May 2013
6 posts
“The business of the church is to ‘remember’ the future. Not merely...”
– Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, and Language quoted by Jonathan Martin in Prototype
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I...”
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“More and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience,...”
– Christian Wiman, “Fugitive Pieces (I)” in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for...”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in...”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to...”
– Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine
“The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded...”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
April 2013
21 posts
To Love
A few lines from Christian Wiman’s poem “Gone for the Day, She is the Day” in Every Riven Thing:
To love is to feel your death
given to you like a sentence,
to meet the judge’s eyes
as if there were a judge,
as if he had eyes,
and love.
“I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the...”
– Christian Wiman, ”Love Bade Me Welcome” in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
“Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and...”
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
“What I crave—and what I have known, in fugitive instants—is mystery...”
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
“Run off to meet Jesus. Tell him the problem. Ask him why he didn’t come sooner,...”
– N.T. Wright, John for Everyone
“To be given the picture of myself as crucifier, as I am given it in the Easter...”
– Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel
“Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s...”
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
“To cultivate an ear for tone is, oddly enough, to cultivate one’s own perceptual...”
– Tony Hoagland, “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America”
All is Grace
A few paragraphs from the introduction to All is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir by Brennan Manning.
“Warning: Mine has been anything but a straight shot, more like a crooked path filled with thorns and crows and vodka. Prone to wander? You bet. I’ve been a priest, then an ex-priest. Husband, then ex-husband. Amazed crowds one night and lied to friends the next. Drunk for years, sober for...
“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into...”
– Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust
“In the arc of my unremarkable life, wherein the victories have been small and...”
– Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path To God
“We all want to save the world. To change it. To make an impact for Jesus. To be...”
– Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good
Bewildered
A few lines I love from Emily Dickinson (no. 323):
As if I asked a common Alms,
And in my wondering hand
A Stranger pressed a Kingdom
And I, bewildered, stand
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory...”
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think...”
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“If we lose sight of the beauty and terror of … Job’s God in the...”
– Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness
“What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence...”
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 77. (via invisibleforeigner)
“To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be...”
– C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Faith
A poem from George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul:
Faith is the human shadow of thy might.
Thou art the one self-perfect life, and we
Who trust thy life, therein join on to thee,
Taking our part in self-creating light.
To trust is to step forward out of the night—
To be—to share in the outgoing Will
That lives and is, because outgoing still.
“The whole New Testament is unanimous on this point: the Cross and burial of...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 189.
“The center, the day, that gives meaning to all days and therefore to all time,...”
– Alexander Schmemann, Easter in the Liturgical Year (via invisibleforeigner)
March 2013
11 posts
“No curse lies more heavily upon our study of the Bible, … than the...”
– Paul W. Meyer, The Word in This World
“The gospel story is not just the story of a super-hero who once upon a time...”
– Richard Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ
You Are What Jesus Thinks of You
A sweet paragraph from a chapter entitled “Loving Yourself” in Samuel Wells’ Be Not Afraid:
“There’s only one place to stand, and that’s face-to-face with Jesus. You are not your wallet; you are not your house; you are not your car; you are not your GPA—you are not even your family. You are what Jesus thinks of you, because Jesus is God, and Jesus is...
lanelashes:
“Do you have hope for the future? Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied. that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, or what looking back half the time it seems we could have been, or ought… The future, yes, and...
“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them...”
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
When Death Comes
A few lines from Mary Oliver’s popular poem “When Death Comes”:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or...
“The church, then, exists not for itself but for the sake of a reconciled...”
– Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams, 66. (via invisibleforeigner)
“If you want to know where God is, you look for the least, the weakest, the most...”
– E. Elizabeth Johnson “Life Together in the Household of God” in Shaking Heaven and Earth: Essays in Honor of Walter Brueggemann and Charles B. Cousar
“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own...”
– Joan Didion (quote via The Reconstructionists)
“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of...”
– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
February 2013
19 posts
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“But God is three in one and one in three. There was diversity from before the...”
– Samuel Wells, Be Not Afraid
“(W)hat does does it mean to be Christian, to be the church, God’s people,...”
– Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday
The Ultimate Solitude
In Parker J. Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life he discusses the experience some of us have at the bedside of a dying person. He suggests that this experience reveals in microcosm how we are called to relate to each other:
“When we sit with a dying person, we gain two critical insights into what it means to “be alone together.” First, we...
“What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And...”
– Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Some Thoughts on Pauline Theology
An important excerpt from Paul W. Meyer’s essay “Pauline Theology: A Proposal for a Pause in Its Pursuit,” in Pauline Theology Vol IV Looking Back, Pressing On Edited by E. Elizabeth Johnson and David M. Hay:
(I)n Paul’s theology (in his letters) we have ringside seats to watch what happens when the fully historical impact of the crucifixion, made the defining event by...
“One tends to forget that at times it is much easier to agree on what a text says...”
– Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology
“The renewal of the church and the Christian university - a renewal of both...”
– James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, 3 (via invisibleforeigner)
Ask Me
In the first chapter of Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer invokes a beautiful poem called “Ask Me” by William Stafford:
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has...
“The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation...”
– Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
In the Deeps
Today I was happy to unexpectedly come across a favorite paragraph in Teaching a Stone To Talk by Annie Dillard. It took my breath away, just like it did several years ago when I read it for the first time:
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you...
