The last lines.........

...of Orthodoxy are powerful, and weighted with meaning. I particularly remember them from a TCCS meeting a couple years ago when Dale had Chuck Chalberg read them "in character."

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respoect, as in every other., above all the thinkers whoever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restrainingh their anger. He never restraied HIs anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. there was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuouse isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth. "

I was just at a company conference, and the obligatory motivational speaker was a retired psychaitrist who was talking about how some people thrive in situations that crush others. The sum total of his hour talk is in the above paragraph........the sense of wonder, mystery, true passion, and Christian joy, although he didnt use those words.