Jack Pelham

At some point, won’t you be forced to face the fact that, even if you are the perfect patriot, fortified with all wisdom and diligence, the corruption in your own party runs so deep and wide as to reduce your influence in it to something nearing one big, well-intentioned zero?

Technically, there’s a difference
Between don’t-care and don’t-care-much.
If if you’re on the receiving end,
They’re pretty much going to feel the same.

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Ralph waldo Emerson, (1803-1882). Journal, 1855.

Must I be the peddler of my own wares,
Chasing the masses down that slippery slope
And begging them in their native Marketese
To want what they do not, but should?

Perhaps there were other indicators
That they were not listening,
But the most obvious always seemed to be
That they simply were not reading his book.

He had hitched his wagon to the church,
And the church, to the nation―
And off they went, waving their flags
And singing their songs,
And having no real need of Jesus
Beyond some name-dropping here and there―
Which seemed pious enough to them, even if
It infuriated the Jesus they never knew―
Who stayed aloof, anyway,
And never crashed their party.

The one Christian thinks his Christianity was fully settled from the get-go, and that all he has to do to please God from here on out is simply to be.

The second thinks that what happened from the get-go was just a starting pistol, and that to please God is to become like Jesus.

The third can’t quite accept the aloofness of the be idea, but neither can he wholeheartedly embrace the full accountability of the become idea. He will never settle into either camp, and has no other choice but to be confused between the two.

I could marvel at how our species
Has learned that some things
Are in fact so utterly important
As to warrant the great labor and expense
Of building a lighthouse to help the captains
Find their way without incident―

You have been happening to me
For quite some time now.

The good habits out of which
I so habitually get
Are the best evidence
For the hypothesis that
This life is, in fact,
A self-guided training program,
The point and import of which
Is not at some times
As clear to me as at others.

It is a divine kindness
In this beautiful-ugly world
That there are good things here
To be enjoyed.