February 2012
88 posts
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“One thing we know about Jesus’ spiritual life is that he asked his Father that the basileia might come (Matt. 6:9-15, Luke 11:2-4). The very fact that Jesus prayed in this way, and taught his disciples to do likewise, tells us something important about the basileia: it is right and proper to pray for its coming. The explicit placing of the basileia in the prayer, directly after the hallowing of...
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“There is no ‘experience’ of God in prayer… but rather a disturbance that invites us to assent to a reordering of our experiences and our sense of what these are and can be. We come to realize that the risk of faith is not assenting to a deficient mode of knowledge but of accepting that, once it is embraced, faith can declare itself as the fundamental ground of our thought and action. We are...
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“God becomes present to us in prayer only to the extent that we open ourselves to the possibility of counterexperience.”
— Kevin Hart, “The Experience of the Kingdom of God,” The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response (edited by Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall) (via bookofprayer)
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“If we meet God in prayer it is as absolute subject, not as intentional object, and this means several things. To begin with, it suggests that the encounter does not take the form of an experience; at the most, we could call it a counterexperience. It indicates a movement we cannot inaugurate or control, a rupture in the immanence of our lives. Needless to say, the recognition that God always...
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“To attend to God: it is a rich notion, if one will allow it to be so. It invites us to see the soul fixed on the deity, concentrating on him, or — it might come to be the same thing — relaxing so as to draw close to him. For it certainly suggests approaching so as to be near at hand, and with the sense of offering service. Yet this service is not servitude, since to attend to God also means...
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“If anything is likely to persuade us that the words ‘experience’ and ‘God’ can enter into a positive relation with one another, it is the simple fact that people pray. In a state of prayer, public or private, one’s consciousness is directed to God. This is not to say that the deity ever offers himself as an intentional object, or that prayer is always ‘answered’ in a straightforward way. It is...
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“Christianity is caught up in an irreducibly double gesture. On one hand, as a living force it must stretch ahead into the unknown, engaging with whatever confronts it and developing itself in every way that is consistent with its missions; on the other hand, it must return perpetually in order to confirm its bases in the witnesses of the New Testament and its roots in the Hebrew scriptures....
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“[T]he synoptic gospels stress time and again that Jesus was convinced that God’s rule, the basileia, was breaking into the world, that an urgent decision about it had to be made, and that the fellowship of an open table was an apt sign of what the kingdom would be like.”
— Kevin Hart, “The Experience of the Kingdom of God,” The Experience of God: A Postmodern...
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“Many people in the Hebrew Bible hold dear the promises of Yahweh, only a few are depicted as conversing with him. Moses enters a heavy cloud (Ex. 19:16) and speaks of encountering a trace of the divine (Ex. 33:22), Elijah listens to a thin voice of silence (1 Kings 19:12): when we are most tempted to venture the word ‘experience’ we are also firmly reminded that God insists on...
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“The healings and the miracles are signs of God’s strength and Jesus’ intimacy with the one he calls ‘Abba,’ but they are not performed so that people may idly savor the supernatural. Unlike magic, miracles presume that faith has already been risked, not always by everyone involved but always by someone.”
— Kevin Hart, “The Experience of the Kingdom of...
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“The father of modern Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher, said in the second edition of his On Religion (first published in 1799) that if we are to understand religion we must step back to an ‘earlier moment’ in our consciousnesses, a time when sense and object ‘mingle and unite’; it is this moment, he says, ‘which you always experience yet never...
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“Perhaps God reveals himself only at the very edge of the concepts we are obliged to use, leaving the blessed soul with a sense that something wondrous has happened but with no language appropriate to speak of it.”
— Kevin Hart, “The Experience of the Kingdom of God,” The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response (edited by Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall)
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“People sometimes think that the spiritual world is distinct from, and even distant from, this world, ‘the company of flesh and blood’, as [William] Wordsworth so memorably put it. But the spiritual world is within this one: not as a secret, but as a radiance. To think of the spiritual world as a secret is to court idols, and the only virtue there is that God appears in the cracks of idols. There,...
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“Prayer is the greatest irruption of immanence that humans can perform. It is poetry taken to the limit, speech turned toward the unsayable. To speak to God. Imagine that! But what can one say to God? At its deepest level a true prayer says nothing at all, simply ‘yes’ and — as Jacques Derrida has reminded us — ‘yes’ to that ‘yes’. Of course, a prayer can be overheard, or read by anyone once it is...
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“What’s truly strange is God, not religion. To say ‘God’ is to explode immanence. Now that’s extraordinary.”
— Kevin Hart, John Kinsella interviews Kevin Hart, John Kinsella
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Footnote to All Prayers
by: C. S. Lewis from: Poems
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art. Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream, And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address The coinage of...
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Prayer
by: C. S. Lewis from: Poems
Master, they say that when I seem To be in speech with you, Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream —One talker aping two.
They are half right, but not as they Imagine; rather, I Seek in myself the things I meant to say, And lo! the wells are dry.
Then, seeing me empty, you forsake The Listener’s rôle, and through My dead lips breathe and into utterance...
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“Jesus’ own ‘I’ is always opened into ‘being with’ the Father; he is never alone, but is forever receiving himself from and giving himself back to the Father. ‘My teaching is not mine’; his ‘I’ is opened up into the Trinity. Those who come to know him ‘see’ the Father; they enter into this communion of his with the Father. It...
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“It is only in God and in light of God that we rightly know man. Any ‘self-knowledge’ that restricts man to the empirical and the tangible fails to engage man’s true depth. Man knows himself only when he learns to understand himself in the light of God, and he knows others only when he sees the mystery of God in them.”
— Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth (via...
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“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state—it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle. Entertainment is a diversion, a distraction of the attention of the mind from the...
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“Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.”
— C. S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (via bookofprayer)
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“The very question ‘Does prayer work?’ puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. ‘Work’: as if it were magic, or a machine—something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession...
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“We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays, we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the...
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“Before I can listen to God in prayer, I must fumble through the prayers of words, of willful demands, the prayers of childish ‘Gimmes,’ of ‘Help mes,’ of ‘I want… .’ Until I tell God what I want, I have no way of knowing whether or not I truly want it. Unless I ask God for something, I do not know whether or not it is something for which I ought to ask,...
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“When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. To speak in hyperbole, when the Father laughs to the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and love gives the persons [of the Trinity] of which the Holy Spirit is one.”
— Meister Eckhart, Meister...
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“In the heart of the Trinity, the Creator laughs and gives birth to the child. The child laughs back at the Creator, and together they give birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to creation.”
— Meister Eckhart, quoted in Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox
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“There is vast evidence in new religiosities of every sort that religion is not only not dead but that it may be more consequential than ever in today’s highly mobile and interconnected global politics.”
— Arjun Appadurai, “Here and Now,” Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (via hours)
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“I have found that writing is the way I most easily pray. In seeking to formulate truth in words, I search deep into the heart of the God of Jesus Christ in a way others do in silence or service or solitude.”
— Samuel Wells, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection (via invisibleforeigner)
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“[W]hen Christians say the Creed together, they do so in the form of a prayer that begins ‘We believe’ and ends with the word ‘Amen’. This teaches us that all our knowledge and understanding is, fundamentally, a prayer. Hence the activity of reading this book will be a form of prayer.”
— Samuel Wells, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection
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“The Church is at home everywhere, and everyone should be able to feel himself at home in the Church. Thus the risen Christ, when he shows himself to his friends, takes on the countenance of all races and each hears him in his own tongue. Such is the Church and such is its real attitude.”
— Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: a Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind...
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“The Bible, in its poetic and indeed Shakespearean King James translation rather than in today’s flat, pedestrian versions, had a huge formative influence on the language, imagery, symbolism, and allegory of such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.”
— Camille Paglia, Religion and the Arts in America,...
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“The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the too–Catholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the...
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“Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe.”
— Camille Paglia, Religion and the Arts in America, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the...
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“Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not...
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“[A]ll reality is metaphor.”
— Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“Now comes a peaceful day, all day long. Then comes evil, crossing the street, going out of its way with determined steps and a face like a nail—invasive, wanting to molest, to hurt, to stain, to dismay, to dishearten. This is no discourse, I have not even the beginnings of sufficient knowledge to hunt down the reasons why. I suppose they, those lives soaked in evil, are miserable and so they ever...
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“When I came to a teachable age, I was, as most youngsters are, directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, meaning not so much ideas but demonstrated facts. Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties.
Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of...
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“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world , and the light of ______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of...
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“I’ve always liked that Buddha, in order to talk about sin and temptation, had to pass through the city of sin and temptation. He didn’t avoid it, he went through it, came out with a vision that exceeded it. That’s a spiritual journey. If you stand still, you know nothing about spirituality.”
— Stephen Dunn, Poet of Restraint and Extravagance: A Conversation with...
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“[T]he Ten Commandments, those extravagant rules for restraint, came about because we are who we are, because, as a species, we need to be contained. In the poem [‘Ars Poetica’], I invoke the Commandments as if they constituted a kind of poem that we must struggle with. Most religions, of course, began in mystery; almost all religions end up as ethical systems that try to make us...
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“Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, ‘How will next year be for me? Where will I be five or ten years from now?’ There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour, or the following day. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the...
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“Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of...
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“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Five,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“What is spiritual about the manifest is not the part that leaves tracks in the snow.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Four,” ‘Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems’
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“[P]ut yourself in the way of grace.”
— John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume XII: Rome to Birmingham (January 1847 to December 1848) (edited by Charles Stephen Dessain of the Birmingham Oratory)
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“[P]ut yourself in the way of the gift.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
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“[I]n… severe ‘program[s]’ of religious life there was every indication that nearness to God could be brought about by increasingly rigorous behavior, more prayer, more work, more abstinence.”
— Mary Oliver, “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“[Mystics] do not of course need to be religious in the conventional sense (abiding, that is, by established tenets); many of them are not. For those who are, however, there is this difference: the nonreligious mystic generally has nothing to ‘work with’ but intuition in the attempt to move nearer to creator, or mystical center, however one may define this core. While the...
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“[E]ven the most faithful man is in some sense passive, for a man receives grace and cannot make his own fortune altogether. It is in grace that one lives, or in hell—hell being, for a man of faith, that place, or those days, when the presence of God is withdrawn.”
— Mary Oliver, “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Winter Hours: Prose,...
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“Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.”
—...
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