7
" It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in then - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held. "
― Kate Braestrup , Here If You Need Me
8
" Mrs. Levesque will put me to use as witness, as crutch, as Kleenex, as proxy for Jean-Pierre -- a temporary substitute for all the neighbors, church folk, friends, and family members who will soon come bursting through her door to share her grief. I am a transitional love object, an objet d'amour; I am Rab-Rab, Blankie, Jesus, Mama. What a strange privilege it is to be so used. "
― Kate Braestrup , Here If You Need Me
10
" Why are you here?” my seminary professors asked me. “You don’t really believe in God, do you?” My brother wrote. Dear professors, dear brother. It is possible that God is the way Annie Payne used to lean her old head against my shoulder, trusting me as I held her on the bedpan; Drew’s arms holding me in our fertile scent; Ron Dunham walking out of the woods hand in hand with a child lost, then found. It is possible that God is my neighbor with her pan of brownies standing on my doorstep. It is entirely possible, that is, that the God I serve and worship with all my body, all my mind, all my soul, and all my spirit is love (1 John 4: 8). It’s enough. It’s all the God I need. "
― Kate Braestrup , Here If You Need Me
11
" Human beings want to live in community, and so we want ours to be an intimate universe presided over by a Father God who cares for us and whose universe is responsive to us. At the same time, we are drawn out of community and physically experience a harsh and lonely cosmos in whose vastness stars are born and explode, and solar systems come into being and fall apart. Closer to home, continents swim around like bits of eggshell on the molten yolk of our planet, banging into one another, squashing the earth’s crust into mountains that promptly erode into the sea. It is a universe in which our soft bodies can be fried or frozen, parched or drowned or dashed against a stone. Seekers of truth, when confronted by such cosmic indifference, can find it both frightening and liberating. Like the game wardens, I understand what draws New Age hikers, enlightenment hunters, and even the deeply depressed out beyond the comfortable edge of the human-centered world, out to where moose, woodcock, grouse, and mink live without reference to the human, out to where a person does not matter at all. The air will be as warm or as cold, as dry or as damp as the indifferent physics of front meeting front demands. Pray or don’t pray. Ask and ye shall receive what you would have received without asking: succor that comes in time or doesn’t. "
― Kate Braestrup , Here If You Need Me
12
" It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when you child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in then - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held. "
― Kate Braestrup , Here If You Need Me
