A Godly Meditation written by Sir Thomas More while in the Tower of London in 1534, awaiting his beheading.

Give me thy grace, good Lord,

To set the world at nought,

To set my mind fast upon thee.

And not to hang upon the blast of men's mouths.

To be content to be solitary,

Not to long for worldly company,

Little and little utterly to cast off the world,

And rid my mind of all the business thereof.

Not to long to hear of any worldly things,

But that the hearing of worldly phantasies may be to me displeasant.

Gladly to be thinking of God,

Piteously to call for his help,

To lean unto the comfort of God,

Busily to labour to love him.

To know mine own vility and wretchedness,

To humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God,

To bewail my sins passed,

For the purging of them, patiently to suffer adversity.

Gladly to bear my purgatory here,

To be joyful of tribulations,

To walk the narrow way that leadeth to life.

To bear the cross with Christ,

To have the last thing in rememberence,

To have ever afore mine eye my death that is ever at hand,

To make no stranger to me,

To foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell.

To pray for pardon before the judge to come.

To have continually in mind the passion that Christ suffered for me,

For his benefits uncessantly to give him thanks.

To buy the time again that I before have lost.

To abstain from vain confabulations,

To eschew light foolish mirth and gladness,

Recreations not necessary to cut off.

Of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all, to set the loss at right nought, for the winning of Christ.

To think my most enemies my best friends,

For the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good with their love and favour as they did him with their malice and hatred.

These minds are more to be desired of every man, than all the treasure of all the princes and kings, Christian and heathen, were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap.

The English Prayers of Sir Thomas More (Templegate Publishers, 1995).

My dear children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as He was. And as He is now in Heaven, where we hope to go, and all to meet each other after we are dead, and there be happy always together, you never can think what a good place Heaven is, without knowing who He was and what He did.

Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord: Written for His Children during the Years 1846-1849 (Simon & Schuster, 17).

Evil, for Tolkien, was not about being scared by monsters. Rather, evil is very real and perilous, whether in fairy tales, in the trenches of World War I, or in the Soviet gulags. The monsters of fiction and nightmares are merely manifestations of the true, original evil -- the perversion and mocking of God's creation. In its essence, evil is and always will be merely derivative and perverse. Therefore, as Hannah Arendt famously explained, evil is, finally, banal. Even Sauron is nothing but a poor substitute for Morgoth. "The operations of Sauron naturally and inevitably resembled or repeated those of his master," Tolkien explained.

Bradley J. Birzer, J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (ISI Books, 2002, 91).

I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness -- that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. By the time I decided to become one of those who is heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving various people who had harmed me directly or indirectly over the years -- four former Republican presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree -- it was "The Twelve Days of Christmas" meets Taxi Driver. But in the end I could only pretend that I had. I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high. As C. S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, "If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo."

So I decided to put everyone I'd ever lived with, slept with, or been reviewed by on hold, and to start with someone I barely knew whom I had only hated for a while.

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (Pantheon Books, 1999, 128-129).

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the media….Demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency. This is only one example of our demand for illusions.

Daniel Boorstin, The Image.

That was a memorable day to me for it made great changes in me. But it's the same with any life: Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chains of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is all between you and God;

It was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We "have all we want" is a terrible saying when "all" does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full -- there's nowhere for Him to put it."

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Simon & Schuster, 1996 edition, 85).

Damare, a small Sudanese boy was taken as a slave and forced to tend camels after his village was attacked by radical Muslims. One day Damare, who had been raised in a Christian home, snuck away from his master to attend a church service. When he returned, his Muslim master was waiting for him and accused of committing a deadly act, "meeting with infidels."

The master then dragged Damare into a field where he nailed his feet and knees into a large board while the boy cried out in agony.

Damare was miraculously rescued and has told The Voice of the Martyrs that just as Jesus was nailed and forgave, he forgives also. What bold faith from a simple Sudanese boy!

The Voice of the Martyrs.

Politics stops at the water's edge. It's a saying often invoked whenever a foreign policy crisis shifts national attention away from domestic disputes and toward matters of our shared national security. When the United States commits troops overseas, or is attacked on its own soil, we must put our internal arguments aside and maintain a united front. We must remember, in other words, that we're all Americans first, Republicans and Democrats second.

Sean Hannity, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism(Regan Books, 2004, 213).