Words from Madeleine L'Engle and Dorothy Sayers

From A Circle of Quiet

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming. Being does mean becoming, but we run so fast that it is only when we seem to stop – as sitting on the rock at the brook – that we are aware of our own isness, of being. But certainly that is not static, for this awareness of being is always a way of moving from the selfish to the self—the self-image—towards the real.
Who am I, then? Who are you?

- Madeleine L'Engle




From Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-One Essays

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man. There never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as He found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

-Dorothy Sayers



I came across these excerpts this past quarter and I really like them. I think they really resonate with what I have been learning lately and things I have been discovering about myself and my faith.