Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Cæsar. The noble Brutus Hath told Cæsar was ambitious; If it were so, it was a grievous fault; And grievously hath Cæsar answer'd it. . . . . For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men. . . . . He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. . . . . When that the poor have cried, Cæsar hath wept; Ambition should be made of sterner stuff . . . . You all did love him once, not without cause.
And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse, As patches set upon a little breach, Discredit more in hiding of the fault Than did the fault before it was so patch'd.
Bernard Loomer's father was a sea captain. He was acquainted with his small place in an uncontrollable nature. In a talk in 1974 Loomer described his father's instructions about the uses of a baseball glove. The father had just overheard his son's sandlot complaints about the thinness of a glove inherited from his older brothers. When his father asked him what a baseball glove was for, young Loomer had said that it was to protect the hand. In the words of Bernard Loomer in his sixties, his father replied: Son, I never have played baseball, but it seems to me you ought to be able to catch the ball bare-handed. The way I look at it, you use a glove not to protect your hand, but to give you a bigger hand to help catch balls that are more difficult to reach. I assume that in this as in all walks of life there are tricks to the trade. I suggest you learn how to catch with that glove for two reasons. First, because you are not going to get another one, and second, because you don't need protection from life. You need a glove to give you a bigger hand to catch baseballs you might otherwise miss. As the decade of the 1970s progressed, Loomer reflected increasingly on the fact that what you might otherwise miss [in theology] was irrational, even evil, but [that it] must be caught anyway. Loomer grew increasingly dissatisfied with those who seemed to restrict their reach-even Whitehead was faulted. And increasingly it appeared that Christian theology was the theology Loomer had-that he was not going to get another one-and so, although it was thin in places, he attempted to use the one theology he had, to catch all he could. [This] suggests the meaning of Loomer's special term, "size." Size signifies "the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity."
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