New Orts #33

September 1 MMXXIV

When I was six, I was a slow reader … and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me.
— Garrison Keillor on Substack, August 4 2024
https://bit.ly/3LYRNtk

Silence is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.
— Thomas Keating (a Trappist Father), quoted in Newsweek, January 6, 1992

 My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
— Christopher Morley (1890-1957)

 As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full,-- and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.
— Rabbi Nachmann of Bratzlav