Stuff On My Mind

"To learn to follow Jesus is the training necessary to become a human being. To be a human being is..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:23:26 -0400

“To learn to follow Jesus is the training necessary to become a human being. To be a human being is not a natural condition, but requires training. The kind of training required, moreover, has everything to do with death. To follow Jesus is to go with him to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.
—Stanley Hauerwas, Working With Words (p. 78)”

- Experimental Theology: The Training That Refuses to Let Death Determine the Shape of Our Living (via mshedden)

"Yahweh constantly calls man to grow up yet more; to leave behind the established and the secure,..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:25:12 -0400

“Yahweh constantly calls man to grow up yet more; to leave behind the established and the secure, first the security of the local nature gods, but then even the security of the Hebrew religious system itself … The response to this God who summons man into the future is always one of faith, of venturing forward into an area of which we have no maps.”

- Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, and Language

"The business of the church is to ‘remember’ the future. Not merely to remember that..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:45:17 -0400

“The business of the church is to ‘remember’ the future. Not merely to remember that there is to be a future, but mysteriously to make the future really present.”

- 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 am aging and eaten..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:13:15 -0400

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"More and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:49:00 -0400

“More and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language. It’s not a quality one can counterfeit, nor do I think that age, breadth of experience, or a certain equanimity of tone- “wisdom,” call it—are necessarily the issue … I would describe it as a recognizable complexity of experience culminating in a clarity of expression that is neither reductive nor summative, some sense that a fully inhabited life-be it brief, or narrow, or in some fundamental way thwarted-has been suffered into form.”

- Christian Wiman, “Fugitive Pieces (I)” in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

"Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:15:36 -0400

“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small … We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:35:59 -0400

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live … To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it.”

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to prove or to conquer,..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:10:59 -0400

“We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel. If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.”

- Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine

"The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:22:29 -0400

“The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.”

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

To Love

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:11:51 -0400

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 earth in order to..."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:26:37 -0400

“I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope.”

- 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 future hope, but..."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:33:06 -0400

“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

"What I crave—and what I have known, in fugitive instants—is mystery that utterly..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:49:25 -0400

“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

"Run off to meet Jesus. Tell him the problem. Ask him why he didn’t come sooner, why he allowed that..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:30:35 -0400

“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

"To be given the picture of myself as crucifier, as I am given it in the Easter encounter, is to make..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:50:36 -0400

“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

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

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:32:52 -0400

“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

"To cultivate an ear for tone is, oddly enough, to cultivate one’s own perceptual alertness …..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:53:03 -0400

“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”

All is Grace

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:31:00 -0400

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.

"The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:13:09 -0400

“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

"In the arc of my unremarkable life, wherein the victories have been small and personal, the trials..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 11:53:10 -0400

“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