maggi dawn

still small voice

"I'm not a great one for synagogues or other places of worship. When I want to listen to that little voice I go out there for a walk".

Geza Vermes

being religious

“To be religious is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter”.

attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein

Einstein on Jesus

"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene....No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase-mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."

from "What Life Means to Einstein," The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Princeton University

be vulnerable, not relevant

"the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self."
Henri Nouwen

blindingly obvious

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Douglas Adams

don't lose your sense of wonder

“Whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.”             Albert Einstein

Listen

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn't hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.

Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, 02-14-2003

live in the moment

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Eliot

Love the questions, live the questions

In the midst of uncertainty and unresolved questions, Jen Lemen recommends Rilke, and the kindness of one lit candle beside a freshly drawn bath. Candlelit baths is a haven I discovered this winter when the light fitting in my bathroom broke and it was a week before I managed to get it fixed. Now the light is fixed but the candles remain. So do the unresolved questions, for which Rilke is indeed a guide for the soul:

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —from the letters of Ranier Maria Rilke

hat tip to my lovely friend Jen

innovation

The first rule of innovation is to give people permission to fail.  Mike Hill, Bishop of Bristol

language

'Human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from stars.

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

poetry

"All poetry is a love affair with language..."

Gaston Miron

writing letters

"The first step in writing letters is to get over the guilt of not writing. You don't "owe" anybody a letter. Letters are a gift. "

garrison keillor

not God

If you find God with ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.

Thomas Merton

"spirit-led worship"

"It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
-- Mark Twain

Sermon-givers, worship leaders and spontaneous pray-ers, take note.

Update: Simon Marsh writes a good counter-balancing reply here

introspection

“When a person is wrapped up in himself, he makes a very small package.”
John Ruskin

he who knows

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

~ Joseph Campbell

hat tip: Visual Voice

turbulent priest

Someone asked me the other day where the phrase "turbulent priest" comes from.  The original turbulent priest was Thomas a Becket.

Thomas a Becket was an outspoken and an emotional man, by all accounts. He excommunicated some of his fellow bishops, declaring 'May they all be damned by Jesus Christ!’ 

The story goes that on hearing of Becket's outburst, Henry II uttered the equally rash, but in this case fateful words “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”. Four of Henry’s knights took his words literally. They immediately set off for Canterbury where,  on the 29th December, they found Becket in the Cathedral, before the High Altar. The first knight approached  and struck Becket on the shoulder with the flat of his sword (which seems to suggest that they did not originally intend to murder Becket). However, their mood changed when he stood up to them, and they then attacked him viciously, cracked open his skull till his brains spilled onto the floor.

When Henry heard the news of Thomas's death, he realised that he was responsible. He put on sackcloth and ashes and fasted for three days as an act of penitence. Becket was immediately hailed as a martyr. He was canonised in 1173, and his shrine is in Canterbury Cathedral.

being nice

"We are in a war between dullness and astonishment."

The most critical issue facing Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of the family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality, or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. The Good News is no longer good news, it is okay news. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn't change people into wild-eyed radicals anymore; He changes them into "nice people." 

Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart (p. 120).
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Meister Eckhart - on being alone

The man who has submitted his will and purposes entirely to God, carries God with him in all his works and in all circumstances. Therein can no man hinder him, for he neither aims at nor enjoys anything else, save God. God is united with Him in all his purposes and designs. Even as no manifoldness can dissipate God, so nothing can dissipate such a man, or destroy his unity. Man, therefore, should take God with him in all things; God should be always present to his mind and will and affections. The same disposition that thou hast in church or in thy cell, thou shouldst keep and maintain in a crowd, and amid the unrest and manifoldness of the world.

Some people pride themselves on their detachment from mankind, and are glad to be alone or in church; and therein lies their peace. But he who is truly in the right state, is so in all circumstances, and among all persons; he who is not in a good state, it is not right with him in all places and among all persons. He who is as he should be has God with him in truth, in all places and among all persons, in the street as well as in the church; and then no man can hinder him.

It is often much harder for a man to be alone in a crowd than in the desert; and it is often harder to leave a small thing than a great, and to practise a small work than one which people consider very great.
Meister Eckhart Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter XIII

priesthood

If a little company of pious Christian laymen were taken prisoners and carried away to a desert, and had not among them a priest consecrated by a bishop, and were there to agree to elect one of them, born in wedlock or not, and were to order him to baptize, to celebrate the mass, to absolve, and to preach, this man would as truly be a priest, as if all the bishops and all the popes had consecrated him.
Martin Luther Address to the Christian Nobility of the German nation

left unsaid

I've been writing a lot lately. Some days it seems to flow along, and others I struggle. But even when it's going OK, I end up feeling that if I even manage to articulate 10% of what I set out to do,  that's about the best I ever manage.  Writing - good writing - is in itself something that demands a bit of the philosophy of SLOW; you can dash off a bit of writing, of course, as anyone who lives under RAE pressure knows very well. But you can't just dash off something really good.

Life itself is much the same.  Sure, we all have things to celebrate, things to be thankful for, things to be proud of.  But only in the privacy of your own soul do you know the huge discrepancy between what is and what might have been; the ragged remains and the false starts and the failures to complete and the unfulfilled hopes that, for the most part, no-one else is aware of.  George Eliot once said, "It is never too late to become what you might have been." That's hopeful, and offers the inspiration never to give up. But in a way, I think Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy got closer to the mark with this mixture of hope and resignation: 

I cannot read the writing of the years,
My eyes are full of tears,
It gets all blurred and won’t make sense;
It’s full of contradictions
Like the scribblings of a child.

I can but hand it in, and hope
That Thy great mind, which reads
The writings of so many lives,
Will understand this scrawl
And what it strives to say – but leaves unsaid.

read the rest of the poem here

the best prayer

"The best prayer is the one in which there is the most love. Adoration, wordless admiration, that is the most eloquent form of prayer: that wordless admiration which contains the most passionate declaration of love."
Charles de Foucauld

Tacit Knowing

"We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing
without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell."  

Michael Polanyi

underestimate

"All of us underestimate the knowledge that we possess, for although the getting of it may be hard, once it is got, we think it innate, as though we were born with it."

Rose Tremain, The Colour, p 80

forgive

"...no one forgives with more grace and love than a child. You have to sit down, tell the truth about yourself, and apologize. You can't make a lot of promises, but if your daily interaction with them shows them that you're back, all may be forgiven and you can move forward."  Real Live Preacher

When a man stops believing in God...

This quote is often attributed to G. K. Chesterton:
"When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in anything."

But Steve informs us that:

...it turns out that Chesterton didn't even say or write it! According to The American Chesterton Society, it is probably an amalgam of these two quotes, found in Chesterton's Father Brown stories:

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.
["The Oracle of the Dog" (1923)]

You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced
on the very edge of belief - of belief in almost anything.
["The Miracle of Moon Crescent" (1924)]

            

Dull, but sure

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. --H. L. Mencken

reassurance

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

from Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

being nice

Following on from my post on conversation with John Drane, Andy sent me this quote (Mike Yaconelli, quoting Robert Capon) about niceness and dullness:

"We are in a war between dullness and astonishment."

The most critical issue facing Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of the family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality, or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. The Good News is no longer good news, it is okay news. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn't change people into wild-eyed radicals anymore; He changes them into "nice people."

purple prose and gilded slippers

"I hear that there has been philosophizing in purple. If a philosopher in purple, why not in gilded slippers too?” —Tertullian.

god and music

"I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music...When things add up to more than the sum of their parts, when the effects achieved are inexplicable, then atheists like me start to get into difficult territory...

When I say that you can hear God in [music], I do not mean to suggest that there is an old chap with a beard - a divine Willie Nelson , if you will - warbling along with them. Nor do I wish to imply that this surprise guest appearance... proves that Jesus died for our sins, or that rich men will have difficulty entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I just mean that at certain spine-shivering musical moments...it becomes difficult to remain a literalist. (I have no such difficulty when I hear religious music, by the way, no matter how beautiful. They're cheating, those composers: they're inviting Him in, egging him on, and surely He wouldn't fall for that? I think He'd have enough self-respect to stay well away.)"
Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

meaning

the meaning is in the writing...
R S Thomas

oops - what I meant to write was "the meaning is in the waiting". See comments below for more on the typo queen..
the quote is from Kneeling

but it must be said "the meaning is in the writing" could in fact be a whole poem on its own.
                               

perfume

Estee Lauder said:
There isn't anything you want from men that you can't get with the use of a good perfume.

I don't want to be worshipped.
I want to be loved.

Tracy Lord

never forget

They may forget what you said,
but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Carl W Buechner

tradition

"I respect tradition, though I'm quite prepared to vandalise it". 
Jeanette Winterson

orthodoxy

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of Orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as Orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad…To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom – that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure.

G K Chesterton

Great quote from AKMA

"I am often wrong, and about lots of things. I am not an oracle.

For that very reason, I feel all the more investment in the things I get right."

hear hear, AKMA.

questions and answers

found this interesting quote the other day:

We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found.  It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers (G. K. Chesterton  Orthodoxy, p. 34).

hat tip

Do it now...

My son tells me that one of my most over-used phrases is "do it now!"  I would, however, seem to be in reasonably good company...

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

Samuel Butler, English composer, novelist, & satiric author  (1835 - 1902)

sexual revolution

"The sexual revolution started, not with the arrival of the Pill in the 1960's, but with the private motor car in the 1930's..."   
                                                            Diana Athill

messy desk

One of the advantages of being disorderly
is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
                                                                   A.A. Milne

Thanks to Ian's Messy Desk for this quote. Duly absolved, I'm now going to attampt to tackle the piles of paper with a sense of excitement instead of dread...

the worst sin

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them,
but to be indifferent to them;
that's the essence of inhumanity."

                                                            Bernard Shaw

hat tip to Rick

ministers, not messiahs

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.

Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador

getting there...

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
from Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

a God who dances

If they want me to believe in their God, they'll have to sing me better songs... I could only believe in a God who dances.
Nietzsche (1844-1900)

tradition is...

Real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone. It is a living force that anticipates and informs the present.
                                                                                            Igor Stravinsky

Love like you've never been hurt

A friend of mine was going through the s*^t a couple of years back. Someone gave him this little saying to stick up on his fridge. Consequently I have read it lots of times while standing in his kitchen. Lately I've started quoting it to myself. I've been told it comes from Mark Twain, but I'm not convinced. (Real Live Preacher might know?)

Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Sing like nobody's listening.
Live like it's Heaven on Earth.