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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

Oct 22

17 Comments

Sparks and Roses

I’m currently going through the book of Job with a young adults group and tonight we’re going to be looking at the dialogue between Job and his “friends” in Job 4-7. The book of Job is, of course, famous for being “about” the problem of evil and God’s justice (or lack thereof) in the face of unmerited human suffering. We are drawn to the book of Job for a variety of reasons. It is a masterpiece of literature, certainly, but I think the story also probes some of our deepest hopes and fears as limited human beings who rarely see or know as much—about suffering or anything else—as we might like. Read more

Oct 8

22 Comments

A Prayer on Theodicy

Another day dawns and it whispers of bad news. Another person dying of cancer, another marriage falling apart, another family whose money has run out, another person’s faith reeling and staggering, another hate-fuelled bomb goes off around the world, another storm strikes killing hundreds… Read more

Sep 29

11 Comments

Unto You

Walter Brueggemann’s Prayers for a Privileged People arrived in my mailbox this morning.  On page one, I read these words: Read more

Sep 8

1 Comment

Faith Waits

 Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost.  There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them.  But faith waits, even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for.  Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it.  And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?

Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

Aug 26

15 Comments

“I Know What God Does With Pain”

From the “sobering quotes” file, comes this morning’s offering from Richard Rohr: Read more

Aug 24

11 Comments

A Grand Thing that Ought to Be True

Most of us who have been Christians for a little while or a long while have moments where we wonder if we really are right about this whole God business.  Some days it seems like nothing could be more obvious than that there is God out there guiding and sustaining the cosmos; on others, it seems like the remotest of possibilities.

Near the end of Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner quotes a character from a George MacDonald novel who has this to say about this question of questions: Read more

Aug 19

The Whole Vast Drama of Things

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last little while—I find myself going through one of those stretches where I have very little that seems worth saying. Of course one of the benefits of times when words and ideas seem to desert us is that we can lean on and be nourished by the words of others. The writings of Frederick Buechner have often been a source of such words for me. Sometimes I feel that posting long quotes from the work of others is just a way of avoiding the sometimes painful process of writing myself; other times, I just feel grateful to have stumbled across something wise and glad to be able to share it. Read more

Aug 12

19 Comments

The Weeping Mode

As a parent of young children, I often wonder about how much of the pain and brutality of the world we ought to expose our kids to—which conversations do they need to be absent from, which books and films could they do without exposure to, and when it is appropriate to let them in on the secret that the world can sometimes be kind of a nasty place (I suspect it’s quite often not as much of a “secret” to them as we might like to think).  There can be a fine line between helping your children see that the world is a safe enough place to love and learn and grow and not shielding from the reality of a messed-up world in desperate need of compassionate, committed, and resourceful people to make it better. Read more

Aug 10

8 Comments

Personal Relationships

One of the things that I have found frustrating at various points throughout my life is how the language of “personal relationship” is used in (usually evangelical) Christian contexts. Often times, the end goal of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was (and is) described as some variation of providing a way for human beings to have a “personal relationship” with God. What is needed, we are often told, is to invite Jesus into our “heart” to be our “personal saviour” and then begin cultivating our “personal relationship” with him via an amalgam of pious-sounding, mostly solitary activities. Of course this isn’t true across the board, but it’s true in enough contexts to have fairly broad traction in many denominational and cultural contexts. Read more

Jul 26

3 Comments

God Has No Grandchildren

From Richard Rohr’s Radical Grace:

Every generation has to be converted anew. Each generation has to know for itself the fidelity of God. Each generation has to do its own homework and walk its own journey of search and surrender. No person, ritual, or institution can finally do that for you. There are no spiritual coat tails on which to ride, they just give us a good head start.

It’s not enough to say that my mother was Catholic, my father was Christian, or “I am a son of Abraham” as Jesus put it. Until you come to that time in your life when you choose that you have been chosen, when you accept that you have been totally accepted, the real process of personal transformation has not begun. God has no grandchildren, it seems. Only children! And mercifully, many, many of them, because there are as many and varied journeys as there are people.

Jun 5

5 Comments

Willard on Faith, Myth Making, and the “Intellectual Slums”

I’ve been looking forward to Dallas Willard’s latest book for a while now, and was happy to see it arrive on my doorstep yesterday afternoon.  Willard is tackling the question of whether/how the claims of faith constitute genuine knowledge (as opposed to private beliefs, opinions, emotions, blind commitments, etc).  I’ve only had time to read the introduction thus far, but it looks like a very intriguing, not to mention timely, project.  Here’s a few quotes from Knowing Christ Today: Read more

Jun 1

Seven Deadly Sins

These have obviously been around a while, but I came across them for the first time last week tucked away in on one of the back pages in MEDA‘s magazine called The Marketplace.  The seven deadly sins, according to Gandhi:

  • Wealth without Work
  • Pleasure without Conscience
  • Science without Humanity
  • Knowledge without Character
  • Politics without Principle
  • Commerce without Morality
  • Worship without Sacrifice

Apr 20

1 Comment

Even During the Night

Surely I know the spring that flows
Even during the night.

The eternal spring is hidden,
But surely I know the place where it begins
Even during the night.

I don’t know its source because it has none
But know that its beginnings come from this one,
Even during the night.

I do know that nothing can equal its beauty
And that from it both heaven and earth drink
Even during the night.

I know there is no limit to its depth
And that no one can wade across its breadth,
Even during the night.

Its brightness is never clouded over,
And I know that from it all light flows,
Even during the night.

I know its current is so forceful
That it floods the nations, heaven, and hell,
Even during the night.

The current that is born of this stream,
I know, is powerful and strong,
Even during the night.

The living stream that I so desire,
I see it in this bread of life,
Even during the night.

St. John of the Cross

Apr 13

4 Comments

The Way God is Made

Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep.  The Bible instead speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. We do not go on living beyond the grave because that’s how we are made. Rather, we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made.

All the major Christian creeds affirm belief in resurrection of the body. In other words, they affirm the belief that what God in spite of everything prizes enough to bring back to life is not just some disembodied echo of human beings but a new and revised version of all the things which made them the particular human beings they were and which they need something like a body to express: their personality, the way they looked, the sound of their voices, their peculiar capacity for creating and loving, in some sense their faces.

The idea of the immortality of the soul is based on the experience of humanity’s indomitable spirit. The idea of the resurrection of the body is based on the experience of God’s unspeakable love.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

Apr 11

Waiting

To be a Christian means to be an optimist because we know what happened on the third day. We know that it worked, that Jesus’ leap of faith was not in vain. His trust was not in vain, and the Father raised him up. He trusted enough to outstare the darkness, to outstare the void, to wait upon the resurrection of the third day, not to try to create his own but to wait upon the resurrection of God. Good Friday inevitably comes into every life. So does Holy Saturday. What is given to God is always returned transformed. That is the eternal third day that we forever await.

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

Apr 3

6 Comments

God’s Self-Justification

Last night, at a young adults group I lead, we got into a discussion about the violence of certain Old Testament texts and how we are to understand/reconcile these with the ethics of Jesus. This led to a discussion of various other evils—from personal struggles down to the most grievous of historical calamities. It was a good discussion, and I was greatly encouraged by the maturity of their views about God, evil, redemption, and hope. Read more

Mar 28

8 Comments

Sinners Anonymous

I’ve been reading Frederick Buechner again lately and, as always, am finding his way of putting things to be quite memorable.  Here’s a quote from Whistling in the Dark that serves as a good reminder about what the church is about as we head into another weekend.  This comes after a brief discussion of the structure and purpose of the Alcoholics Anonymous program: Read more

Mar 22

2 Comments

Preaching

I preached this morning—something that is still taking some getting used to.  Over the last decade or so, I’ve grown accustomed to preaching once or twice a year, at special events, or as a guest in another church.  The idea of preaching regularly (in my case, once a month or so) still feels like strange, uncharted, fearful, and exciting territory to me. Read more

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