& other randomness

25
Apr

Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
24
Apr

What I crave—and what I have known, in fugitive instants—is mystery that utterly obliterates reality by utterly inhabiting it, some ultimate insight that is still sight. Heaven is precision.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
23
Apr

Run off to meet Jesus. Tell him the problem. Ask him why he didn’t come sooner, why he allowed that awful thing to happen. And then be prepared for a surprising response. I can’t predict what the response will be, for the very good reason that it is always, always a surprise. But I do know the shape that it will take. Jesus will meet your problem with some new part of God’s future that can and will burst into your present time, into the mess and grief, with good news, with hope, with new possibilities.

N.T. Wright, John for Everyone

22
Apr

To be given the picture of myself as crucifier, as I am given it in the Easter encounter, is to make an important discovery about the nature of suffering itself. Pain is not simply what I endure, it is equally what I transmit. To concentrate upon the cross as my cross locates the responsibility for pain elsewhere—with God, with nature or fate, with those who have the power I do not. To see the cross as another’s is to learn that pain and violence is something I am capable of causing.

Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel
21
Apr

Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
17
Apr

To cultivate an ear for tone is, oddly enough, to cultivate one’s own perceptual alertness … To develop an ear for such delicate modulations is in fact a survival skill that can aid one for a lifetime.

Tony Hoagland, “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America”
15
Apr

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 a season, then drunk again. I’ve been John the beloved, Peter the coward, and Thomas the doubter all before the waitress brought the check. I’ve shattered every one of the Ten Commandments six times Tuesday. And if you believe that last sentence was for dramatic effect, it wasn’t.

… 

Over the tar of my life, I have usually been headed toward something along the lines of ‘professional commitments.’ Or at least I thought they were. But those trips are over now. I am living in a different emotional direction. I am steering toward home, hardly a poster child for anything … anything, that is, but grace. And what exactly is grace? These pages are my final words on the matter. Grace is everything. I am Brennan the witness.”

All is grace.

13
Apr

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of a pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust
13
Apr

In the arc of my unremarkable life, wherein the victories have been small and personal, the trials fairly pedestrian, and the failures large enough to deeply wound me and those I love, I have repeated endlessly the pattern of falling down and getting up, falling down and getting up. Each time I fall, I am propelled to renew my efforts by a blind trust in the forgiveness of my sins from sheer grace, in the acquittal, vindication, and justification of my ragged journey based not on any good deeds I have done (the approach taken by the Pharisee in the temple) but on an unflagging trust in the love of a gracious and merciful God.

Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path To God
11
Apr

We all want to save the world. To change it. To make an impact for Jesus. To be a hero. But we are not the center of God’s story. We are not God’s heroes … at most, we’re the nameless soldiers in the Philistine or Israelite army, watching with either horror or glee as God’s inscrutable and unrelenting providence unfolds, and our fates are determined by the people and forces beyond our control. We are the biblical bystanders, individuals whose literary analogs are the unnamed people who gather in plurals—crowds, armies, masses—to watch as God’s history marches onward.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good