“I had lost my first clear vision of the world, and reached the stage when a child tries desperately to see things as his elders see them, and hopes to grow up by pretending to be grown up… Under that compulsion I could not see things with my own eyes; instead I tried to see them as I thought my father and mother… saw them. I eagerly falsified them, knowing that the falsification was expected by everyone: my parents, my teachers, visitors to the house, even other boys, who were enthusiastically doing the very thing I was doing… It is in these years between eleven and eighteen that we construct little by little, with the approval of all the world, the mask which we shall wear with such ease when we reach manhood, feeling that we were born with it, though it is merely a face which was made to look like a face by our own clumsy hands at an age when we did not know what we were doing.”
-------“The Autobiography of Edwin
Muir”
“In America, I was once told the story of a little girl and her baby brother. When the baby boy was born the girl kept asking her parents if she could spend time alone with her newborn brother. The parents finally agreed, and intrigued by why she was making this request, they listened at the door. The little girl said to her baby brother, “Tell me what God is like. I’m beginning to forget.”
-------- J. Phillip Newell
The Face of God?
Both of the above quotes are from “Echo of the Soul” by J. Phillip Newell.
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