Quotes to Think About Today

Leonie in On Mary and Mothering, quotes Scott Hahn:

"Mothers are the most difficult people to study. They elude our scrutiny. By nature and by definition, they are relational. They can be considered as mothers only in their relationship with their children. That is where they focus their attention, and that is where they would focus ours.""Mothers are the most difficult people to study. They elude our scrutiny. By nature and by definition, they are relational. They can be considered as mothers only in their relationship with their children. That is where they focus their attention, and that is where they would focus ours."

In Synergy, she quotes Stephen Covey:

"Synergy...is the magic that happens when one plus one equals three - or more. And it happens because the relationship between the parts is a part itself. It has such catalytic, dynamic power that it affects how the parts interact with one another. ...
So, synergy deals with the part between the parts. In the family, this part is the quality and nature of the relationship between people. ..."

There is a mystery here that I've noticed before. A lot of what REALLY is going on in life is the parts between the parts.

After two hospitalizations, the first for a long time, I find myself floundering a bit.

WB Yeats wrote in The Second Coming "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold....." -- for some reason, ever since I read the Chinua Achebe novel of this name back in high school, this has always summed up my human-nature response to calamity and grief.

The terrible secret of the universe:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre /The falcon cannot hear the falconer.... The best lack all convictions, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity."

This is my human response, I say, but I know there's more to it than that. Somehow, to me, what the quotes say about relationships, about the sum of two parts being more than two, are at the heart of it.

Leonie describes her One Thing concept. My "One Thing" recently, since that horrible evening in the Emergency Room where Aidan was not breathing, has been to look into Aidan's beautiful brown eyes. They are so full of joy and hope. It is like an antidote to that terrible Second Coming:

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? "

His bright, expectant eyes remind me of the power of the powerless, the power of the hidden, little things of life. The paradox of the Beatitudes. And of the Nativity.