Brennan Manning, in The Wisdom of Tenderness:

“If you too can answer with gut-level honesty, ‘Oh yes, the Father is very fond of me,’ there comes a relaxedness and serenity, a compassionate attitude toward yourself in your brokenness, that elucidates the meaning of tenderness.”

Tim Keller, in Jesus the King, on that wonderful word.

“At the end of his great act of creation, the Lord said, ‘It is finished,’ and he could rest.

On the cross at the end of his great act of redemption, Jesus said, ‘It is finished’ – and we can rest.”

C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed:

“Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet.

We shall see that there never was any problem.

And more than once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness.

The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.”

Henri Nouwen, in Return of the Prodigal Son:

“There are endless ‘ifs’ hidden in the world’s love. These ifs enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately all of them.

The world’s love is and always will be conditional.

As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain ‘hooked’ to the world.”

Brennan Manning, in Ragamuffin Gospel.

“God wants us back even more than we could possibly want to be back.”

Often, the depressed struggle with a deep sense of melancholy, which goes hand-in-hand with sentimentality.

By nature, that’s me, and maybe you — and writer Frederick Buechner.

But there’s a danger.

From his book, The Longing for Home.

“When we sentimentalize about things, we see not so much the things themselves as we see the flood of feeling, of sentiment, that the things occasion in us, with the result that sentimentality becomes a form of blocking out the world.”

How true.

And I would add that it’s not just the blocking out of the world, but the nature of a thing changes, as well, and for the sadder.

For example, when I was a small kid, my dad played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, non-stop.

I thought it was the most purely beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

Now I also think it’s beautiful but the memory of my childhood and dad and youth adds a new dimension to the beauty, and I can’t appreciate it for its purity as much, because where before it didn’t provoke nostalgia, it does now.

And that can lead to some depression, and therein, lies the danger of nostalgia, as I’ve written.