God Is Not Dead. He Isn’t Even Tired

By Dr. Charles E. Rice

When President O’Donnell asked me to give this address, I expressed one concern: “Will there be a protest? And will you prosecute the protestors? Or at least 88 of them?” He made no commitment. I accepted anyway.

So what can I tell you? This is a time of crises. The economy is a mess, the culture is a mess, the government is out of control. And, in the last three years, Notre Dame lost 21 football games. But this is a great time for us to be here, especially you graduates of this superbly Catholic college. This is so because the remedy for the general meltdown today is found only in Christ and in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Let’s talk bluntly about our situation and what you can do about it.

We are living through a transformation of our federal government. A one-party regime, the leader of which was elected with 54 percent of the Catholic vote, is substituting for the free economy and limited government a centralized command system of potentially unlimited jurisdiction and power. Its takeover of health care, against the manifest will of the people, not only funds elective abortions and endangers the elderly and conscience rights. It was enacted in disregard of legislative process and by a level of bribery, coercion and deception that was as open as it was unprecedented.

To find a comparable example of the rapid concentration of executive power by a legally installed regime, we have to go back to 1933. Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor on January 30. Over the next few weeks he consolidated his power. The decisive event was the Reichstag’s approval of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, by which it ceded full and irrevocable powers to Hitler. That was the point of no return. The Enabling Act received the needed two-thirds vote only because it was supported by the Catholic party, the Centre Party.¹ Our “Health Care Reform,” enacted with the decisive support of Catholic members of both houses of Congress, may be the Enabling Act of our time in the control it cedes to government over the lives of the people. It includes the federal takeover of student aid. What do student loans have to do with health care? The common denominator is control. No student will be able to get a federally guaranteed educational loan without the consent of a federal bureaucrat. This opens the way to make political loyalty a test for educational advancement, as it was in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This confirms the wisdom of Christendom’s decision to forego all federal aid.

Unlike Germany in 1933, we have legal means of redress. I am proud to say I am a Tea Party guy. In November, the reaction may dislodge the Congressional arm of the ruling class. But that reaction will be only temporary unless we go to the source of the evil. The root problem is not political or economic. It is religious. And that is where you come in. “The social crisis,” said Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, “happens when we elect people to rule over us who are immoral. …. [P]eople who don’t have a moral bearing to elect other moral people, elect immoral politicians to serve over them…. So immoral lifestyles produce immoral leaders.”² In other words, we elect immoral, rather than moral, people because we have lost the ability, or the desire, to tell the difference. The answer, said Fr. Euteneuer, is “to turn back to God. … What we need is a conversion of heart.”

We rightly urge fidelity to the Constitution. But no paper charter can survive the disappearance of the morality that produced it. In 2001, thirteen days after 9/11, Pope John Paul II, in Kazakhstan, cautioned the leaders of that Islamic republic against a “slavish conformity” to Western culture which is in a “deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment” caused by “the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”

You graduates will enter a culture in which the intentional infliction of death upon the innocent is widely seen as an optional problem-solving technique. The Columbine shootings set a precedent. If you have a grievance against your classmates, fellow employees or IRS agents, the answer is to blow them away. Legalized abortion is the prime example of murder as a problem solver. And the execution of someone like Terri Schiavo occurs routinely, without public notice, when the family and caregivers agree to withhold food and water because it is time for the patient to “die with dignity.” The separation of morality from killing has counterparts in the separation of morality from economics, from sex and from personal decisions in general.

There is no mystery in this. We are living through what Fr. Francis Canavan, S.J., called “the fag end of the Enlightenment,” the collapse of the effort by philosophers and politicians, over the past three centuries and more, to build a society as if God did not exist.³ That Enlightenment culture is built on three lies, secularism, relativism and individualism. They are components of what Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism… that recognizes nothing as absolute and which leaves only the ‘I’ and its whims as the ultimate measure.”⁴ Those three lies are weapons deployed by our enemy, Satan, the father of lies. Your job, for which you are well equipped, is to counter his lies with the truth. If you speak the truth, you will have an impact beyond what you know. Cardinal Edouard Gagnon described a conversation he had with John Paul II:

[T]he Holy Father… told me, “error makes its way because truth is not taught. We must teach the truth…. not attacking the ones who teach errors because that would never end—they are too numerous. We have to teach the truth.” He told me truth has a grace attached to it. Anytime we speak the truth…. an internal grace of God… accompanies that truth. The truth may not immediately enter in the mind and heart of those to whom we talk, but the grace of God is there and at the time they need it, God will open their heart and they will accept it. He said, error does not have grace accompanying it.⁵

Remember that Truth, with a capital T, “is a person, Jesus Christ.”⁶ And Christ is not some lawyer, CEO or community organizer. He is God. Cardinal Avery Dulles described three foundational principles: “that there is a God, that he has made a full and final revelation of himself in Jesus Christ and that the Catholic Church is the authorized custodian and teacher of this body of revealed truth.”⁷ The Catholic faith is not a set of doctrines. It is a lived encounter with Christ, who lives in, and teaches through, the Church.⁸

The Magisterium, or teaching authority of the Church, is a great gift, not only for Catholics but for others to whose conscience it appeals “on the basis of reason and natural law.”⁹ The forces of evil concentrate their fire on the Vicar of Christ, who is the authoritative interpreter of the moral law. We must respond with loyal defense of him and of the Church. We are not, to borrow Fr. Euteneuer’s phrase, the Church Impotent. We are part of the Church Militant. Our job is to fight for the Truth. Don’t be conned by their lies:

1). The first lie is secularism: There is no God or he is unknowable. They say that is what the First Amendment means, but that, too, is a lie. On September 24-25, 1789, the First Congress approved the First Amendment and called on the President to proclaim a day of “thanksgiving and prayer… acknowledging… the many … favors of Almighty God.”¹⁰ President Washington proclaimed that day of prayer. The First Amendment required neutrality on the part of the federal government among religious sects while recognizing the power of the state and federal governments to affirm the existence of God. The Supreme Court has now imposed a duty on all governments to maintain an impossible neutrality between theism and non-theism. The words “under God,” according to Justice William Brennan’s still accurate description of the Court’s approach, may remain in the Pledge of Allegiance only because they “no longer have a religious purpose or meaning.” Instead they “may merely recognize the historical fact that our Nation was believed to have been founded ‘under God.'”¹¹

At all levels of government, the suspension of judgment on the existence of God has evolved into an establishment of secularism. Today, affirmations of God are considered non-rational, and are generally excluded from the public discourse which is shaped by utility and power rather than right or wrong.

The existence of God is not self-evident. But it is unreasonable, even stupid, not to believe in God, an eternal being that had no beginning and always existed. The alternative is that there was a time when there was absolutely nothing. But that makes no sense. St. Thomas Aquinas said, “if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence–which is absurd.”¹² As Julie Andrews put it in The Sound of Music, “Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.”

The only basis for transcendent rights against the State is the creation of the immortal person in the image and likeness of God. Every state that has ever existed, or ever will exist, has gone out of business or will go out of business. Every human being that has ever been conceived will live forever. That is why you have transcendent rights against the State. The person does not exist for the State. The State exists for the person. And for the family.

2). The second lie of Satan is relativism. To say that all things are relative is absurd, for that statement itself must be relative. The jurisprudence of relativism is some form of legal positivism, which asserts that there is no higher law that limits what human law can do. A law of any content is valid if it is enacted pursuant to prescribed procedure and is effective. Hans Kelsen, the leading legal positivist of the 20th century, said that Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulags were valid law. He could not criticize them as unjust because justice, he said, is “an irrational ideal.”¹³ Kelsen claimed that relativism is the philosophy of democracy. John Paul II said relativism leads instead to totalitarianism: “If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to … impose his own interests … with no regard for the rights of others.”¹⁴

In your personal and professional lives you will be pressured to be a relativist, to lie, cheat or steal. As John Paul put it, the negative prohibitions of the Commandments, which are a specification of the natural law, “allow no exceptions.”¹⁵ But you will pay a price for your fidelity.

Let me tell you a story. Captain James Mulligan, of the United States Navy, spent seven years, half of them in solitary confinement, in the Hanoi Hilton after his plane was shot down in 1966. He was a cell-mate for a time of later Senator Jeremiah Denton. He, as were the others, was tortured severely and often to try to make him betray his fellow prisoners and his country. Captain Mulligan put his reliance on prayer, especially the Rosary. Under torture, he laid it on the line in a prayer he composed that we ought to make our own: “Lord, give me the strength and the guts to see this thing through to the end, one way or another. No one else knows, Lord, but you and I know, and that’s all that’s necessary. You suffered for your beliefs, and I must suffer for mine. Right is right if no one’s right; wrong is wrong if everyone’s wrong.”¹⁶ That is the answer to relativism.

3). The third lie you will confront is individualism. Social contract theories denied the social nature of man. They postulated a state of nature in which each person was an autonomous, isolated individual with no relation to others unless he consents. That is the origin of pro-choice as we know it today. Planned Parenthood didn’t think it up. The mother has no relation to her unborn child unless she consents. The husband and wife have no continuing relation unless they continue to consent. And so on. The autonomous individual is his own god. Conscience is not a judgment about the objective rightness or wrongness of an act. It is the individual’s unfettered decision as to what he wills to do. Whatever he chooses is, for him, the right thing to do. That is portrayed as the way to freedom. But “authentic freedom” cannot be separated from the truth.¹⁷

You are “free” to choose to put sand in the gas tank of your car. But you will no longer be free to drive your car because you have violated the truth of the nature of your car. You are “free” to choose to lie, to fornicate, etc., but you will diminish yourself because you have violated the truth of your nature. You have chosen the moral equivalent of putting sand in your gas tank. And there is one thing the autonomous individual of liberal mythology can never do. He can never put himself out of existence. He is going to live forever and will spend eternity someplace. Where, is up to him.

It is time for us to shed our inferiority complex. We allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that the smart guys are the academics who think that something can come from nothing, who are sure that they can’t be sure of anything and who think that freedom means, without limit, the power and right to do whatever they want. This culture has lost not only its faith but also its mind. They need to hear the truth, especially about the right to life.

But there we have a problem. Our prolife efforts are compromised by our timidity on contraception. The Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 was the first time that any Christian denomination had ever said that contraception could ever be objectively right. The Magisterium teaches the truth, that contraception is wrong, first, because it deliberately separates the unitive and procreative aspects of sex; second, by so changing the nature of the conjugal act, the man and woman make themselves, rather than God, the arbiters of whether and when life shall begin; and third, contraception frustrates the total mutual self-donation that ought to characterize the conjugal act. If man makes himself the arbiter of whether and when life shall begin, he will make himself the arbiter of when it shall end as in abortion and euthanasia. John Paul II described abortion and contraception as “fruits of the same tree.”¹⁸ If it is man’s decision whether sex will have any relation to reproduction, why can’t Freddy and Harry get a marriage license? In 2004, Pastor Donald Sensing of Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, TN, wrote that opponents of same-sex marriage are “a little late. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago” with the general acceptance of the contraceptive pill.¹⁹

God has chosen to depend on human cooperation for the creation of new citizens for the kingdom of heaven. The contracepting couple alter the conjugal act to prevent that creation. What they say to God is something like this: “For all we know, God, it may be your will that from this act of ours a new human person will come into existence who will live forever. For all we know, that may be your will. And we won’t let you do it.” That is awesome. “Contraception,” said John Paul II, “is so profoundly unlawful as never to be, for any reason, justified. To think or to say the contrary is equal to maintaining that in human life situations may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God.”²⁰

Catholics practice contraception at the same rate as everyone else. One reason is that they have not been adequately informed. Many Catholic churches and schools are closing or consolidating for lack of parishioners and students. A fair response would be respectfully to say: “Most Reverend Bishop (or Father), you would not have this problem if you and your predecessors had been doing your job, over the past four decades and still today, of educating your people about the evil of contraception and about the entire positive teaching of the Church on marriage and the gift of life.” Christendom graduates know the score on this. Don’t be afraid to live it. And teach it, by word and example.

The link is clear between the premises of the Enlightenment and of contraception and such evils as pornography, promiscuity, divorce, in vitro fertilization, cloning and others.²¹ Scientists at Newcastle University, in England, announced last month that they had created a “designer embryo” with the DNA of one man and two women, a child with two mothers.²² Our scientists are probably not far behind.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, addressed this point in 2002. He discussed the description in Genesis 3 of the posting of angels east of Eden with flaming swords to keep man, after the Fall, from eating of the Tree of Life. After the Fall, man was forbidden to eat of that tree which gave immortality, “since to be immortal in this [fallen] condition would… be perdition.” People are now, Ratzinger said, “starting to pick from the tree of life and make themselves lords of life and death, to reassemble life….[P]recisely what man was supposed to be protected from is now… happening; he is crossing the final boundary….[M]an makes other men his own artifacts. Man no longer originates in the mystery of love, by… conception and birth… but is produced industrially, like any other product…. [W]e can … be certain of this: God will take action to counter an ultimate crime, an ultimate act of self-destruction, on the part of man. He will take action against the attempt to demean mankind by the production of slave-beings. There are indeed final boundaries we cannot cross….”²³

This is serious business. Nineveh repented, prayed and was spared. Sodom and Gomorrah did not and were destroyed.²⁴ Those options could be ours.

If we look at all this in merely human terms, our cause is hopeless. But we don’t depend on our own strength. And we don’t know everything. Don’t be discouraged when bad things happen. “God permits everything,” said St. Maximilian Kolbe, “in view of a greater blessing.”²⁵ Trust God. Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J., who spent 23 years in Soviet prisons, said what God wants, especially in times of adversity or danger, is “an act of total trust,” demanding “absolute faith: faith in God’s existence, in his providence, in his concern for the minutest detail, in his power to sustain me, and in his love protecting me.”²⁶

Trust God. And pray, especially, to Mary, his Mother and ours. At Lepanto in 1571, the odds against the Christian fleet were so great that Las Vegas would have taken that bet off the board. But they prayed the Rosary and Mary gave the victory. She can take care of our problems today. This really is a great time for us to be here. We know we are on the winning side. God is not dead. He isn’t even tired.

Thank you for the privilege to be with you. God bless you, your families and Christendom College. And God bless the United States of America.

Source: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9325

Do Not Be Afraid!

One important and significant thing you should do before we could go into the detailed discussion of this topic is now stop reading, close your eyes for some minutes, and then freely write a list of your fears of your own. I would dare to bet that you will have a long list of fears: fear of death, fear of joblessness, fear of being neglected, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of illness, fear of accidents, fear of being killed, fear of darkness, fear of gosh, and fear of responsibilities… in general fear of everything that we can not list down here.

With the above list of our fears, I dare say that now we are dragging our feet to all corners of life with a big and heavy bag of all types of fears at all levels. We drag our feet because we have accidentally or intentionally allowed fears go into our life and then become a burden of ourselves. And from that time, naturally the fear become a vital part of our life as if we can not without it. And perhaps because of this harsh reality, there are a lot of books of fears management which have been written and millions sold out around the world. This shows that fears are something or illnesses needed omitting so that we could fly up and enjoy this life. And now I believe that you really want to leave out all fears having been allowed to be with you in life. To completely do this, we need to know where they are from, why we are so fearful, and how they affect our life.

According to Krishnamurti, fears are originated from two powerful sources which are education of your society and family you live and finally our thoughts.

From the family and the society we live: When we were born, we were not asked to choose our family and county we wanted, it is a harsh true reality that everyone has to accept as a fate of life. In this living environment and condition, surely we are influenced by many factors that shape our characteristics, behaviors, viewpoints, believes, sense of values, directions of life and even fears. In the family life, from the beginning to the time we are regarded as a real mature, we have had to suffer a lot of fears begun from our parents’ ways of education in which there are more curses than motivations, more tears than joys, more bans and regulations than permissions and freedom etc. All are existed on behalf of their love for us. Let’s get back to the childhood to find out what they have done for us. When we had a big dream that we thought we could turn it into reality, we joyfully came by their side and told them about it, and immediately they smiled and told us “My beloved son, a dream is a dream, it never comes true. At your age, I also had a lot of dreams but you could see that now I’m old, there is none of my dreams come true.”; or at home they told us a lot of don’ts and cants with heavy punishments if you try to not obey the set law; or just to force us do something that we resisted or did not want to do or not ready to do, we were threatened by being left alone in the dark, by some ghosts, by some bugs or animals, being put on the top of the roof without ladder or put into a dark room with a lock outside… In the social life, at the very first time we went to school, we were taught to be afraid of failure in examinations, we were advised to be fearful of the strongest in the class, we were taught death is something fierce and ended, we were educated that money was everything,… and from that time on we are afraid of failure, of death, of difficulties, of barriers, of illnesses…

From our thoughts: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” – (Genesis 1, 1:2). This verse shows that everything invisible becoming visible from God’s will or thoughts, so we are created like him and be shared the same ways of creating this world. Nowadays, a lot of self-help books related to the power of thoughts are available on bookstores in all over the world to prove that thoughts are very important to us in creating ourselves, our future, destiny, and even our world. If you take a look at the world around, you could see that everything visible to us now is originated from the invisibility – our thoughts: a car, a home, a TV set, an airplane, a ship, and the likes. From this point, I can tell you that fears are nothing but thoughts which can create and destroy as well. The more positive thoughts build the more negative ones destroy. When you search the word “fear” on the Bible software, you will get totally 260 verses related. It means, as I have mentioned above, “fears become a vital part of our life”. And the result of fear is that you are not loved and you will be punished as Sain John Apostle indicates in his first letter “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drive out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” – (1John 4, 18).

Now we can certainly know that there are two doors that fears can go in our life: family and social education, and our thoughts. But thoughts play a key role in forming our fears. As you know, because of fears, we will hide ourselves in a box instead of open to the world, we close our heart and mind in the relation with our brothers and sisters, we become selfish and cruel in alternative of generous and kind. Fears can turn us into losers, murderers, betrayers, burglars, cheaters, addicts etc. who we actually do not want to become, I am sure of this. So, to drive out fears we need to accumulate love and positive thinking which can bring you peace, love, joys, happiness, prosperity, and freedom.

You should know that you are a magnet of the universe, so you can attract everything in this universe to you depending on your ways of thinking positive or negative. If you always think about love and happiness, you will be loved and happy in life, and vice versa, if you think about fears you will be an image and a victim of your fears like we have discussed above. We have just one life to live and God wants us surely to be happy and enjoy this life with his favors. So, our responsibility is to choose ways of living: happy or unhappy, loved or hated, faithful or betrayal, rich or poor, successful or failed, free or dependent. And you should remember that fears are nothing but our thoughts and they are surely coming to our life whenever we think about them. That’s why at the beginning of his mission as The Holy Father, John Paul The Second says to the world “Don’t be afraid!”. This phrase should be a maxim of our life if we want to live our life fully and significantly.

Awakening

Joseph Pham

There is one thing I can make sure that at least you have had a white night once of a time in your life, I mean a sleepless night you have experienced probably with your classmates around the campfire at the seashore or in the forest, maybe with your family at the new year eve, or probably in a hospital to take care of someone special,.. or simply yourself alone to think about something that you care for…So I want you to stop here now for some minutes to contemplate the feeling at that time.

Certainly when we  had a white night with whom or for whatever, we would experience this that we are awakening and others are seemingly sleeping. It seems that the night is longer while we are awakening than while we are sleeping. It is simply because of that sleeping is a state which our body and consciousness are temporarily off in term of time, while awakening is a state of fully consciousness of time which is flying regardless slowly or fast. Therefore, we are moving forwards instead of stopping, we are seeing instead of none, we are experiencing instead of none.

“Awakening” is a topic that great spiritual teachers like Anthony De Mello, Krishnamurti, and Osho loved to talk about in their life. They all shared the same in common this field and helped us to absolutely understand the command that Jesus Christ – the Greatest Teacher of ever has taught in His life “Be on your guard! Be alert!” – (Mark 13, 33). And so what is awakening and why do we have to be alert? And are we on our guard and alert?

In the literal sense, “awakening” means no sleeping. In the figurative sense, “awakening” means being completely aware of oneself and of what is happening outside the world. So if we are in the state of awakening, we can live fully our life and avoid serious mistakes caused by the non-awakening. Now, let’s take a small experiment about this in our life to see more clearly about this point. What will happen for us if we fall asleep while driving? Surely we may have a serious accident, or if we are lucky we will say thanks to God for saving us.

According to father Anthony De Mello, we are human beings who “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak” – (Matthew 26, 41b) always have a tendency to enjoy sleeping more than awakening. And that is why he confidently declares that the human race is sleeping alternative to awakening. We always love to sleep for the feeling of being very comfortable while sleeping, especially when we are hurt spiritually or physically. Furthermore, sleeping is a very good way to escape from facing the world outside where a lot of crimes and injustices still exist. Reading Anthony De Mello and Krishnamurti, I could see that they have the same in common, “sleeping is a state of stupidity”. And if we take time to think about this, we will see that it is true in our life, because each day many accidents happen in the world caused by this state.

They also said that an action or a decision that seriously harms oneself, others, and the world can be considered as a lack of necessary awakening. And from this point, we can see that, throughout the world history, world wars, civil wars, racial exterminations, racial discrimination, environmental damage etc. took place and still go on happening if we are still in the state of sleeping. For the lack of awakening, we try to kill each other nations to nations, races to races, skins to skins, families to families, and even bothers and sisters under a roof. For the lack of awakening, we allow ourselves to fall into gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse, drug addiction, adultery etc. and finally die for them. Also, we let ourselves live in negative emotions and bad characteristics like anger, greed, selfishness, , deception, betrayal, and the likes.

One more point about awakening we need to know here is that, also according to Anthony De Mello and Krishnamurti, a state of being totally conscious of that we are awaking means that we are sleeping and vice versa when we know that we are sleeping means that we are waking. This idea seems to be a very conflict. I also feel conflict when I first read them, but now I could see that there is no conflict here if we stop and think carefully about it in term of looking at ourselves with all dimensions of thinking and actions we have made. And to help you get a firm foundation to completely understand this seemly a conflict, I find a Bible verse stating the same “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!” – (1Corinthians 10, 12). For example, when we think that we are so good, it means that we are not good at all, and vice versa. This is true, because when we are conscious of that we are so good, we will be fell into a state of being self-satisfied in which we will not want to master ourselves more. This is a one’s shortcoming. So, the key here is that we need to be humble enough to know ourselves fully and exactly so that we can adjust and change ourselves at the time needed without any regret of having done this or done that in life.

“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” – (Matthew 26, 41a) is a command that Jesus Christ gives us to keep on living this life without making so much mistakes that could be harmful to ourselves and others. If we are always fully aware of this command and live it perfectly in life, we will surely be very happy and make many significant contributions to this world, or vice versa, we will live in sorrows, fears, doubts, and destruction. This lesson also helps us avoid falling into the temptation of being over arrogant, but always be humble to learn, to live, and to love as God wants.

And now I would like you to spend time to think more about the farewell letter from the Nobel Prize writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez to see how he lives his final moments of life fully. He wrote when he was aware of that he would die someday for his serious cancer. And here is a short piece taken from the letter “I would values things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep little, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light. I would walk when others hold back. I would wake when others sleep. I would listen when others talks, and how would I enjoy a good chocolate ice cream! If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul. My God, if I had a piece of life…I wouldn’t let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them…. I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in love when they grow old, not knowing that they grow old when they cease to love! To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own…. I have learned that everyone wants to live on the peak of the mountain, without knowing the real happiness is in how it is scaled…. I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he helps the other get to his feet.”