If it should happen. . . If this sacred poem— this work so shared by heaven and by earth that it has made me lean through these long years— can ever overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair fold where I slept, a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it, by then with other voice, with other fleece, I shall return as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown.
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Mullins on Shattered Dreams and Whispered Prayers
And the lady in the harbor, She still holds her torch out To those huddled masses who are Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them. The immigrant's children see their brightest dreams shattered Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos, But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral, And they stoop in the silence And there their prayers are still whispered.
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Colum McCann on Gazing Homewards
Sheila wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness — she would never go back to her old country — it was gone in more senses than one — but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.
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Edwards on Religious Affections
The Author of our nature has not only given us affections, but has made them very much the spring of actions. As the affections not only necessarily belong to the human nature, but a very great part of it; so (inasmuch as by regeneration persons are renewed in the whole man) holy affections not only necessarily belong to true religion, but are a very great part of such religion.
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Charles Péguay on Men and Angels for Ash Wednesday
This my child, is what the angels don't understand. I mean to say that this is what they haven't experienced. What it is to have this body; to have this bond with this body; to be this body. To have this bond with the earth, with this earth, to be this earth, clay and dust, ash and the mud of the earth, The very body of Jesus.