| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: Had to our doleful prison made its way,
And in four countenances I descry'd
The image of my own, on either hand
Through agony I bit, and they who thought
I did it through desire of feeding, rose
O' th' sudden, and cried, 'Father, we should grieve
Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gav'st
These weeds of miserable flesh we wear,
And do thou strip them off from us again.'
Then, not to make them sadder, I kept down
My spirit in stillness. That day and the next
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth;
that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great
elective office, it was like an inheritance of powerto certain
people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not
a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite
risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruinthe passing of
the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who
made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.
...Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for
having done so much for him....
...All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while
This Side of Paradise |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: righteousness, because by it he gave glory to God; and that to us
also, for the same reason, it shall be imputed for righteousness,
if we believe (Rom. iv.).
The third incomparable grace of faith is this: that it unites the
soul to Christ, as the wife to the husband, by which mystery, as
the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul are made one flesh. Now
if they are one flesh, and if a true marriage--nay, by far the
most perfect of all marriages--is accomplished between them (for
human marriages are but feeble types of this one great marriage),
then it follows that all they have becomes theirs in common, as
well good things as evil things; so that whatsoever Christ
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