Rabindranath Tagore

Deine Gaben erfüllen all unsre Notdurft
Uns Sterblichen und kommen zu
Dir zurück unvermindert.

Der Fluss hat sein Tagwerk zu tun und
Eilt durch Felder und Weiler; doch windet
Sein unaufhaltbarer Strom zu deinen
Füßen sich, um sie zu waschen.

Die Blume durchtränkt die Lüfte mit
Duft, doch ihre letzte Verehrung bietet
Sich dir dar.

Dein Dienst verarmt nicht die Welt.

Den Worten des Dichters entnehmen
die Menschen den Sinn, der ihnen gefällt;
doch ihr letzter Sinn deutet auf dich.

(Aus: Gitanjali, Sangesopfer. Hohe Lieder. Berlin: Holzinger, 1916 [in Bengalisch 1910; engl. Gitanjali or Song Offerings. A Collection of Poems translated from Bengali by the Poet himself. With an Introduction by W.B. Yeats. A & D. o.O.: Promotionwise, 2015; dt. Leipzig 1914 (übers. Marie Luise Gothein)]

1 Corinthians 13, 12-13

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

(From: The Bible. Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (AV 1611). Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Caroll and Stephen Pricket. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997/2008)

Northrop Frye

“We are continuous identities; we have had many identities, as babies, as boys and girls, and so on through life, and when we pass through or ‘outgrow’ these identities they return to their source. Assuming, that is, some law of conversation in the spiritual as well as the physical world exists. There is nothing so unique about death as such, where we may distracted by illness or sunk in senility to have much identity at all. In a double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. Our live in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized.”

(Aus: Northrop Frye, The Double Vision. Language and Religion in Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, S. 84f)