Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

My given name is Rachel. I was named after my mother's mother. For the first fifty years of my life, I was called by another name, Naomi, which is my middle name. When I was in my middle forties, my mother, who was at that time almost eighty-five, elected to have coronary bypass surgery. The surgery was extremely difficult and only partly successful. For days my mother lay with two dozen others in the coronary intensive care unit of one of our major hospitals. For the first week she was unconscious, peering over the edge of life, breathed by a ventilator. I was awed at the brutality of this surgery and the capacity of the body, even in great age, to endure such a major intervention.

When she finally regained consciousness she was profoundly disoriented and often did not know who I, her only child, was. The nurses were reassuring. We see this sort of thing often, they told me. They called it Intensive Care Psychosis and explained that in this environment of beeping machines and constant artificial light, elderly people with no familiar cues often go adrift. Nonetheless I was concerned. Not only did Mom not know me but she was hallucinating, seeing things crawling on her bed and feeling water run down her back.

Although she did not seem to know my name, she spoke to me often and at length, mostly of the past, about her own mother who died before I was born and who was regarded as a saint by all who knew her. She spoke of the many acts of kindness which her mother had done without even realizing she was being kind. "Che-sed," said my mother, using a Hebrew word which roughly translates as "loving kindness." The shelter offered to those who had none, the encouragement and financial support which helped others, often strangers, to win their dreams. She spoke of her mother's humility and great learning and of the poverty and difficulty of life in Russia which she remembered as a child. She recalled the abuses and hatreds the family experienced to which many others had responded with anger and her mother only with compassion.

Days went by and my mother slowly improved physically although her mental state continued to be uncertain. The nurses began correcting her when she mistook them for people from her past, insisting that the birds she saw flying and singing in the room were not there. They encouraged me to correct her as well, telling me this was the only way she might return to what was real.

I remember one visit shortly before she left the intensive care unit. I greeted her asking if she knew who I was. "Yes," she said with warmth. "You are my beloved child." Comforted, I turned to sit on the only chair in her room but she stopped me. "Don't sit there." Doubtfully I looked at the chair again. "But why not?"

"Rachel is sitting there," she said. I turned back to my mother. It was obvious that she saw quite clearly something I could not see.

Despite the frown of the special nurse who was adjusting my mother's IV, I went into the hall, brought back another chair, and sat down on it. My mother looked at me and the empty chair next to me with great tenderness. Calling me by my given name for the first time, she introduced me to her visitor: "Rachel," she said. "This is Rachel."

My mother began to tell her mother Rachel about my childhood and her pride in the person I had become. Her experience of Rachel's presence was so convincing that I found myself wondering why I could not see her. It was more than a little unnerving. And very moving. Periodically she would appear to listen and then she would tell me of my grandmother's reactions to what she had told her. They spoke of people I had never met in the familiar way of gossip: my great-grandfather David and his brothers, my great-granduncles, who were handsome men and great horsemen. "Devils," said my mother, laughing and nodding her head to the empty chair. She explained to her mother why she had given me her name, her hope for my kindness of heart, and apologized for my father who had insisted on calling me by my middle name, which had come from his side of our family.

Exhausted by all this conversation, my mother lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she smiled at me and the empty chair. "I'm so glad you are both here now," she said. "One of you will take me home." Then she closed her eyes again and drifted off to sleep. It was my grandmother who took her home.

This experience, disturbing as it was for me at the time, seemed deeply comforting to my mother and became something I revisited again and again after she died. I had survived many years of chronic illness and physical limitation. I had been one of the few women in my class at medical school in the fifties, one of the few women on the faculty at the Standford medical school in the sixties. I was expert at dealing with limitations and challenges of various sorts. I had not succeeded through loving kindness. Over a period of time I came to realize that despite my successes I had perhaps lost something of importance. When I turned fifty, I began asking people to call me Rachel, my real name.

["Seeing Around the Corner," in Part IX, "Mystery and Awe"]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The form of the Crucified invalidates all thinking oriented toward success, for it is a denial of judgment. Neither the triumph of the successful nor the bitter hatred that those who have failed harbor against the successful will ever really get the better of the world. Jesus is certainly no advocate of the successful in history, but neither does he lead the rebellion of failed existences against the successful. He is concerned not with success or failure, but with his willing acceptance of God's judgment. . . . In the cross of Christ, God shows the successful person the consecration of pain, of lowliness, of failure, of poverty, of loneliness, of despair. Not because all this might possess some inherent worth, but because it receives its sanctification through God's love, which takes all this upon itself as judgment. God's yes to the cross is judgment upon the successful. The unsuccessful, however, must realize that it is not their lack of success, not their status as pariahs as such, but alone the acceptance of the judgment of divine love that allows them to stand before God.

[From "Ethics as Formation Power," in Ethics (1940), reprinted in Meditations on the Cross (Manfred Weber ed., Douglas W. Stott transl.)]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's incarnation alone makes it possible to know real human beings and not to despise them. Real human beings are permitted to live before God, and we are permitted to let them live alongside us before God without either despising or deifying them. Not because of some value that might be inherent in real human beings but only because God loved and was incarnate in the real human being. The ground of God's love for human beings resides in God, not in human beings. And the ground permitting us to live as real human beings and to let real human beings live alongside us is likewise found only in God's incarnation, in God's unfathomable love for human beings.

[From "Ethics as Formation Power," in Ethics (1940), reprinted in Meditations on the Cross (Manfred Weber ed., Douglas W. Stott transl.)]

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Nothing is so admirable as a verdure washed by the rain and wiped by the sunbeam; it is warm freshness. The gardens and the meadows, having water at their roots and sunshine in the flowers, become vases of incense, and exhale all their perfumes at once. All these laugh, sing, and proffer themselves. We feel sweet intoxication. Spring is a provisional paradise; sunshine helps to make man patient.

There are people who ask nothing more; living beings who, having the blue sky, say: "it is enough!" dreamers absorbed in marvel, drawing from idolatry of nature an indifference to good and evil, contemplators of the cosmos radiantly diverted from man, who do not understand how anybody can busy himself with the hunger of these, with the thirst of those, with the nakedness of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of a little backbone, with the pallet, with the garret, with the dungeon, and with the rags of shivering little girls, when he might dream under the trees; peaceful and terrible souls, pitilessly content. A strange thing, the infinite is enough for them. This great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore. The finite, which admits of progress, sublime toil, they do not think of. The indefinite, which is born of the combination human and divine, of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Never joy, always ecstasy. To lose themselves is their life. The history of humanity to them is only a fragmentary plan; All is not there, the true All is still beyond; what is the use of busying ourselves with this incident, man? Man suffers, it is possible; but look at Aldebaran rising yonder! The mother has no milk, the newborn dies, I know nothing about that, but look at this marvelous rosette formed by a transverse section of the sapwood of the fir tree when examined by the microscope! compare me that with the most beautiful Mechline lace! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac has such success with them that it prevents them from seeing the weeping child. God eclipses the soul. There is a family of such minds, at once little and great. Horace belonged to it, Goethe belonged to it, La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egotists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of grief, who do not see Nero if the weather is fine, from whom the sunshine hides the stake, who hear neither the cry, nor the sob, nor the death-rattle, nor the tocsin, to whom all is well, since there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy until the light of the stars and the song of the birds are exhausted.

They are of a dark radiance. They do not suspect that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are. He who does not weep does not see. We should admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire a being at once light and darkness, with no eyes under his brows and a star in the middle of his forehead.

In the indifference of these thinkers, according to some, likes a superior philosophy. so be it; but in this superiority there is some infirmity. One may be immortal and a cripple; Vulcan for instance. One may be more than man and less than man. The immense incomplete exists in nature. Who knows that the sun is not blind?

But then, what! in whom trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Thus certain geniuses themselves, certain Most High mortals, star men, may have been deceived! That which is on high, at the top, at the summit, in the zenith, that which sends over the earth so much light, may see little, may see badly, may see nothing! Is not that disheartening? No. But what is there, then, above the sun? The God.

["Jean Valjean," Book First, Chapter XVI]

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

[Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"]

Giovanni Giacomo Casanova

Marriage is the tomb of love.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

When you fall in love, it is like temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. . . . That is just being in love, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away. It doesn't sound very exciting . . . but it is.