The Burning Girls

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly judge a person by their books.

Belief should be a conscious choice, not something you’re brainwashed into when you’re too young to understand or question it. Faith isn’t something you pass down like an heirloom. It’s not tangible or absolute. Not even for a priest. It’s something you have to keep working at, like marriage or children.

Or perhaps all adults feel like that at times. Like we’re just playing at being grown-up, but inside we’re still children, shuffling around in oversized clothes, wishing someone would tell us that monsters don’t exist.

The Church isn’t just for those who believe in God. It’s for those who don’t have anything to believe in. The lonely, lost and homeless. A place of refuge.

Why do we hate our girls so much that history echoes with their screams and the earth is pitted with their unmarked graves?

The Old Testament is crap. It’s full of misogyny, torture and inconsistencies. Jesus preached about love. All love.

We all have our hiding places. Not just physical ones. Places deep inside where we put away the things we don't want others to see. The less palatable parts. Our St. Peter's box, I call it, The one we pray he won't find when we're trying to sneak in through the pearly gates.

That’s the problem with social media. It’s not designed for negatives. It’s all about people showing their best side. Posing with filters, creating some sort of fake perfect life. But what do you do when life isn’t perfect? When everything feels shit. When you feel like you’re sinking into a deep black hole and you can’t crawl your way out. LOFL

Bad memories are like splinters. Sometimes painful, but you learn to live with them. The problem is, they always work their way to the surface eventually. [the Rev. Jack Brooks]

Flo isn’t really a huge fan of social media. She doesn’t like how everyone pretends they have an amazing life or how they filter their faces a zillion times so they don’t even look human. It’s all false and fake

Your past is a part of you. It trails at your heels like a faithful old dog, refusing to leave your side. And sometimes, it bites your arse.

As all tragedies are. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.

Faith, to an extent, is a placebo. If you believe it works, it works.

Although we can never really ease trauma, our mind is good at repairing it, layering over it with new experiences, like fresh skin growing over an old wound. The scar remains. It just hurts less and becomes harder to see.

I think we have the capacity for good and evil. But for some, one side is more prevalent than the other.

Guilt is a little like grief. A cancer of the soul. They both hollow you out from the inside. But while you can learn to live with grief, guilt only grows as the years go by, spreading its tumourous tentacles.

Never have children, a friend once told me. Not if you want to finish a cup of coffee, get to see the end of a film or enjoy a full night’s sleep ever again.

You’re not protecting me when you keep stuff from me, you’re just worrying me.

Prayer is a useful medium for focusing the mind. But it is not a magic cure-all. God is not a therapist or a psychiatrist. We still need the support of other people and sometimes those people are professionals.

They say not knowing is worse. But sometimes, knowing is just as bad. Knowing is finally finding that elusive needle in the haystack, only to discover that the needle was the very thing stopping the entire haystack from collapsing and burying you.

People are made to feel guilty for 'living a lie', but who hasn't hidden parts of themselves from those they love? Because we don't want to hurt them. Because we don't want to see the disappointment in their eyes. We talk about love being unconditional, but very few of us ever want to put that to the test.

You want to believe the world is black and white. But, as an adult, you realise that most people exist in the grey area in between. All stuck in the middle and bumbling through.

I often think his skills would be better put to use in politics rather than the Church, but then, perhaps there isn’t so much difference. We both preach to the converted.

I think that doing something bad is different from being bad. I think we all have the capability to do bad things

It’s true that some women grow into their looks, gaining beauty as the years pass.

Sometimes, trying to fill a silence just makes it heavier

I believe that evil exists. In the hearts of all men and women