Some of my favourite quotations

JESUS WENT TO JERUSALEM to announce the Good News to the people of that city. And Jesus knew that he was going to put a choice before them: Will you be my disciple, or will you be my executioner? There is no middle ground here. Jesus went to Jerusalem to put people in a situation where they had to say yes or no. That is the great drama of Jesus' passion: He had to wait upon how people were going to respond.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, "A Spirituality of Waiting," The Weavings Reader
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I'D ALWAYS KNOWN, in one place in my throat, how Jesus must have cried in the garden—crying not to die, because there was no fear of death, and not to leave his friends, because he walked alone, and not to suffer, because the blood and bruises and thorns were part of his perfection—but crying because he could not find his Father's face, because when he would suffer all that he could bear, the pain of every person, living and dead, in that dark moment, there was really nobody there.

Paul Shepherd, More Like Not Running Away: A Novel
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IN THE CROSS IS SALVATION, in the Cross is life, in the Cross is protection from our enemies, in the Cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness, in the Cross is strength of mind, in the Cross is joy of spirit, in the Cross is the height of virtue, in the Cross is perfection of sanctity. There is no salvation of the soul, nor hope of everlasting life, but in the Cross.

Thomas á Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
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HE DIED, but he vanquished death; in himself, he put an end to what we feared; he took it upon himself, and he vanquished it; as a mighty hunter, he captured and slew the lion.

Where is death? Seek it in Christ, for it exists no longer; but it did exist, and now it is dead. O life, O death of death! Be of good heart; it will die in us also. What has taken place in our head will take place in his members; death will die in us also. But when? At the end of the world, at the resurrection of the dead in which we believe and concerning which we do not doubt.

Augustine, Sermon 233
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THERE IS WONDERFUL POWER in the Cross of Christ. It has power to wake the dullest conscience and melt the hardest heart, to cleanse the unclean, to reconcile him who is afar off and restore him to fellowship with God, to redeem the prisoner from his bondage and lift the pauper from the dunghill, to break down the barriers which divide [people] from one another, to transform our wayward characters into the image of Christ and finally make us fit to stand in white robes before the throne of God.

John Stott, The Preacher's Portrait

EASTER is not the celebration of a past event. The alleluia is not for what was; Easter proclaims a beginning which has already decided the remotest future. The Resurrection means that the beginning of glory has already started.

Karl Rahner, Everyday Faith

Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.

Augustine, Confessions
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The function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society.

Northrop Frye, quoted in Michael Dirda, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland

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The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

John Milton, "Of Education"
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In academic life the temptation to worship the Part instead of the Whole is subtle and rationally appealing. In the sciences—natural and social—in the humanities, we learn an enormous amount of invigorating truth. We know this search is valid. And therefore it is an aspect of the search for God himself. But if we stop at halfway houses, if we are content with a likeness of Reality, then we are bowing before graven images. They are not false, they are only seductively incomplete.

Gordon W. Allport, Waiting for the Lord: Meditations on God and Man

There are those who desire to acquire knowledge for its own value—and this is a base vanity. But there are others who desire to have it to edify others—and this is charity. And there are others who desire it so that they may be edified—and this is wisdom.

Bernard of Clairvaux, The Song of Solomon
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It's not better teachers, texts, or curricula that our children need most; it's better childhoods, and we will never see lasting school reform until we see parent reform.

Samuel Sava, in Leadership
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A little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a further proceeding therein doth bring the mind of man back again.

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
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Remember: When you talk you only repeat what you already know, but if you listen you may learn something.

Amish school proverb
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A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vain-glory, and pride; one should not be able to fool him by flattery, nor blind him by gifts, nor conquer him by the stomach, nor dominate him by anger; but he should be patient, gentle, and humble as far as possible; he must be tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls.

Benedicta Ward, Desert Christian
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IN AUTUMN'S vibrant colors there are reminders of summer's fullness of life, of winter's impending bleakness, and of the prospect of spring not far beyond. Autumn compels us to think about life's transience and continuity all in one.

Allen M. Young, Small Creatures and Ordinary Places
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DAYS decrease,
And autumn grows,
Autumn in everything.

Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto

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WE THANK Thee, then, O Father, for all things bright and good, / The seed time and the harvest, our life, our health, and food; / No gifts have we to offer, for all Thy love imparts, / But that which Thou desirest, our humble, thankful hearts.

Matthias Claudius, We Plow the Fields and Scatter

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WHEN the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here there are no lying nor vain epitaphs. … Let us walk in the cemetery of leaves—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.

Henry David Thoreau, Autumnal Tints

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I SAW old autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence,
listening
To silence.

Thomas Hurd, "Ode: Autumn"

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FOR the past few years, it has become my custom in autumn to evaluate what needs to be relinquished in my life. Sometimes possessions weigh me down. At other times it is my character flaws that burden not only me but everyone who lives with me as well. I look into my closet and my heart each autumn and ask, "Is there anything I could surrender that would help me become a freer person?"

Macrina Wiederkehr and Joyce Rupp, The Circle of Life

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CHANGE ME, oh God,
Into a tree in autumn.
And let my dying
Be a blaze of glory!

Esther Popel, "October Prayer"

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FOR the fruit of all creation, thanks
be to God.
For the gifts to ev'ry nation, thanks
be to God.
For the plowing, sowing, reaping,
silent growth while we are sleeping,
Future needs in earth's safekeeping,
thanks be to God.

Fred Pratt Green, For the Fruit of All Creation
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THE GOSPEL message says: "You don't live in a mechanistic world ruled by necessity; you don't live in a random world ruled by chance; you live in a world ruled by the God of Exodus and Easter. He will do things in you that neither you nor your friends would have supposed possible."

Eugene H. Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work
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I AM GROWING accustomed to the grace of gradual illumination, so it is a delight and no real surprise when I see God's messages to me in the scattered rainbows on my wall at sunrise.

Luci Shaw in Weavings
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GOD'S WORD is designed to make us Christians, not scientists, and to lead us to eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ. It was not God's intention to reveal in Scripture what human beings could discover by their own investigations and experiments.

John R. W. Stott, Christian Basics
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SILENCE is one of the deepest disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don't need to straighten others out.

Richard J. Foster, Seeking the Kingdom

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A REALIST is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.

Warren W. Wiersbe in Leadership
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JESUS CHRIST is God's missionary par excellence, and he involves his followers in his mission.
C. Rene Padilla in Missiology
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YOU COULD SPEAK of Jesus' rising as the most hopeful (hope-full) thing that has ever happened—and you would be right!

J. I. Packer, Your Father Loves You
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PEOPLE DO NOT drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

D. A. Carson, For the Love of God
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I DON'T WANT to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political Right. The hard Right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

Billy Graham in Parade (1981)
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ALTHOUGH the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown.

Corrie ten Boom, My Heart Sings
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IF WE ATTEMPT to comprehend God, the God we think we understand is not God. … God's presence and activity are beyond our ability to comprehend. We can accept them with faith. We can be deeply thankful for them. But there is no way we can grasp them, describe them, and explain them. … The closer we are to God, the less we know about God.

Pseudo-Macarius, Homilies
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WHEN THE END comes and we are taken for judgment above, we will then clearly understand in God the mysteries that puzzle us now. Not one of us will think to say, "Lord, if it had been some other way, all would be well."

Julian of Norwich, Showings
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IT IS POSSIBLE to learn all about the mysteries of the Bible and never be affected by it in one's soul. Great knowledge is not enough.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
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IT IS a serious waste to let a day go by without allowing God to change us.

Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love
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GOD has granted you the morning, but he does not promise the evening. Spend each day as if it were your last.

Lawrence Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat
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OUR BODIES have one fault: The more we cater to them, the more things they want. … This is not a trifling matter. God will help us to gain mastery of our bodies.

Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection
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GOD ALLOWS himself to be seen in ordinary things, even when they are darkened by shadows.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
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IF YOU put up with yourself, why not put up with everyone else?

Guigo I, Meditations
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FIRE TESTS IRON; temptation tests an honest person. Sometimes we don't know what we can do until temptation shows us what we are.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
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THE BEST TEACHERS are trouble and affliction. These alone give us understanding.

John Foxe, Christ Jesus Triumphant
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IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to love an unseen God while mistreating God's visible creation.

John Woolman, Journal
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SPRINKLE a seasoning of short prayers on your daily living. If you see something beautiful, thank God for it. If you are aware of someone's need, ask God to help. … You can toss up many such prayers all day long. They will help you in your meditation and in your secular employment as well. Make a habit of it.

Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
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I HAVE SEEN a fraction of [God's] glory, and it is awesome.

Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs
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THE BEST TIME to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

Chinese proverb
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IF YOU are planning for a year,
sow rice.
If you are planning for a decade,
plant trees.
If you are planning for a lifetime,
educate people.

Chinese proverb
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IF YOU can talk, you can sing;
if you can walk, you can dance.

African proverb

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TELL ME who's your friend, and I'll tell you who you are.

Russian proverb

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A JOY that's shared is a joy made double.

John Ray, English Proverbs
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WORRY often gives a small thing a big shadow.

Swedish proverb
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WHEN YOU were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

Indian proverb
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MONEY IS a good servant but a bad master.

H. G. Bohn, Handbook of Proverbs
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TIME IN THE SUMMER does not seem to move; instead, time collects, or perhaps it might be better said to pool. One of the spiritual lessons of summer is just that: to allow time to pool. To halt in our headlong rush. To be fully in a particular time. To stop long enough to see what lies around us, rather than to be always merely glimpsing.

Gary D. Schmidt, Susan M. Felch, editors, Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
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THE BEST TEACHERS to help us enjoy summer are little children. They do not yet work in offices. They do not own calendars with tasks crying out to be done. I love to see the parks fill up with young life each summer. … I am joining them for a day, lest I grow old before my time. … As a child, I was quite successful at living life fully, because I had not yet learned to live by the calendar. I lived by heart.

Macrina Wiederkehr, The Circle of Life
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[W]HEN MELODY WELLS UP in thrushes' throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery's drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric's glad in spite of it all.

Frederick Buechner, Godric
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EVERYTHING FLOWS AND stays. You can't step twice into the same river.

Heraclitus, quoted in Plato, Cratylus
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IT IS NEVER RIGHT to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or, when we suffer evil, to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.

Socrates, quoted in Plato, Crito

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IS THAT WHICH IS HOLY loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Plato, Euthyphro
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WHERE SOME PEOPLE are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or desperation will come from either of those excesses.

Aristotle, Politics
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IN THE COUNTRY of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Desiderius Erasmus, Adages
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NEW OPINIONS are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

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WHAT REALLY COUNTS in life is that at some time you have seen something, felt something, which is so great, so matchless, that everything else is nothing by comparison, that even if you forgot everything, you would never forget this.

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers
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IT IS GOD who is the ultimate reason of things, and the knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of beings.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter on a General Principle Useful in Exploring the Laws of Nature

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SO ACT as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.

Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics

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HE WHO FIGHTS with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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WHAT CAN BE SAID at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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THE ART OF BEING WISE is the art of knowing what to overlook.

William James, The Principles of Psychology
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WHEN PEOPLE ARE FREE to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

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IT IS ONLY WITH THE HEART that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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BEING "RIGHT" ISN'T ENOUGH. We also need to be wise. And loving. And patient. Perhaps nothing short of that should "seem good to the Holy Spirit and us."

Brian McLaren, as quoted in Leadership

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KNOWING GOD without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance, because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees
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A CHRISTIAN cannot win God's forgiveness, but he can lose it by refusing to extend it to a brother.

John P. Meier, The Vision of Matthew

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I NO LONGER CLUTCH at things
that are not mine.
I see that all is gift and all is thine.
A holier hunger hollows me, a thirst
for thee,
a longing to be godly, loving, free.

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Blessed Paradoxes
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LET GO of a small part of your righteousness, and in a few days, you will be at peace.

Abba Poemen, Sayings of the Fathers
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GOD WILL COMFORT US. That is true. But God will, and already does, comfort us through all those who accept us as sisters and brothers, bind up our wounds, wipe away our tears, and are kind to us in all circumstances. That is how God comforts us.

Gerhard Lohfink, The Work of God Goes On

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NOURISH BEGINNINGS, let us
nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

Muriel Rukeyser, "Elegy of Joy," The Green Wave

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LOSS IS TRANSFORMATIVE if it is met with faith. Faith is our chance to make sense of loss, to cope with the stone that rolls around in the hollow of our stomachs when something we loved, something we thought was forever, is suddenly gone.

David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

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HOW ELSE but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

(this portion is courtesy of Dr. Amar and Dr. Im)

My brother, may the Son of God who is already formed in you, grow in you so that for you he will become immeasurable, and that in you he will become laughter, exultation, the fullness of joy which no one will take from you.

- Isaac of Stella -
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The prayer that You require of me must be ultimately just a patient waiting for You, a silent standing by until You, who are ever present in the inmost center of my being,
open the gate to me from within.
In this way I shall be able to enter into myself, into the hidden sanctuary of my own being, and there, at least once in my life,
empty out before You the vessel of my heart’s blood.
That will be the true hour of my love.

- Karl Rahner -
(“Encounters with Silence” p.24)
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In one sense we are always traveling, and traveling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived. We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are traveling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, & therefore in that sense we have arrived
& are dwelling in the light.
But oh! How far have I to go to find You
in Whom I have already arrived!

- Thomas Merton -
(“A Thomas Merton Reader” p. 513)
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To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless sense to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Reaching Out” p.35)
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Now to tread the spiritual path we must learn to be silent. What is required of us is a journey into profound silence. .... To be silent with another person is a deep expression of trust and confidence and it is only when we are unconfident that we feel compelled to talk. To be silent with another person is truly to be with that other person.

- John Main -
(as quoted in “Spiritual Classics” p.156)
Through the discipline of silence, then, we are learning to place our reputation in God’s hands. We no longer need to be sure everyone understands us or thinks well of us. We let go of even needing to know what they think of us. We are silent. Interestingly, we come to value words more in times of silence. This is because we are no longer cheapening words by overuse. We are still, and in the stillness we are creating an open, empty space where God can draw near. And in this stillness we just may hear God’s voice in his wondrous, terrible, loving, all-embracing silence.

- Richard Foster -
(“Spiritual Classics” p.158, 159)
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The paradox of prayer is that we have to learn how to pray while we can only receive it as a gift. ..... We cannot truly pray by ourselves, but that it is God’s spirit who prays in us.
We cannot force God into a relationship. God comes to us on his own initiative, and no discipline, effort, or ascetic practice can make him come. All mystics stress with an impressive unanimity that prayer is ‘grace’, that is, a free gift from God, to which we can only respond with gratitude. But they hasten to add that this precious gift indeed is within our reach. In Jesus Christ, God has entered into our lives in the most intimate way, so that we could enter into his life through the Spirit.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Reaching Out” p. 115)
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.... For the more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us. ..... Only in the silence of the heart, God speaks.
- Mother Teresa –
(“Total Surrender” p. 107)
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I used to think such negative feelings were a sign of failure. Now I realize how wrong I was, for God is the God of surprises who, in the darkness and the tears of things, breaks down our false images and securities. This in-breaking can feel to us like disintegration, but it is the disintegration of the ear of wheat: if it does not die to bring new life, it shrivels away on its own. Through this painful in-breaking of the God of surprises, truths of Christian faith with which I was familiarly bored, or doubted, began to take on new meaning. As God breaks down the cocoon of our closed minds, he enters it. He is no longer remote and out there, no longer dwells only in tabernacles and temples of stone, but we meet him smiling at us in our bewilderment, beckoning to us in our confusion and revealing himself in our failure and disillusion as our only rock, refuge and strength.

- Gerard W Hughes -
(“God of Surprises” p. xiii, xiv)
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The mystery of love is that it protects and respects the aloneness of the other and creates the free space where he can convert his loneliness into a solitude that can be shared. In this solitude we can strengthen each other by mutual respect, by careful consideration of each other’s individuality, by an obedient distance from each other’s privacy and by a reverent understanding of the sacredness of the human heart. In this solitude we encourage each other to enter into the silence of our innermost being and discover there the voice that calls us beyond the limits of human togetherness to a new communion. In this solitude we can slowly become aware of a presence of him who embraces friends and lovers and offers us the freedom to love each other, because he loved us first.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Reaching Out” p. 44)
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If we really could see into the depths of ourselves and into our subconscious and unconscious minds, we would recognize in ourselves all the characteristics of the demoniac and this would terrify us, but we would see also other qualities which would delight us. There is no crime, no perversion, no cruelty ever practiced of which we are not capable, but there is also no heroism, selflessness or love which is beyond our potential. Because we are afraid of looking at the evil possibilities in us, we fail also to see our true greatness. Refusing to look at our inner lives, we ignore our true selves, renounce our individuality, our freedom, our personality, or, as the Jerusalem Bible puts it, ‘we lose our very selves’.
We refuse to acknowledge our own inner chaos because we are all afraid of rejection.

- Gerard W Hughes -
(“God of Surprises” p.28)
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There is an intimate link between the contemplative spirit and pain. We have a special mission. Our lives are not an escape from pain. It is not for us to run away from the pain of the world but somehow to hold onto it. It is important to hold in our prayer those who are stretched beyond their limits.
We can only do that if we become like Jesus and if we love the Father. Let Jesus love and live inside us. ‘The secret things of God are hidden.’
The great secret is that in this world of pain and division, he comes and wants to reveal himself to us. He wants to say to us, ‘I wish to rest in you’. This is a beautiful secret.

- Jean Vanier -
(“Treasures of the heart” p.1)
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We are called to be contemplatives in
the heart of the world by:
- seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time, and his hand in every happening, and especially,
- seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus in the
lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor,
by praying the work, that is,
by doing it with Jesus, for Jesus, and to Jesus.

- Mother Teresa -
(“Total Surrender” p. 97)
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It is always the same Christ who says:
I was hungry - not only for food, but for peace that comes from a pure heart.
I was thirsty - not for water, but for peace that satiates the passionate thirst of passion for war.
I was naked - not for clothes, but for the beautiful dignity of men and women for their bodies.
I was homeless - not for a shelter made of bricks, but for a heart that understands,
that covers, that loves.

- Mother Teresa -
(“Total Surrender” p.150-151)
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Complete sincerity is an unattainable ideal. But what is attainable is the periodic moment of sincerity, the moment, in fact, when we confess that we are not as we have sought to appear; and it is at those moments that we find contact with God once more.
The progress of our spiritual life is made up of these successive discoveries, in which we perceive that we have turned away from God instead of going towards him. That is what makes a great saint like St Francis of Assisi declare himself chief among sinners.

- Paul Tournier -
(“Reflections” p. 116,117)
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If you desire intimate union with God you must be willing to pay the price for it. The price is small enough. In fact, it is not even a price at all: it only seems to be so with us. We find it difficult to give up our desire for things that can never satisfy us in order to purchase the One Good in Whom is all our joy - and in Whom,
moreover, we get back everything else that we have renounced besides!
The fact remains that contemplation will not be given to those who willfully remain at a distance from God, who confine their interior life to a few routine exercises of piety and a few external acts of worship and service performed as a matter of duty. Such people are careful to avoid sin. They respect God as a Master. But their heart does not belong to Him.

- Thomas Merton -
(as quoted in “Spiritual Classics” p. 18, 19)
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But the solitude that really counts is the solitude of heart; it is an inner quality or attitude that does not depend on physical isolation. On occasion this isolation is necessary to develop this solitude of heart, but it would be sad if we considered this essential aspect of the spiritual life as a privilege of monks and hermits. It seems more important than ever to stress that solitude is one of the human capacities that can exist, be maintained and developed in the centre of a big city, in the middle of a large crowd and in the context of a very active and productive life. A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner centre. ...... When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Reaching Out” p. 38,39)
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Here we touch the heart of prayer since here it becomes manifest that in prayer the distinction between God’s presence and God’s absence is no longer really distinguishable. In prayer, God’s presence is never separated from his absence and God’s absence is never separated from his presence. His presence is so much beyond the human experience of being together that it quite easily is perceived as absence. His absence, on the other hand, is often so deeply felt that it leads to new sense of his presence.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Reaching Out” p. 117)
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Jean Vanier, the Canadian who founded a worldwide network of communities for mentally disabled people, has remarked more than once that Jesus did not say: ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor’, but ‘Blessed are the poor’. Simple as this remark may seem, it offers the key to the kingdom.

Once I asked Jean Vanier: ‘How do you find the strength to see so many people each day and listen to their many problems and pains?’ He gently smiled and said: ‘They show me Jesus and give me life.’ Here lies the great mystery of Christian service. Those who serve Jesus in the poor will be fed by him whom they serve: ‘He will put on an apron, set them down at table and wait on them’ (Luke 12:37).

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“Here and Now: Living in the Spirit” p.69,70)
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Praying means, above all, to be accepting toward God who is always new, always different. For God is a deeply moved God whose heart is greater than ours. The open acceptance of prayer in the face of an ever-new God makes us free. In prayer, we are constantly on the way, on a pilgrimage. On our way, we meet more and more people who show us something about the God whom we seek. We will never know for sure if we have reached God. But we do know that God will always be new and that there is no reason to fear.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“With Open Hands” p. 55)
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One of the early Christian writers describes the first stage of solitary prayer as the experience of a man who, after years of living with open doors, suddenly decides to shut them. The visitors who used to come and enter his home start pounding on his doors, wondering why they are not allowed to enter. Only when they realize that they are not welcome do they gradually stop coming.
This is the experience of anyone who decides to enter into solitude after a life without much spiritual discipline. At first, the many distractions keep presenting themselves. Later, as they receive less and less attention, they slowly withdraw.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(as quoted in “Devotional Classics” p. 138)
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When we pray, we allow God to live within us, so that at the deepest level it is God’s Spirit who does the praying in us and through us.
Soren Kierkegaard says ‘Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays’.
- James Houston -
(“The Transforming Friendship” p.6,7 )
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The real enemy is in ourselves, in our flight from the God of compassion into the security of a god of wealth, power and status, both individual and national.
God is a disturbing God. Our temptation in all religion and in all spirituality is to domesticate God, to create a God who favours us, our group, our nation, our Church, and who overthrows our enemies. But God is the God who has compassion for all creation, whose living spirit is in all; a God who breaks down in us all our comforting prejudices and false securities, religious and secular. This is very painful for us, but it is the pain of rebirth.
“God is”, in St Augustine’s words, “closer to me than I am to myself.” The encouraging note I can end with is that God is in all things, in every individual: the best which I can give to any reader is that you let God be the God of compassion to you, and through you.

- Gerard W Hughes (“God of Surprises” p.xii) -

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There are layers upon layers of consciousness within us and on our journey towards God we are constantly discovering areas of atheism within us, provided we dare to look. These discoveries are signs of progress, not of failure.
That is why so many of the saints, guilty of no serious wrongdoing in their lives, think of themselves as great sinners. They have reached inner depths of sinfulness in themselves of which most of us are blissfully unaware. They are amazed and full of gratitude to God, who accepts them in their darkness and sinfulness, while those of us who have not reached those depths may be delighted and full of gratitude at our own virtuous respectability.

- Gerard W Hughes -
(“God of Surprises” p.64, 65)

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Clement of Alexandria said that ‘prayer is keeping company with God’. This began to give me a new focus on prayer. I began to see prayer more as a friendship than a rigorous discipline. It started to become more of a relationship and less of a performance. At the same time I learned another important truth: that God calls us to our Achilles heel, where we limp most, to lead us through our natural weakness or woundedness of personality, to grow spiritually strong. After this discovery, I made up my mind that the desire to pray and keep company with God would become my primary concern in life. Prayer would come even before my public ministry.

- James Houston -
(“The Transforming Friendship” p.6,7 )

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Prayer is a matter of theology and ethics, both thinking and doing: it is profoundly guided by what we believe and by how we behave. The character of our prayers will be deeply determined by the character of God as we know him and have experienced him. The emotional education we have had since childhood will set the tone for our attitudes to God. So it is true to say: ‘tell me who your God is and I will tell you how you pray’.

- James Houston -
(“The Transforming Friendship” p.6,7 )
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Silence is the home of the word. Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to the word. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of the silence from which they come. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu expresses this well in the following way:
‘The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of the word is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.’
‘I would like to talk to the man who has forgotten words.’ That could have been said by one of the Desert Fathers. For them, the word is the instrument of the present world and silence is the mystery of the future world. If a word is to bear fruit it must be spoken from the future world into the present world. The Desert Fathers therefore considered their going into the silence of the desert to be a first step into the future world. From that world their words could bear fruit, because there they could be filled with the power of God’s silence.
In the sayings of the Desert Fathers, we can distinguish three aspects of silence. All of them deepen and strengthen the central idea that silence is the mystery of the future world. First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“The Way of the Heart” p. 40, 41)
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The third way that silence reveals itself as the mystery of the future world is by teaching us to speak. A word with power is a word that comes out of silence. A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it. It is a word that reminds us of the silence from which it comes and leads us back to that silence. A word that is not rooted in silence is a weak, powerless word that sounds like a ‘clashing cymbal or a booming gong’ (1 Corinthians 13:1).

All this is true only when the silence from which the word comes forth is not emptiness and absence, but fullness and presence, not the human silence of embarrassment, shame, or guilt, but the divine silence in which love rests secure.

- Henri JM Nouwen -
(“The Way of the Heart” p. 47)
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Silence has a psychological aspect. For me it means listening to God, but for others it may represent a way of deepening self-knowledge.
I have often had occasion to share silence with others. I can say in general that it is the less sophisticated person who understands best. A rustic who decides to listen in to God can in five minutes make you a list of all his problems, which a professor of philosophy would be incapable of doing. Children understand straight away, too. The naked truth comes out. We are dealing with simple matters, and modern people have lost their understanding of such things.

- Paul Tournier -
(as quoted in “Spiritual Classics” p. 162)

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The more I am persuaded of the importance of seeking God’s will for oneself, the more skeptical I become about the possibility of saying what is his will for others. That is the source of all kinds of intolerance and abuse. People who claim to know what is God’s will try to impose it upon others with the arrogance which comes from the conviction that they are the repositories of divine truth. I avoid that at all costs. I can never know what is God’s will for someone else. Even in psychoanalysis doctors generally prefer that their patients should make their own discoveries. If doctors start making suggestions of their own, they almost always go astray.

- Paul Tournier as quoted in “Spiritual Classics” p. 162, 163 -

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To be mindful is to live in the present moment, not to be imprisoned in the past nor anticipating a future that may never happen.
When we are fully aware of the present, life is transformed and strain and stress disappear.
So much of modern life is a feverish anticipation of future activity and excitement. We have to learn to step back from this into the freedom and possibility of the present.

The church's leaders have Alzheimer's disease. We still love them. We remember and pas on their stories.But they're living in another world. They're totally clueless about the world that is actually out there. The problem is that they are captaining the ship

Leonard Sweet, Post-Modern Pilgrims
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God became a man for this purpose: since you, a human being, could not reach God, but you can reach other humans, you might now reach God through a man. And so the man Christ Jesus became the mediator of God and human beings.

God became a man so that following a man—something you are able to do—you might reach God, which was formerly impossible to you.

Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 134, 5

Shane Claiborne, who spent a summer in the slums of Calcutta with Mother Teresa, wrote the following about one of his experiences there:

People often ask me what Mother Teresa was like. Sometimes it's like they wonder if she glowed in the dark or had a halo. She was short, wrinkled, and precious, maybe even a little ornery—like a beautiful, wise old granny. But there is one thing I will never forget—her feet. Her feet were deformed. Each morning in Mass, I would stare at them. I wondered if she had contracted leprosy. But I wasn't going to ask, of course. "Hey Mother, what's wrong with your feet?"
One day a sister said to us, "Have you noticed her feet?" We nodded, curious. She said: "Her feet are deformed because we get just enough donated shoes for everyone, and Mother does not want anyone to get stuck with the worst pair, so she digs through and finds them. And years of doing that have deformed her feet." Years of loving her neighbor as herself deformed her feet.
This is the kind of fasting that creates the divine longing for justice, where our feet become deformed by a love that places our neighbors above ourselves.

Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution (Zondervan, 2006), p.167-168

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
Sir William Osler

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
Sir William Osler

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Sir William Osler

To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
Sir William Osler

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
Sir William Osler, Aphorisms from his Bedside Teachings (1961) p. 105

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler, In H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Sir William Osler, to his students

we have reasons given to us by God in his Word why he should answer, & we can read them there. That's why Nehemiah's prayer was answered – based on God's purposes & God's promises; our prayers ought to be like that, so that God's purposes may be realized; but more often we hear prayers just asking God to bless the work, to bless the sick ones, to keep us plugging along, to keep the work going.

from Preaching Today.com

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Frederick Buechner wrote about two experiences that may be whispers from the wings or they may not be whispers from anywhere. He leaves the reader to decide.

"One of them happened when I was in a bar at an airport at an unlikely hour. I went there because I hate flying and a drink makes it easier to get on a plane. There was nobody else in the place, and there were an awful lot of empty barstools on this long bar, and I sat down at one which had, like all the rest, a little menu in front of it with the drink of the day. On the top of the menu was an object -- and the object turned out to be a tie clip and the tie clip had on it the initials C.F.B., which are my initials, and I was actually stunned by it, just B would have been sort of interesting, F.B. would have been fascinating, and C.F.B., in the right order -- the chances of that being a chance I should think would be absolutely astronomical. What it meant to me, what I chose to believe it meant was: You are in the right place, the right errand, the right road at that moment. How absurd and how small, but it's too easy to say that.

"And then another one was just a dream I had of a friend that recently died, a very undreamlike dream where he was simply standing in the room and I said: "How nice to see you, I've missed you," and he said, "Yes, I know that," and I said: "Are you really there?" and he said: "You bet I'm really here," and I said: "Can you prove it?" and he said "Of course I can prove it," and he threw me a little bit of blue string which I caught. It was so real that I woke up. I recounted the dream at breakfast the next morning with my wife and the widow of the man in the dream and my wife said, "My God, I saw that on the rug this morning" and I knew it wasn't there last night, and I ran up and sure enough, there was a little squibble of blue thread. Well again, either that's nothing -- coincidence -- or else it's just a little glimpse of the fact that maybe when we talk about the resurrection of the body, there's something to it!"

-- "A Conversation with Frederick Buechner," Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Spring 1989, 56-57 as quoted in Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress, 1994), 103-104.

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Dr. Cowart is a scholar of New York City's spiritual history. He began doing interviews, creating an archive of stories of volunteers in 911. He tells story of Joseph Bradley, a crane operator:

Joe was playing golf at a Police Benevolent Association outing when the towers were hit. Within a few hours he had gone to the union hall and registered to volunteer. That night he received a call with his assignment, and headed immediately for the city, emerging from the subway at West 4th Street."

Joseph worked all through the night in 18 inches of water, picking up body after body:

"I was sitting on the curb with my head in my hands. It was the middle of the night. That's when the Salvation Army kids appeared in their sneakers with their pink hair and their belly buttons showing and bandannas tied around their faces. One was a little girl pushing a shopping cart full of eyewash through the muck. They came with water and cold towels and took my boots off and put dry socks on my feet. And we kept going all night on the 12th and the morning of the 13th and were relieved in the afternoon. I've never seen so many people pull together. One until. One thought. We were going to rescue a survivor. But that wasn't to be.

"When I was finally relieved and started to walk out, I thought to myself, you did pretty good. You did your part. You can go home and get back to normal. Then my mind flashed to the hostages coming home from Iran, and the ticker-tape parade when the Yankees won the World Series. I had always thought that's what New York's about. Those kinds of heroes. But it was the little girl with the pink hair that became my hero that night, not Tino Martinez.

"When I got to Houston Street, a bunch more of these kids, all pierced and tattooed with multicolored hair, made a little makeshift stage. And they started to cheer as we came out, and that was it for me. I never identified with those people before, but I started crying and I cried for four blocks.

"I've been a construction worker my whole life and I've always felt I was viewed by the public as a pest. As rude. And now I was so vulnerable. Yep. I was taken totally off guard. I got home and saw my wife, show asked, 'Joe, are you okay?' 'Sure!' I said. You know, the bravado came back. But she said, 'Are you sure? Go look in the mirror.' There I was with my filthy, dirty face, and just two clean lines down from my eyes. You become like a child after you get banged around a bit. She cried with me. Gave me something to eat. Drew a bath. I don't take baths. She put me to bed for six or seven hours. I told her I wasn't coming back here.

"Now it's December 3rd and I haven't missed a day. I never knew anything about Episcopalians or Presbyterians, or gays, or people with nuts and bolts through their cheeks, or those Broadway people, but now I know them all. We're not the heroes. They are the heroes. They've cried and prayed out loud for me. I never thought I'd have a family like this one."

-- Courtney V. Cowart, "Voices from Ground Zero," Spirituality & Health, 5 (Fall 2002), 36-38.

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At a retreat in the Poconos, poet Denise Levertov asked the retreatants a question. She wanted an answer as if our very life depended on it. The questions was this "What is there between the tomb and resurrection."

Her own answer was found in a line from an R. S. Thomas poem: "and I have looked/in and seen the old questions lie/folded and in a place/by themselves . . . the piled/graveclothes of love's risen body."

-- Rose Marie Berger, "'Of Love's Risen Body'" The Poetry of Denise Levertov, 1923-1997," Sojourners, 27 (March/April 1998), 55.

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USAmerican theologian Ron Sider was once chatting with German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg about Jesus' resurrection. Pannenberg repeated at least twice in the conversation, "The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: first, it is a very unusual event; and second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live."

-- As quoted in Prism, 4 (March/April 1997), 34.

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"Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist."

-- David Ben-Gurion

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"We do not gather at Easter to celebrate a doctrine, the doctrine of the Resurrection. We come here to rejoice in the presence of one we love; in Jesus who was lost to us and has been found."

-- Herbert McCabe, "A Sermon for Easter," in God Still Matters, ed. Brian Davies (New York: Continuum, 2002) 226.

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"Our Easter faith is that we really do encounter Jesus himself; not a message from him, or a doctrine inspired by him, or an ethics of love, or a new idea of human destiny, or a picture of him, but Jesus himself."

-- Herbert McCabe, "A Sermon for Easter," in God Still Matters, ed. Brian Davies (New York: Continuum, 2002) 227.

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The last words of God according to The Last Days of Mankind, "Your business in the Universe is done: Eternity already has begun."

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"A Baptist Minister's Forgotten Story of Faith and Heroism"

The movie Titanic thrilled millions and garnered a record number of Academy Awards. But an inspiring story is missing from the script -- the self-sacrificing efforts of Baptist minister John Harper.

Harper was the son of a draper in a village near Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a Puritan in theology and practice, according to Harper's brother George, and read the sermons of the great London preacher C. H. Spurgeon aloud to his children "whether we enjoyed them or otherwise."

Both Harper and his brother became ministers. At age 17, Harper, according to his brother, had an "enraptured vision, almost overpowering in its intensity, in which he saw and felt as never before the purpose of God in the cross of Christ."

For the next five or six years, Harper worked in a paper mill by day and preached on the streets of the village and neighboring communities by night. He eventually became pastor of a mission in Glasgow.

The mission prospered, and he began a new church in another rough section of Glasgow, where many formerly "heavy drinkers, blasphemers and deep-eyed sinners" testified to the fact that Harper was the means by which they came to repentance and faith. "He looked after us carefully as a father after his children," one wrote.

After 13 years of a rigorous schedule, Harper's health broke, and he was forced to take a six-month sabbatical. Although his health never fully returned, he became pastor of a church in London, and his success there led to an invitation to preach a revival at Moody Church in Chicago in the winter of 1911. The revival was successful, and although his health was weakening, he agreed to return to Chicago that spring.

When Harper boarded the Titanic for that return trip to the United States, he was 39 years old, a widower accompanied by his 6-year old daughter, Nana. His departure included an ominous foreshadowing of disaster. While speaking at a seaman's mission in Glasgow, he mentioned he had changed his plans and instead of sailing on the Lusitania, he was scheduled to sail on the Titanic. A man stood up and begged him not to go, saying he had been in prayer and had the impression that disaster awaited him if he made the voyage. Harper's response isn't recorded, but he and his daughter sailed from Southampton on the Titanic, April 11, 1912.

They were second-class passengers, and when the Titanic struck an iceberg the night of April 15, he immediately wrapped his daughter in a blanket and was able to hand her to an upper deck officer with instruction to place her in a lifeboat. She survived the disaster. Harper didn't. As the scale of the crisis started to become obvious, Harper's Scottish voice could be heard calling out, "Women, children and the unsaved into the lifeboats first!" He took his own life jacket -- his only hope for survival -- and gave it to another man.

More than 1,500 people died in the disaster, but more than 700 survived. One man, picked up by the S. S. Carpathia after clinging to a board for several hours, recalled an encounter with a man that turned out to be Harper. After the ship had gone down, the man drifted near another passenger -- Harper -- who was struggling to stay afloat. "Are you saved?" Harper called out to him. "No," he replied. Harper responded with the worlds of Acts 16:31: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." The man made no reply and drifted away again. Before long the current brought them back within sight of each other. Again, Harper asked him, "Are you saved now?" "No," he replied, "I can't honestly say that I am." Once more the words from Acts echoed in the darkness, before they drifted apart for the last time. After his rescue, the man found out the name of the man who had asked him the questions. He explained what happened at a meeting in Ontario, Canada: "Shortly after, he went down; and there, alone in the night, and with two miles of water under me, I believed. I am John Harper's last convert." Later, the church Harper started in the Glasgow suburb was renamed Harper Memorial Church in his memory and is still active.

Ironically, Harper had faced drowning several times before, most recently during a voyage to Palestine on a leaking ship in the Mediterranean. In a description of the incident, Harper said later, "The fear of death did not for one moment disturb me. I believed that sudden death would be sudden glory."

-- Baptist Standard 110:22 (June 3,1998); Adapted from the Baptist Times

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"During the Fondren Lectures . . . I confessed, in the last lecture, that if I had a better doctrine of resurrection, I would be able to believe more steadily but there were days when I didn't believe it at all. [That] grand Theologian, Albert Outler, stopped me in the hall and said, 'You shouldn't have said that.' I said, 'You're so smart, what should I have said, Albert?' He said, 'Whoever told you you had to believe it every day.' I said, 'Tell me, dear friend, when do I have to believe the resurrection?' And he said, to my unending appreciation, 'The day you die and the day you have to die with somebody, you believe the resurrection of the dead!' Here I could say, 'Yes.' For in this situation I have been able always to say, 'Lord, I believe,' knowing all the while that in a few minutes church might be out for me but I cling to the meeting with this Thou and crave its constant repetition...'Lord, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief.'"

-- Carlyle Marney, "The True Believer"

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Genesis 2:24 GE 2:24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

“This verse has three parts. It mentions three things which are essential to marriage: to leave, to cleave, and to become one flesh.”

Eugene Peterson postulated that we are now living resurrected life. This resurrected life involves:

We need to practice living a life as if we are already already death and are already living a resurrected life. The resurrected life awakes in us the forgotten sense of wonder in knowing God. Sabbath keeping as a constant reminder and discipline. Eucharist as the communion with God. Resurrection lives are to be lived with friend.

Our secondary calling, considering God who is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him… we can therefore properly say that as a matter of secondary calling that we are called to homemaking or to the practice of law or to art history.

Os Guinness, one of the sharpest mind in American and part pf the Trinity Forum rightly helps us in our understanding of calling and vocation. This is a good book for those who seeks to understand the call of God on our lives

“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.

“You must be very patient,” replied the fox.
“First you will sit down at a little distance from me like that, in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...”

“The next day the little prince came back.
‘It would have been better to come back at the same hour,’ said the fox. ‘If, for example, you came at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.’

‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret:
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1945), 65-66.

I said to the man
who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely
into the unknown.”

And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness
and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you
better than the light
and safer than a known way!

In his book To a Dancing God Sam Keen tells with searing honesty about his quest for satisfaction. He thought his deep thirst would be quenched by securing a Ph.D. but when finally people called him ‘Doctor’ and ‘Professor’ he knew he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. He pursued many popular pathways but these only intensified his disillusionment. Finally in desperation he cried out, “What can I do that will give dignity and meaning to my life?” Then, one night he awoke with the answer: “Nothing, nothing at all.” It dawned upon him that there was nothing to do to give meaning and dignity to his life for these are given and received out of God’s grace. There in the night Sam Keen realized that he had been “riding on an ox, looking for an ox.”

In an after-service discussion on the theme of discernment an Australian man shared this experience that happened when he was visiting a Quaker community in the United States of America. On the first night of his visit, the friends of the community gathered to pray about America’s entry into an international war. As they joined in silent prayer this man sensed that the group was being gathered by a cord of prayer.

After entering into a deep silence some people stood and spoke words that they felt were prompted by God. At one point in the service this man said he had a strong impulse to stand up and say some words that were clear and urgent in his mind. However, he reneged because this was his first day with the group and he was self-conscious about his accent that, at his arrival earlier in the day had marked him out as a foreigner. He persisted in his determination not to speak but some time later another person stood and said exactly the words he had previously felt prompted to share.

The man talked with a person following the meeting about his experience and was told by this seasoned Quaker that this often happens. When the Spirit of God desires to say something and meets with resistance the Spirit will often move somebody else to say the words that need to be declared.

One day a traveller begged a monk for a word of wisdom that would guide the rest of the journey. The monk nodded affably and, as it was their day of silence, he took a sheet of paper and wrote on it a single word, ‘Awareness.’

“Awareness?” the traveller said, perplexed. “That’s far too brief. Couldn’t you expand on that a bit?” So the monk took the paper back and wrote: ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness.

“But what do these words mean?” the traveller insisted. Finally the monk reached for the paper and wrote, clearly and firmly, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness means . . . Awareness!’

-Joan Chittester, Wisdom Distilled From the Daily (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 68.

The only place that God can bless you is right where you are because that is the only place you are. Do you remember Moses at the burning bush? God had to tell him to take off his shoes. He did not know that it was holy ground. If we can just come to understand that right where we are is holy ground and it is there that we build a history with God and learn to walk confidently with God.

Rabbi Joshua puts it succinctly when saying, “God spoke from the thorn bush to teach us that there is no place where the Divine Presence is absent, not even in a thorn bush.”

The need to keep in step with the Spirit is beautifully expressed by the French writer Teilhard de Chardin in this letter to his cousin, Marguerite:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end without delay,
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made
by passing through some stages of instability...
...and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually;
let them grow, let them shape themselves,
without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as though you could today
what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own goodwill) will make tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of your believing
that His hand is leading you, and of your accepting
the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense
and incomplete.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest 1914-1919 (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 57.

Wilbur Reeves sums up a popular attitude to God when he says, “I would like to buy three dollars worth of God please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of God to make me love a black person or pick crops with a migrant. I want ecstasy not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack.”[

-Tim Hansel, When I Relax, I feel Guilty (Elgin, IL: David C Cook Publications, 1979), 49.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he or she will not exist at all.

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

-Frederick Buechner. Listening to Your Life: Daily meditations with Frederick Buechner, San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1992, p.2.

Before enlightenment- chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment- chop wood, carry water.

-Pascal, B. Pensee and the Provincial Letters. New York: Modern Library, 1941, p.95

-Pascal, B. "The Memorial," Pascal Selections. (R. Popkin, ed.). Old Tappan, NJ: Macmillan, 1989, p. 69-70.

About a quarter before nine, while he (Luther was being read) was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

-Wesley, J. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley. (N. Curnock, ed.). London: Epworth Press, 1938, vol.1, pp. 475-476.

The Christian ideal has not been tired and found wanting; it had been found difficult; and left untried.

Unprotected by prayer, our social activism runs the danger of becoming self-justifying good works. As our inner resources atrophy, the wells of love run dry, and we are slowly changed into the likeness of the beast.

He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening is own self-understanding, freedom, integrity ad capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.

-Merton, T. Contemplation in a World of Action. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1973, pp.178-179.

Christians are simply those people who engage and do not engage in certain practices because they have found them appropriate or inappropriate to their way of life. The individual Christian's character is formed by his (or her) association with the community that embodies the language, rituals and moral practices from which this particular form of life grows. Perhaps this is why some have become Christians not so much as believing but by simply taking up a way of life. This is possible because the Christian gospel is at once a belief...that involves behaviour and a behaviour that involves belief.

-Hauerwas, Stanley, Character and the Christian Life, San Antonio, Trinity University Press, 1975, pp. 210-211

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of town, taking those extra precautions necessary when the roads are wet and slick.

"The rain!" she began, "is like sin, and the windshield wipers are like God wiping our sins away."

So I asked... "Do you notice how the rain keeps on coming? What does that tell you?"

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I would suggest that the purpose of theology is to serve the church and its mission by engaging in the constructive task of setting forth a coherent model of Christian belief-mosaic that is faithful to the biblical narratives and teachings, is informed by the trajectory of the church's theological reflection, and is relevant to the contemporary setting

Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke

Beyond Fundamentalism: Shaping Theology in a Post Modern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 3-54

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"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind"

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With globalisation, there is a “global culture” that is slowly insinuating into the local cultures and at times supplants them. This global culture is not irreligious but brings along its own branding and mythology. The branding is named McDonaldisation. The new mythology includes what Neil Postman calls the “god of consumerism,” “god of technology,” and “god of Economic Utility” (1995 , 27-36). Each of these gods have their own theology. The “god of consumerism” teaches through the media, the most powerful being television commercials.

Postman notes,

But the majority of important television commercials take the form of religious parables organised around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the lost Traveller’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education (1995, 34)

This was written in 1995. Postman did foresee the “god of consumerism” working with the “god of technology” but may not imagine how true was his forecast. This partnership resulted in niche marketing, the rise of the Internet, the pervasive influence of computers, the DVD revolution, the virtual life (facebook, second life), and the prevalence of handphones as status symbols, multimedia communication devices, and entertainment centre.

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