redemption

My life was going exactly where I wanted it to until the Devil showed up.

The black of the ocean waves was the color of the sorrow in my breast, a sorrow that was never far away and always visible.

I did not choose to be a monster__ shell of a man__alf-human, half-fiend. I am a tiefling. I am what I am.

Iona stared at me for a long time. __ou are going to leave me a widow before I have a chance to become a bride.

I was once a man, not a great man, not a saintly man, but a good man, and a man nonetheless.

Then it kissed me__ot as a man would kiss a lover, not with tenderness or even passion. This was a kiss that stole the soul of men. Revulsion at this creature__ kiss was instantly replaced by the warmth stealing through my veins, as if my missing blood were being replenished and contrived to heal me. I craved to keep kissing the beast. My entire being awakened to that kiss feeding me ecstasy, feeding me life.

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin'Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind

God__ great love is the grace of redemption.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

Some of the simplest of truths are also some of the most difficult of truths, but such is Christianity: 'If it's not about Christ, it's not about life.

The older we get, the bigger the catalog of failures Satan can throw in our faces. You may think, __ don__ have anything to offer._ But you can teach out of your failures as well as your successes (p. 223).

The extent of God__ grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He__ had enough.

In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.

Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don__ need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don__ much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world__r more probably comes at us via the Muslim world__ already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn__ want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus__ words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard.

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind.