It is necessary not to think of the baby as a person who get’s hungry, and whose instinctual drives may be met or frustrated, but to think of the baby as an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety.

p. 93, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner.

Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.

Psalm 16:1

And Seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love

George Eliot, Middlemarch
Cited in John Bowlby, attachment and loss

p. 91, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner

No temptation has overtaken you except as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.

Definition: no way forward, no way out, danger lurks without a doubt.

beside the still waters, vol 29, issue 4

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

Romans 8:18

What is striking, almost painful, to read now in the 1970’s writing about motherhood is how optimistic it all was. Common sense and a kind of can-do approach to solving the conflicts of motherhood set the tone.
There was faith. The new generation of fathers would help. Good babysitting could be found. Work and motherhood could be balanced. It was all a question of intelligent juggling. And to not falling prey to the trap of self-sacrifice and perfectionism that had tripped up the generation that came before.

p. 87, Perfect Madness, Motherhood in the age of anxiety, Judith Warner.

Because there is a god, this war is not hell. God permits it to happen only for a greater good presently unseen. The war is more like purgatory than hell, for through it’s refining flames we were meant to have the dross of our materialism burned away.

P. 293, daily meditation, Benedictus, July 2024, vol. 4, no. 7.

Nothing is impossible for him who believes that the power of god will accomplish the will of god.
Jeremiah Stodt, beside the still waters, July | August 2024, vol. 29, issue 4

By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.