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Reluctant
Very often we are reluctant to admit that we are the sick and sinful Jesus came to heal, and very often we prefer our self-protecting isolation to the risk of our face-to-face encounter with the Other...
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Not a manipulated extension of myself
We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the...
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To help
To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth – these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another …. Barbara Brown...
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Divine spaciousness in all the tight places
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name....
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Hell
Hell is … a failure of openness, a failure of love and a consequent and dreadful entrapment within the self. Thus Tony Milligan, in Love, who goes on to note that for Milton love of others and hell,...
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A box full of darkness
The Uses of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. Mary Oliver, Thirst Tagged:...
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The marks of oppression
As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. … Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of...
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God takes sides
God is a God who takes sides. God is God of the oppressed; God enters into their difficult, suffering situations to set things right. God is a God who is concerned to move people from slavery to...
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People in need of saving
We believed that God’s home was the church …, and that the world was a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. [...] The problem is, many of the people in need of saving...
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God visits us right where we are
Commenting on the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:11-22, Barbara Brown Taylor (in An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet) notes that even though [Jacob's] family had imploded,...
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No-one told them
A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to Banksy, Wall and Piece Tagged: Banksy, initiative, random thoughts
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The wrong people
World War II sent the wrong people wandering. God’s curse on Cain was intended for murderers and not their victims. Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall Tagged: curse, Jonathan Wilson, murderer, random...
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A sin against life
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus, ‘Summer in...
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Hope = resignation?
Here’s another Camus quote, again from ‘Summer in Algiers’. I’m somewhat ambiguous about this one, although I can certainly see his point. Anyway, here it is: Contrary to the general belief, hope...
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Accepting the darkness
There is a deep rightness in accepting the darkness of doubt and uncertainty on our spiritual journey, reflected as it is in the seasonal growing of the dark and of the cold. There is an appropriate...
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Cornfields
In Deventer … there was contact with God and with every person I met …. There were cornfields I shall never forget, whose beauty nearly brought me to my knees …. And the sun, which I drank in through...
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Amos and social networking
Here’s a (post-) modern take on the prophet Amos for you: Amos’s longest oracles contain fewer words than the typical blog posting. His shortest oracles are brief enough to be a Facebook status update...
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Love recklessly
Some quotes on love and forgiveness from Francis Spufford’s recent book Unapologetic: If someone asks for your help, give them more than they’ve asked for. If someone hits out at you, let them. Don’t...
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One fingernail at a time
When Christians try to exercise power as if it were God doing it, cruelty and suffering and tyranny follow swiftly. In short order, we get the steely-eyed monks of the Inquisition trying to drag the...
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Literacy does not involve knowing the meaning of words
Wendell Berry opens his collection of essays, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, with a piece entitled ‘The Joy of Sales Resistance’, which offers some wonderfully biting sarcasm. Here are a few...
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