Daily Reading for April 12

Emmaus is where we go when life gets to be too much for us . . . the place we go in order to escape—a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” . . . Emmaus may be buying new clothes or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred, that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that men have had—ideas about love and freedom and justice—have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for selfish ends.

From The Magnificent Defeat by Frederick Buechner (Harper & Row, 1966).