These days I am praying a great deal. I don't think I've prayed this much, or this earnestly, in a very long time. But still God is silent. I can think of no better way to put it than thus: it has to be a why, not a why not. I want to trust you, and I normally do, because I don't think you'd ever do anything intentionally to hurt me. It's funny how I trust your judgement in almost every thing - except your very self. It is the sad mark of a fallen world that every day we scar and maim one another without even trying, without even knowing. We were only looking out for ourselves, we say (almost defensibly). Or worse, that keening refrain - we thought it was a kind of love. I am trying to think for you now, but that is so very dangerous, and so perhaps the best thing to do is to wait.

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Something else; the resolute coper in me says, it's time to move on. Then this passage catches my eye, and you know what? He's absolutely right.

"There is a fashion among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defence. 'Look how absurd I was when I was young' forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony."

Graham Greene, 'A Sort of Life'

Follies, and sentimentalities, and exaggerations - that's about right. Maybe I will stop laughing at them. Maybe I will stop pretending that they don't smart and sting anymore. Maybe the naked brokenness You demand of us will then finally be within reach.