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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful… becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical… if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as “Blessed are the peacemakers. - Quote by David James Duncan

Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful… becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical… if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as “Blessed are the peacemakers.

David James Duncan
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But what really won me over was his butt. What finally made it impossible for me not to like the man was how right out there on the Adventist basepaths, right in front of eighty or ninety of the kind of pious adult spectators who spent their every Sabbath if not their entire lives trying to forget the existence of things like butts, Beal's buns were trying to light a fire by friction inside his jeans; they were gyrating like a washing machine with its load off balance; they were thrashing against his pants like two big halibut against the bottom of a boat. And the wonderful thing, the amazing thing, was how once his older audience got over the shock of it, they began to look amused at, then fascinated by, and finally downright grateful toward his writhing reminder that yes, buns did exist, and yes, every one of us owned not one but two of the things, and yes, like the God who created them in His Image, they did indeed move in mysterious ways.
David James Duncan
They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He’d been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know — to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess — that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember.
David James Duncan
I'd trapped myself in a script.... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.
David James Duncan
When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly ‘in the world’ in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.
David James Duncan
I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
David James Duncan
And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.
David James Duncan
There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.
David James Duncan
--I truly and deeply wanted to kill him. And I believe I could have done it, with nothing but my hands. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Peter had an arm around me. "Let it go, Kade," he was whispering very gently, though his arm was nearly crushing me. "Open your fists," he said, "and let go of the coals.
David James Duncan
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