Present Joy

I'll close A Year Of Grace after taking one more quotation from it. It's only a short one. It comes from Goethe's flawed, magnificent, practically unstageable, poetic and dramatic masterpiece Faust. I love Faust and I love Goethe. At one time in my life I had to read almost everything Goethe ever wrote - and I did not regret it. Goethe towers over German Literature as Tolstoy does over Russian Literature and Shakespeare does over ours. This is from Faust Part II, Act III - the scene where Faust meets Helen of Troy:

FAUST. The Spirit looks not forward, not behind,
Here in the Present -

HELEN. Here our joy we find.

So A Year Of Grace has led us from the blessings of the Beatitudes to a willing and joyful endurance of all aspects of life (for the good of "the peace and tranquillity of our soul"); from the perception of beauty and the praising (the witnessing and the celebrating) of it (and praise not only of obvious beauty but also of "those dark, deadly, devastating" and "wildest and mildest of ways"), finally to the positive recognition of the present moment.

Grace indeed.