loud grief that once again the film had to be stopped. Again the missionary tried to calm them, explaining that the story still wasn’t over yet, that there was more. So once again they composed themselves and sat down to see what happened next.
Then came the Resurrection. Pandemonium broke out this time, but for a different reason. The gathering had spontaneously erupted into a party. The noise now was of jubilation, and it was deafening. The people were dancing and slapping each other on the back. The missionary again had to shut off the projector. But this time he didn’t tell them to calm down and wait for what was next. In a sense, all that was supposed to happen—in the story and in their lives—was happening.
Alive and enlivened
Imagine a worship service in which the liturgy was periodically interrupted because the people were overcome with the enormity and emotion, the sheer weight of the gospel story; and in which the joy and sadness, the adoration, appropriate to such an event would simply take over. Like the primitives they would be fulfilling the purpose for which God made us: which is, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
These two go together, to glorify and enjoy. They are nearly one and the same because as C. S. Lewis observes, “Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”1 Wonderful things happen to us when we do this.
“God’s mirth,” says Theodore Jennings, “roars in our veins and we are alive and enlivened.”2 It’s true, God is never more glorified than when a human being comes fully alive. It’s not in sunsets and oceans. It’s not in mountain grandeur and stellar blaze. It’s in people.
One evening I was sitting on the edge of my favorite place on earth, the Grand Canyon, watching the sun go down. It’s a magnificent sight; the changing of the light, the continual slow-motion movement of the shadows is like a visual fugue. One of my sons was with me, and we were rhapsodizing about the majesty, the glory of God manifest in that place, when I noticed his face outlined against the canyon and the sunset. My dear son, my beloved son, I thought. Then it struck me: “You know,” I said to him, “there’s something here that is even more glorious and godlike than this canyon.” He looked at me with a frown of disbelief, and said, “What could chat possibly be?” I grinned and said, “You.”
More than even the Grand Canyon, he showed the glory of God, because it’s not of canyons, but only of humans, that God says, “I made them in my image, like me.”
So, of course, God is most glorified when those he made in his image become fully alive, all they were created to be. This can happen but one way: through the vision of God. Paul says, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). God is glorified as we come alive, his mirth roaring in our veins, as we awaken to the vision of God.
Given, not gotten
There was a time when all those commands of God for us to thank and praise him seemed to me to be a little odd. Did he need them to feel better about himself? Was he like the kid I knew in junior high who stood around with his hands in his pockets fishing for compliments? No, God doesn’t need our praise—we need to give it. For to praise God is to sharpen our soul’s vision of his greatness and goodness, and thus to increase our soul’s greatness and goodness. God doesn’t need our thanks and praise to feel better about himself, we need to thank and praise him to be better ourselves. It is a gift to us to give God thanks and praise.
That’s why both are so important.
Consider the power of simple thanksgiving. Its genius is its prerequisite: humility, which is essential to a proper relationship to God. Paul asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” The answer is nada, nothing—absolutely nothing whatsoever. Everything we have is a given, not a gotten. We enter the world naked, we exit the world naked. All we have in between is on loan. It’s humiliating! Precisely. Then the apostle asks, “And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Cor. 4:7). In other words, what grounds do you have for pride? Same answer: nada, nothing—absolutely nothing whatsoever. So “gratitude is a species of justice,” writes Samuel Johnson, meaning that when we genuinely say thanks to God, we are seeing things as they actually are, and humbly giving credit where credit is due.
To be ungrateful is to see things as they are not, to have a perspective that is fundamentally and fatally distorted. Such is the view of the proud, who see all they have and are as a gotten, not a given. That, says C. S. Lewis, is a “completely anti-God state of mind.” God is implacably against the proud, utterly hidden from their sight. The logic is simple: “A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”3
If pride is the complete anti-God state of mind, grateful prayer is the complete anti-pride state of mind. It’s good, very good for the soul.
Indefatigable, defiant joy
Grateful prayer is also a vigorous exercise, producing an indefatigable, even defiant perseverance and joy. Grounded as it is in humility, it is not stymied when circumstances turn sour. It says, “Who am I to complain when I suffer loss, since whatever I lost was never mine to begin with?” Job is Exhibit A in the Bible of what this looks like in practice. When he loses everything he owns and loves, how does he respond? As one who knew all along that what he had was a given, not a gotten. His first act is to worship God!
Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:
“Naked I came from my mother’s
womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away;
may the name of the Lord
be praised”
(Job 1:20-21).
True gratitude is unstoppable.
One of the great hymns of gratitude was written by another man with this kind of defiant humility: Martin Rinkart (1586-1649), a pastor in the city of Elenberg in Saxony, during the Thirty Years War. During that horrible time, all the other pastors in the city left, leaving him with 4,500 funerals to conduct, among them his wife’s. As the war drew to a close, the city was overrun by the Austrians once and the Swedes twice. The Swedish general levied a heavy tax on the beleaguered people. Rinkart and his congregation pleaded for the general to show mercy, but he refused. Rinkart then turned to his people and said, “Come, my children; we can find no mercy with man—let us take refuge in God.” There, before the general, they knelt in prayer.
The general was so moved by what he saw that he relented and lowered the tax to one-twentieth of what it had been.
Martin Rinkart, the man who saw so much grief and endured so much loss, could still say gratitude’s defiant “nevertheless,” and write the great, “Now Thank We All Our God”:
Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.
All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son and Holy Ghost,
Supreme in highest heaven;
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.
4
The power of humble gratitude to produce such a defiant joy lies in its insight into the nature of things. Only the humble can see the ultimate goodness and joy that lies at the core of creation, the Father’s heart that beats beneath the worst of circumstances. Frederick Buechner discovered this one cold, rainy night in Anniston, Alabama.
On an infantry training bivouac, he was in the last place on earth he wanted to be. That year an uncle had committed suicide, revealing a family darkness no one knew what to do with. Buechner had no idea where he really belonged, all he knew was where he didn’t want to be: there—eating his supper out of a mess kit. But the grace of gratitude gave him a new vision of things:
There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down. I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it, mud and all. And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again. With a lurch of the heart chat is real to me still, I saw it suddenly, almost as if from beyond time all together, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and the cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the cold Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even go out and speak of it to the birds of the air. 5
Thank therapy
One year when I was on vacation in Minnesota, I dreaded the day when I would have to go back to my church to work. The problems seemed endless and insoluble. I was suffering, my children were suffering, and my wife was worried about us all. When the day came to leave, I loaded everybody up in my van, set my jaw, gritted my teeth, and headed home, grimly determined to obey the will of God. That is exactly what I did the first few days I was home. I did something I’ve since come to think of as an oxymoron: I grimly obeyed the will of God. Then one evening in a prayer meeting, the Lord spoke to me.
He said, “Ben, I don’t need this. If you can’t obey me with anything more than grim determination, you’ll just make yourself and everyone else miserable as you bravely (italics for sarcasm) do the will of God. If you can’t serve me with joy, forget it. Go get a real job somewhere.”
There can be no such thing as grim obedience with God.
It was then I realized chat joy was a choice. It’s a choice that comes when we choose to give thanks in all things. There is even a linguistic illustration of how this works spiritually. In the Greek language, the words for grace, gratitude, and joy; charis, eucharistia, and chara, respectively, all have the same root, char. It’s a word that has to do with health and well-being. Here’s how it works spiritually: grace, charis, naturally produces gratitude, eucharistia. Theologian Karl Barth says the two belong together like heaven and earth, that grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo, that gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.
What then is joy? It is the subjective experience of gratitude and grace! All three are organically connected like the parts of a delicious fruit of the Holy Spirit.
That’s why Paul says we can—no, he commands that we must—”be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:16-18). The pray-and-give-thanks part I understood long before the joy part. I could see how we could be commanded to pray and give thanks. But to be joyful? I had for most of my life adopted a passive stance toward joy.
Since it was a gift of the Holy Spirit, I said, in effect, “Anytime you’re ready, Lord, lay it on me.” Then I waited for something magical to happen. Nothing did.
But that night I came to understand that while I couldn’t generate joy, I could choose it by choosing to obey God’s command to pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances. Someone has called that “thank therapy.” I can testify to its power. The vision of God is thus made sharp and clear, his mirth begins to roar in our veins, and God is glorified as we come fully alive.
You are wonderful
Like grace, gratitude, and joy, thanks and praise are organically related to each other, closely connected but separate. In thanksgiving we list God’s benefits, in praise he is the benefit. Thanksgiving is like a child opening a gift from a parent, a new doll or a baseball mitt, and throwing her arms around her mom and dad and saying, “Thank you, thank you! It’s just what I wanted. It’s wonderful!” Praise is what happens when that child can pause and look up from the gift into her folks’ eyes and say, “You are wonderful.” There is, I think, in prayer and worship, a kind of ascendancy that moves from thanks to praise to wonder to awe and silence—and then back again to thanks to praise to wonder to awe to silence. Praise seems to be the singular activity of heaven. Like thanks, praise is God’s due, a “species of justice.” But it also does great things for us.
Praise is itself a fertile source of joy.
When our church in Irvine moved into its first building in 1982, it was a joyful occasion. We had been meeting in a school for seven years. It happened that Ken Medema, the gifted singer-songwriter-musician, was in the area, so we invited him to give a celebratory concert in our new meeting place. It was a spectacular performance, and we were grateful for what he had given us. When he finished, we rose to our feet in thunderous applause.
Later, as I reflected on the experience, it occurred to me that two things had happened: one was that in that standing ovation we had moved in our appreciation beyond his piano virtuosity to Medema himself. What he gave on the piano was spectacular. But so was he! It was more than thanks we were giving, it was praise. We had gone beyond what he had done to he himself. The second was that the praise not only let the joy inside us out, it actually fulfilled it and created yet more joy in the expression. Praising Me-dema together gave us more joy. To choose not to give praise, or to somehow be ordered to keep silent, would have been to abort the joy. It would have hurt.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumphal procession, the crowds went wild with praise and joy. They were doing more than they knew. Jesus’ religious opponents urged him to tell the crowd to keep silent. When he answered, “If they don’t praise me, the stones will,” he was saying there is a joy so great that it will not be squelched. Even inanimate creation would not be able to sit still in the presence of the Glorious One.
How can we?
Tuning our instruments
Praise also enlarges us. It is an exercise in our glorification. Augustine asks the question that should be in the heart of any who would call upon God:
How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, since in truth when I call upon him I call him into myself? Is there any place within me where my God can dwell? How can God come into me, God who made heaven and earth? O Lord my God, is there any place in me that can contain you? 6
Is there any place in us that can contain God? Of course, the answer is no. Something new, something radical, must happen to us for that to happen. We must somehow be expanded.
I have a large yellow Labrador retriever named Sonja. She’s everything I like about dogs: exuberantly earnest about all she does, always glad to see me, even if I’ve been gone for only five minutes, and tirelessly forgiving of my faults. As sweet as she is, she’s but a dog—her world is a world of sounds and smells, especially smells. Her favorite organ is her nose. So if I were to try to read her one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, her first response would be to sniff the book to see whether it was edible and then lose all interest in it. But what would it mean if, as I read Shakespeare, she sat up, perked up her ears, and barked her approval? It could mean but one thing: something miraculous had happened in her central nervous system, and she had been marvelously expanded in her capacity to appreciate the good, the true, and the right.
Would Shakespeare be any better because my dog liked him? No. But would she be any better? Yes!
Seeing is becoming. “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.”7 When we praise God, we adjust our vision to gaze upon the One who transforms and expands us in the gazing. “We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). In praise, we anticipate Christ’s appearing, and by faith, see him as he is. But we are, nevertheless, participating now in what will be. C. S. Lewis borrows an image from John Donne, describing praise as “tuning our instruments”:
The tuning of the orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can, in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony … even our most sacred rites, as they occur in human experience, are, like tuning, promise, not performance. Hence, like the tuning, they have in them much duty and little delight; or none. But the duty exists for the delight. When we carry out our “religious” duties we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that, when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. I mean, for the most part. There are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy souls to whom this happens often. 8
When poet George Herbert was thinking of the life-giving, soul-expanding power of praise, he described prayer as “God’s breath in man, returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase … the soul’s blood.”9 The very breath of God that gave us life comes back into us as we breathe it out in praise. Genuine praise is God’s mirth roaring in our veins—and lungs expanding and enlivening us.
“Acting as though …”
Praise is a great impetus to faith. There is a profoundly important reason for this: unbelief is first a failure at adoration. In his analysis of the human condition, Paul probes into the heart of our darkness and finds this at its root: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). Note the order: First comes the refusal to honor and give thanks to God, then follows mental darkness and futility. The reason is not hard to understand. We see what we look for; we see most clearly what we most dearly adore.
Two men were pushing their way through the crowds in New York City’s Times Square. They had to shout to each other to be heard above the din. One man was a native of New York, the other was a Native American from Oklahoma.
The Native American stopped suddenly and said to his friend, “Listen! Can you hear the cricket?”
His friend thought it was a joke. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “How could anyone hear a cricket in this bedlam? You just think you heard it.”
“No, I’m not kidding,” he said. “Come over here.”
He walked over to a planter that was holding a large shrub and pointed at the dead leaves in the bottom. To his amazement, the New Yorker saw a cricket.
“You must have extraordinary ears,” the New Yorker exclaimed.
“No better than yours,” said the Native American. “It all depends on what you’re listening for. Watch this.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of nickels, dimes, and quarters. Then he dropped them on the sidewalk. People from as far as two blocks away stopped and turned to see where that sound had come from.
“See what I mean?” he said. “It all depends on what you’re listening for.”
To listen for the right thing takes faith. Some of the best advice I ever got about how to deal with a faith crisis was something attributed to Blaise Pascal. Reportedly, he told reluctant unbelievers and others who were in some way struggling with their faith to act as though they believed, whether or not they did. Pascal believed that even something as meager as that—acting as though—would qualify as the mustard seed of faith Jesus promised would move mountains. The spirit bears a kind of internal witness to those who go only this far in faith and obedience. That advice has helped me immensely as I have time and again found myself barren in my spirit, unsure of what I believe but choosing nevertheless to praise God as though I believed. To praise God is to practice the opposite of the thing chat brings unbelief in the first place.
Peek outside the cave
Praise is also an act of hope, a participation in the future, the eternal—and therefore a reality check. Plato’s famous cave analogy has helped me to think about this:
Suppose a man is born in a cave and spends his entire life tied to a post, facing the wall at the rear of the cave. He cannot look to the right or the left, only forward. The light from the outside shines from behind him on the wall he faces. Occasionally people and animals walk by the cave’s entrance and, as they do, their shadows are cast on the wall. These shadows and the dim light on the wall are all he ever knows of reality. To him they are reality. To speak of a world outside the cave, made of color and three dimensions, would be incomprehensible and unbelievable to him. But what would it mean if a mirror were held up to him, in which he could get a glimpse of the world outside the cave? Everything would change! He would then see the shadows in the context of a larger and deeper reality of depth and color.
To praise God is to gaze into a mirror and get a peek at the world outside the cave.
The cave is the “world” that St. John speaks of in his gospel and three epistles. By “world,” John does not mean the creation—made by God and good, deserving our love and care. By “world,” he means the evil world system of false values and pride, ruled by Satan and implacably hostile to God. Since Satan is the Father of Lies (John 8:44), his dominion is a cave of deception and falsehood, made up of “the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does” (1 John 2:16). The “world cave” is illusory and fading, but it exerts enormous power over our hearts and minds. According to the New Testament, it is a bitter and formidable rival of God. To be redeemed by Christ is to live no longer in darkness, but to be given the “light of life” (John 8:12). It is to begin to see things as they really are. In the praise of God we begin to see ourselves with the tens of thousands of angels in heaven, where God is visibly supreme, throughout eternity, worshiping him “who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).
Earthly good
To praise God is to hope in the world to come and is therefore the most practical act in this world. Occasionally I hear something like this said after a great service of worship: “That was wonderful! Too bad we have to go back to the ‘real world’ now.”
The assumption seems to be that what happened in worship was a pleasant and therapeutic diversion, and that the real thing is out there in the rough and tumble of the world. It’s the other way around! What was seen and felt in worship is the real thing. The secret is to remember what we saw and felt when we go back into the world of deception and lies.
G. K. Chesterton said the unbeliever is like a man born upside down, standing on his head, his feet “dancing upward in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss.”10 Christianity sets a man right side up. His head is placed in heaven, where it belongs, and his feet on the earth, where they belong. Now he can walk the earth and see where he is going. The saying “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good” is false. The only way to be any earthly good is to be heavenly minded! In prayer, all our work is put into a different mode, heaven in the ordinary.
Praise is also the ground of obedience. Dante paints a compelling picture of this in The Divine Comedy. At the very end, when he has passed through the levels of Hell and Purgatory, ascending through Heaven until he finally stands looking into the Godhead, he describes the effect gazing into the face of God has on him. Words leave him, for no mere human language can describe such a sight. But as speech departs, something remarkable is added to his desire and will: “But now my desire and will were revolved, like a wheel which is moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and other stars.”11 The impact of looking at the unfiltered glory of God is to have his desires, his affections, his will transformed and moved by the same powerful love that makes stars and constellations, quasars and nebulae move together through this vast universe in complete harmony.
Think of your struggles with sin and temptation, of your weak will and halfhearted desire. What if these could be empowered by Dante’s vision of the immeasurable glory and worth of God? They can! I return to the words of the apostle Paul: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
What Paul and Dante were describing is the promise made through the prophets of God’s new covenant with humankind, and fulfilled in Jesus Christ: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezek. 36:26-27).
Obedience follows praise. We follow most nearly what we most dearly love:
May I know you more clearly,
Love you more dearly,
And follow you more nearly
Day by day.
12
Am I worthy?
Helen Roseveare is a short, no-nonsense Irish doctor, with steely blue eyes and a wry wit. When I met her in 1994, she was a spry seventy and reminded me of a favorite elderly aunt or a grandmother. Just looking at her, one would not guess that she had spent the better part of her life serving Christ as a medical missionary in Zaire—or that she had been beaten and raped repeatedly by rebels during the Simba Rebellion of the early ’60s. Despite her incredible suffering and subsequent emotional breakdown, she managed to come back to her work and accomplish amazing things for Christ in the jungles of that land.
I was in Kenya interviewing her for a radio program. As she spoke of her horrible experience with the rebels, a thunderstorm passed overhead and rain pounded on the tin roof of the cottage. When she was finished, she said, “I’ll have nightmares tonight from this.”
I said, “I would never have asked you for an interview if I had known it would have this effect on you.”
She dismissed my remark with a short wave of her hand: “No, no. The Lord told me that if I’m going to tell this story, I can’t be like a phonograph record. I’ll have to feel it each time I tell it.”
Then she said something incredible: “People would ask me, ‘Was it worth all the suffering—what you accomplished there?’ And I’d tell them, no, it’s been too costly. All I got done doesn’t offset what I paid for personally.
“But then the Lord spoke to me. He said, ‘Helen, that’s the wrong question. The question is not, Was it worth it? The question is, Am I worthy?’ And I said, ‘Of course you are, Lord. You are worthy.’ “
I was talking that day with a woman set right side up, her head in heaven and her feet planted firmly on the earth. Remarkable things happen to our heads and feet and hands when that happens. Because of what we have seen of heaven, we go places and do things we would never have dreamed of.
Chesterton wondered if tragedy was not something we are permitted on this earth as a kind of “merciful comedy.” Why? Maybe it was because the joy and glory of heaven is too much for us now, that unmediated by the pain and struggle of this life, “the frantic energy of driving things would knock us down like a drunken farce,” and we would be consumed by the “tremendous levities of the angels.”13
Perhaps. But this much is sure: with our heads in heaven, and something of the infinite worth of God in our eyes, his praise on our lips, we are empowered and made new. God’s mirth roars in our veins, a loving abandon grips us, and we find ourselves compelled by the vision expressed by Augustine: “Lord, hast thou declared that no man shall see Thy face and live?—Then let me die, that I may see Thee.”14
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), 97.
Theodore Jennings, Life As Worship: Prayer and Praise in Jesus’ Name (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 90. The church father Irenaeus put it this way: “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.”Ireneaus, quoted by William Willimon, The Service of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 64.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 110-11.
Martin Rinkart, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Hymns II (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1976), 148.
Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 85.
Augustine, The Confessions (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1.
Irenaeus, Ibid., William Willimon, 64.
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), 97.
“George Herbert, “The Pulley,” 183.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 365.
Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto 33, The Great Books (Chicago: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952), 157.
St. Richard of Chichester. Used in various musical productions.
Quoted in Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 95.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
