Sunday, May 15, 2011

We Must Love One Another Or Die


"The last weeks have been hard, filled with many bitter hateful things and only a few short happy interludes. Sometimes I feel very old. We have been a long time in the line. I have come to the extremity of knowing beyond all doubt that there is no other way for me to survive this period except the hard Christian way of finding the finer points in my associates and loving them for those characteristics. The bare, cold, prophetic words of Auden, We must love one another or die have rung in my mind on several of these frigid, sleepless nights of late. Perhaps even you cannot participate enough in this life over here to understand. You would have to see a fine, fine family broken, people you have learned to love destroyed because of petty personal grudges. You would have to see people slapped and beaten because they might be telling a lie or because certain sadistic impulses need to be satisfied. You would have to see old men and women on the roads with a few pitiful belongings in a driving rain, going they know not where, trying to find shelter and a little food in a scorched-earth area. Oh, you would have to see many things to know why I should come to realize such a primitive truth as that I have only one alternative to death and that is to love." -Glenn Gray, The Warriors

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