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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

May 21

6 Comments

How God Feels in This World

In around a month or so, it will be one year since we packed up and left Vancouver Island and returned to our roots in southern Alberta. For the entirety of this time, Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing has been sitting on or around the shelf beside my favourite reading chair.  The book was a parting gift from a dear saint in our previous church—a woman whose spirituality was thick and deep and broad, and from whom I learned a great deal over the course of my three years on the Island.  She said it was a book that had impacted her like few others. I accepted her gift with gratitude and no small amount of curiosity. Read more

May 9

9 Comments

“God Does Not Depend on You”

Over the course of the five years or so that I have been maintaining this blog, it has been interesting to observe which topics spark conversation and which do not. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that if there is one topic or theme that has tended to generate the most comments and/or traffic over the lifespan of this blog, it would be something related to doubt—whether the role doubt plays (or can play or ought to play) in the life of faith or the role doubt has played in the rejection of faith. Read more

May 7

Do Not Fear

Yesterday presented me with two opportunities to share some reflections and experiences from my recent trip to Colombia—a morning sermon at the church I grew up in, and an evening presentation at a local fundraiser for the work of MCC. Wherever we went in Colombia and whoever we spoke with, we would ask some variation of, “so what would you have us say to people back in Canada?” Almost without exception we would hear something along these lines: “Just tell our stories. It is important for us to know that our stories are heard.” The more I have thought about the sights and sounds and stories we encountered in Colombia, the more I have been struck by what an enormous privilege and a solemn responsibility it is to be entrusted with a story.   Read more

May 1

5 Comments

Faith Does Not Wait

I haven’t been writing much over the past week or so due mainly to the demands of settling back into “real” life after my trip to Colombia, as well as dealing with a persistent bug that seems to have followed me home from South America.  Even though being sick is no fun, there are blessings here too, for I have had found myself with much more time for reading than normal!  One of the books that I have been reading over the past week or so, as I continue to reflect upon and process what I saw and learned in Colombia, is Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.  Here’s a quote I am mulling over today as I think about the reality of five million internally displaced people in Colombia: Read more

Apr 8

The New Beginning Has Already Been Made

The resurrection message burst through the frontiers and was universal: Christ has been raised not as an individual but as Israel’s messiah, as the Son of man of the nations, as humanity’s ‘new Adam’, and as “the first-born of all creation”…. The risen Christ pulls Adam with his right hand and Eve with his left, and with them draws the whole of humanity out of he world of death into the transfigured world of eternal life. His new beginning in his end is the beginning of God’s new world in the passing away of this one. Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun. With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away.

— Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning

Apr 6

3 Comments

Which World is the Real World?

You should take a few minutes (or hours) to read Kim Fabricius’s Good Friday sermon “Wackos” posted over at Faith and Theology today. His final paragraph is lodged in my gut as I head off to church this morning: Read more

Mar 31

2 Comments

In Spite Of

I’ve been critical of Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God here and there over the last little while (see here, for example), but the book does contain some memorable and insightful passages as well. One must give credit where credit is due. The themes of this quote, for example, struck me as fitting well with the words of Václav Havel in my previous post: Read more

Mar 7

1 Comment

Life

It’s mid-afternoon and it’s been one of those scattered, disjointed days.  Office equipment malfunctioning, the seemingly constant pinging of email, several conversations about how to do this or that better, and what the church ought to consider doing, and what a healthy church looks like, and not getting my sermon done, and thinking ahead to a funeral for a friend tomorrow, and how are we going to get the kids to their various activities tonight, and don’t forget to stop at the bank, and remember to call so-and-so about such-and such, and, and, and…. Read more

Feb 21

4 Comments

The Life and the Light

Two services in the next six days, combined with a quick jaunt to Saskatchewan to see family in between will likely mean a rather light week on this blog. I did, however, want to throw up a quote that I came across a while back that I’ve been thinking about as we head into the season of Lent.

This past Sunday was Transfiguration Sunday where the divinity of Jesus is revealed to a handful of frightened and bewildered disciples on the top of a mountain. During Lent and Holy Week we reflect upon the simultaneously horrific, beautiful, and unexpected manner in which this divinity is expressed. Read more

Feb 15

3 Comments

The Crucial Question

Over at the Mennonite Weekly Review’s “The World Together” blog, writer and activist Bert Newton has written a really thought-provoking piece on “the crucial question” when it comes to religion. So many debates and conversations on the nature of religion and irreligion focus on “belief in God” or its absence. Newton helpfully probes the common assumption that this is the central question, and asks us to ask harder and more honest questions about how and why we invest in the formation and maintenance of the views we hold about the world.

Read more

Jan 27

3 Comments

Doodles

I always enjoy Kim Fabricius’s theological “doodlings” over at Faith and Theology. He’s got a real talent for coming up with short, punchy, provocative statements that are invariably theologically insightful and interesting, and amusing to boot!

Today’s post is well worth a quick visit.  Here are a few of my favourites: Read more

Jan 17

10 Comments

Making Space

I’ve remarked here before that I am, by nature, a bit of a pessimist. I’m not particularly proud of this, but my default position seems to be  to see the glass half-empty. I tend to expect the worst in life, for myself and for those I love, as a kind of protective mechanism—this, despite the fact that this strategy has proved to protect me from precisely nothing and, in fact, almost certainly closes off certain possibilities for joy and peace. Just this morning, in a conversation  with someone about a person of mutual interest, I responded to an expression of hope and optimism in with something like, “yeah, well I’ll believe it when I see it.”   Read more

Jan 10

19 Comments

Fragmented People

This past Sunday’s sermon touched briefly on the experience of meaninglessness. The text was Genesis 1:1-5 and I focused on how the creation narrative portrays God speaking life and light and beauty and purpose into the cosmos. Yet so often, in our world and in our lives, this seems more than we can believe. We postmoderns are restless people who have difficulty accepting that there is a big story within which our individual crazy, chaotic stories can find their place. We are fragmented and unmoored people who are divided and distracted in so many ways.   Read more

Dec 16

23 Comments

A Labour of Vision

This morning, I read of Christopher Hitchens’ passing and felt very sad.

I did not know the man personally, of course, nor did I share many of his convictions about the world. Indeed, Hitchens spent a good deal of time and energy (articulately and entertainingly) attacking some of the things most important to me. But today’s news really hit me. It was kind of like hearing that a friend had died—or at least a distant cousin that you once stayed up late into the night having an intense conversation where you both got really worked up and ended up simply having to agree to disagree!   Read more

Dec 8

14 Comments

Wilderness

One of the texts that I spent some time on during last Sunday’s sermon was Isaiah 40:1-11 which speaks of good things coming from the wilderness. Words of comfort for beleaguered exiles, words of hope in the God who raises the valleys and brings low the mountains, words of good tidings to be proclaimed from the mountaintops, that the Lord comes to his people with strength and with compassion. Good words, from the wilderness. Read more

Dec 5

Welcomed From a Distance

One of my morning Scripture readings today was the famous “by faith” passage in Hebrews 11 that talks about how the heroes of faith did not receive “the things promised” and lived as “foreigners and strangers” on earth.  It’s a beautiful text, a powerful portrayal of longing, faith, and hope. Read more

Dec 2

4 Comments

It Is To You My Heart Calls

One of my trusted companions throughout each Advent Season over the last few years has been a little reader put together by the folks at Regent College called The Candle and the Crown. Each day there are two Scripture readings and short reflections by Regent faculty, alumni, and others—one for the morning and one for the evening.

Among the Scripture readings this week was the twenty-seventh Psalm, which has long been one of my favourite psalms. The combination of joyful, expectant hope, longing, and raw honesty has made this psalm a frequent destination for me. As with so many of the Psalms (and Scripture in general), I find that these ancient words narrate and interpret my own experience so many years later. Read more

Nov 12

9 Comments

Reading and the Encroaching Buzz

Last night, I finished a book. Not a particularly momentous occasion, you might think—and certainly not worth celebrating online. But it was significant to me for the simple reason that  I haven’t been doing much of this lately. Finishing books, that is. I’m very good at starting books—I must have fifteen or so on the go at any given moment—but lately I’ve noticed that making it to the last page is an increasingly rare occurrence. Read more

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