December 2011
59 posts
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WatchFree Fall by Prolifik
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“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our...
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“Waiting silently is the hardest thing of all. I was dying to talk to Jim and about Jim. But the things that we feel most deeply we ought to learn to be silent about, at least until we have talked them over thoroughly with God.”
— Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control
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“Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is ‘a mind of winter’ in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at...
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TIMOTHY: Sometimes, we feel God’s hand on the back of our neck pushing us towards something. And sometimes, we feel totally abandoned. That’s normal. But just because you don’t feel something, doesn’t mean it’s not there. How many people here have gotten sunburned on a cloudy day? You didn’t think it was working on you, but it was. God’s love is just like...
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“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (via invisibleforeigner)
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“We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God, or we can write the great American novel. But the only way we can brush against the hem of the Lord, or hope to be part of the creative process, is to have the courage, the faith, to abandon control.
For the opposite of sin is faith, and never virtue, and we live in a world which believes that...
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“Weizsäcker’s book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore...
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“[N]othing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he doesn’t fill it, but on the...
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“[My grandmother] was a religious woman. That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room...
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“I can live with this promise
that nothing is in place but everything is here”
— Lavinia Greenlaw, “Estuary”
(if anyone can tell me which collection of hers this is from, i’d be so, so grateful!)
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“Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity.
I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such...
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“God becomes known to us by our constant confession of the limits of our human symbols.”
— Henri J. M. Nouwen, Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader (edited by Robert Durback)
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“Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
— Henri J. M. Nouwen, Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader (edited by Robert Durback) (via mikegarycole)
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“All art is nostalgia for God.”
— Alexei Jawlensky (via chary)
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“Israel’s God’s bodied love continues world-making.
The modifier ‘Israel’ assures that ‘God’ is the creator of heaven and earth, who emancipated Israel and gave the commands of Sinai. This God is fully and uniquely ‘bodied’ in Jesus and his restorative life. ‘Continues’ concerns the ongoing force and rule of God’s Spirit that...
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STAN: [T]hings are going to get better. The sun’s gonna rise on a new day. I know it doesn’t feel like it will, but that dawn’s coming. There’s hope. One of the agents here repeated to me something that a friend had mentioned to him, and he said, “We’re all prophets now.” And, you know, I can’t think of a prophet worth a damn that didn’t...
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“There are no doubt unthinking Catholics. Asked what they believe, they say they believe what the church believes, whatever that may be. But the authentic Catholic spirit is well expressed by the fifth-century St. Augustine: ‘No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable. Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought. Not everyone who thinks...
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“It is true that, as the sixteenth-century St. Ignatius of Loyola put it, we should think with the Church (sentire cum ecclesia). It is also true that thinking with the Church begins with thinking. Faithful assent is not a matter of standing to attention, clicking one’s heels, and saluting at the appearance of every document from Rome. Rather, it is a matter of thinking for myself so...
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“[R]eligion, not only in America, has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful. So liberals have set out upon a long, earnest project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable—if such a thing can be imagined as an effort fired by moral passion and carried out by people who would...
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“There is every reason to turn to poetry in order to acquire a sense of the nature of religion. The two seem always to have been intimately linked. This deep and ancient affinity cannot be accidental. One does not ‘understand’ what Aeschylus or Isaiah wrote, because poetry is not, in the ordinary sense, ‘understood.’ If it is great, it is lived with over time by...
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“Those who try to understand religion from an outsider’s perspective share the tendency of anthropologists to mistake the limits of their own comprehension for a crudeness, a rudimentary character, in what they observe. Anthropologists now acknowledge this error, if they have not yet learned to avoid it. Those who look from the outside at religion, however, still occupy precisely, and...
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“Any reader of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job is aware that the canon of scripture has room for thought that can disrupt conventional assumptions about the nature of belief, whether these assumptions are held by the religious or by their critics. Indeed, religion is by nature restless with itself, impatient within the constraints of its own expression. When the fifteenth-century Zen monk...
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“[C]ourage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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“‘It is,’ [John Henry Cardinal] Newman observed, ‘as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.’ However convincing the argument, however holy the arguer, the act of faith remains an act of choice which no one can do for another. Pascal’s ‘wager’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘leap’ are neither of them quite adequate descriptions,...
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“No doubt by praying we learn to pray, and the more we pray the oftener we can pray, and the better we can pray. He who prays by fits and starts is never likely to attain to that effectual, fervent prayer which availeth much. Prayer is good, the habit of prayer is better, but the spirit of prayer is the best of all. It is in the spirit of prayer that we pray without ceasing, and this can...
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“[A]s Bonhoeffer wrote in his lovely book, Life Together, the church is called to anticipate the transparency of the city of God. No one is to bury his talent, but each member of the body is to share whatever good he has for the common good of all. Sins are not to be concealed but confessed, and Christians are commanded to meet open confession with open forgiveness. ‘You are the light...
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“[T]he heart that desires the supreme friendship must be undivided in its aim. The grace of prayer is the grace of the single eye. When we read the lives of the saints, we are struck by a certain large leisure which went hand in hand with a remarkable effectiveness. They were never hurried; they did comparatively few things, and these not necessarily striking or important; and they troubled...
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“I don’t think a Christian account of ‘religion’ requires that we identify religion with belief in God. Whether one considers Paul or Augustine or Calvin, it seems to me that ‘religion’ is associated more fundamentally with an impulse to worship. To say that human beings are ineradicably ‘religious’ is not to say that they just can’t shake...
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“I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to ‘prove my answer.’ The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole....
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“[I]dealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism.”
— C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses
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“It is… quite true that the Christians do enjoy their world picture, aesthetically, once they have accepted it as true. Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts, for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an aesthetic stimulus. In this sense, Christianity, Life-Force-Worship, Marxism, Freudianism all become ‘poetries’ to their own believers....
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“You don’t have a soul… . You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
i should qualify that i didn’t post this quote because i agree with it entirely. i don’t think we “have a body, temporarily,” since that is inconsistent with what Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 15:35-57, about the immortal,...
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“The twentieth-century Scottish preacher James Stewart makes a powerful statement when he talks of the mystery of Jesus’ personality as the ‘startling coalescence of contrarieties’:
He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men, yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror...
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"The Holy Land Today" by Tom Wright →
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“In the same passage where Paul speaks of God’s intention to make the whole world his Holy Land, to renew and liberate the whole of creation, he also speaks of the whole creation at present groaning in travail; and then he declares that we who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we, too, wait for our final redemption (Romans 8.18-27). It is in that context that he...
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“‘Thou wouldst not seek Him if thou hadst not already found Him,’ Pascal says, and it is true too that you love God if you want to love Him. One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word. Sooner or later one is given a chance to prove his love.”
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (via invisibleforeigner)
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“The great mystery of the Incarnation, which meant that God became man that man might become God, was a joy that made us want to kiss the earth in worship, because His feet once trod that same earth.”
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (via invisibleforeigner)
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“[I]n truth there is no greater power on the planet than self-sacrificial love. Coming under others has a power to do what laws and bullets and bombs can ever do—namely, bring about transformation in an enemy’s heart. This is the unique “Lamb power” of the kingdom of God, and indeed, this is the power of God Almighty. When God flexes his omnipotent muscle, it doesn’t...
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“We don’t [know how to worship]. At our best we must amuse the angels enormously. I read last summer that scientists are closer to the creationists now—that there does seem evidence for a beginning to the universe. This has upset other scientists. I don’t see why it should. Galileo upset the establishment enormously. Jesus upset the establishment. Galileo did nothing to change...
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“I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars. I can understand God only through one specific particular, the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the ultimate particular, which gives me my understanding of the Creator and of the beauty of life. I believe that God loved us so much that he came to us as a human being, as one of us, to show us his...
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“Whether artists are aware of it or not, art is always incarnational. True art is Christian. Sometimes I know that my work at its best keeps me from straying, keeps my faith intact. Someone once asked me if the fact that I was a Christian affected the way I work. I said no, but the way I work affects my Christianity.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings...
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“We’ve got to be free to fail. As Christians we follow a man who in terms of the world failed. He listened to his mission, to where the Father told him to go. We seem to have lost sight of that. We live in a world that insists we be successes. If you’re not free to fail, you’ll never be anything but mediocre. You must try to do more than you can really do. Sometimes, you do...
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“Freedom comes on the other side of work. If I want to play a Bach fugue, I must practice scales. If I hope for any transcendent experience in prayer, I have to have just done my ordinary, everyday prayers, which is the same thing as practicing my scales. I have to write every day. Freedom and discipline, rather than being antithetical, are complementary. Permissiveness, either from others...
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“I’m learning that love is not an emotion. God is love, but God is not an emotion. We may not always feel love toward those who are close to us, but that doesn’t alter the fact of our love. Love is what we do. One of the great victories of the Enemy is to persuade us that love is a feeling.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic...
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“One of my sons-in-law is an English Anglican theologian priest. He has talked about being atheists for Christ’s sake. He means that Christians build up little gods, little temples of Baal. We begin to worship them. And we must tear them down, destroy them. The gods we erect are easier to worship than the Creator of the universe. They’re more comprehensible. The God I believe in...
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“When I realized that [I was an atheist] I was trying to be a Christian with my mind only, trying to put Christianity in terms of provable facts. My husband left the theater when our children were little, and we moved to a little New England village. I was asked if I would teach Sunday school. I explained to the minister that I didn’t really believe in God, but I couldn’t live as...
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“I don’t know why I always had a deep sense of the nearness of a personal God to whom I could talk. Perhaps part of it was the influence of a marvelous old English Roman Catholic woman, Mary O’Connell, who took care of me. Mrs. O. was a true Christian saint. Wherever she was, there was laughter and joy, the infallible signs of the presence of God. Yet, she had a terrible life....
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“One of the greatest journalists of the last generation, Bernard Levin, described how, when he was a small boy, a great celebrity came to visit his school. The headmaster, perhaps wanting to impress, called the young Levin to the platform in front of the whole school. The celebrity, perhaps wanting to be kind, asked the little boy what he’d had for breakfast.
‘Matzobrei,’...