"She covered her face with her hands for a moment and tried to capture the flashing vision that had come to her of life as a series of deaths and rebirths, each predestined, so that when you reached it you recognized it as something waiting for you, and yet each at the same time also a matter of choice, so that you came to it with a joy or pain of your own making, a paradox whose mystery baffled the mind but whose truth the heart recognized.
She remembered how the old masters in their paintings would sometimes represent the soul as a tiny child. Somewhere she had seen a picture by, she thought, Fra Angelico, of God standing behind a bier with a smiling baby in His arms. The old masters had known their business. They had had the boldness to express the inexpressible in terms of humanity, after the example of God Himself at Christmas."
-Elizabeth Goudge, Pilgrim's Inn (1948), p. 281
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