February 2012
17 posts
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Everything is Waiting For You
rabbit-light:
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish...
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“It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As...”
– Lauren Winner, Still
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“I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison
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Seven Stanzas At Easter
invisibleforeigner:
By John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged...
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Ordeal by Nina Cassian
whenwetalkaboutlove:
I promise to make you more alive than you’ve ever been. For the first time you’ll see your pores opening like the gills of fish and you’ll hear the noise of blood in galleries and feel light gliding on your corneas like the dragging of a dress across the floor. For the first time, you’ll note gravity’s prick like a thorn in your heel, and your shoulder blades will hurt from...
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“Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether,...”
– Lauren Winner, Still (via invisibleforeigner)
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godthings:
“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Five,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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Over the past week, I’ve been making my way through Frederick Buechner’s Stories in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. Today I read a chapter called “The Two Stories,” which quickly became a favorite due to passages like these: “The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light. It is a story that hides more than it reveals. It is the story of a mystery we must...
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“Not Knowing” by Gary Soto
By then, by the time my brother Was getting married, weeks before the old Apartment was pulled down, The evenings were warm and the sound of Freight trains absorbed by three oleanders, Whipped by wind and iron clanging. By then, by the time I was nineteen And the crickets were hauling their armor Into the weeds and dusty bushes, I was thinking that I would...
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“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says,...”
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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“They who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a...
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“If we think the purpose of Jesus’s stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as the moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw the story itself away like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice. Is that true? How about other people’s stories? What is the point of A Midsummer...
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“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of...”
– Jane Austen (via thatkindofwoman)
Love.
(via invisibleforeigner)
I’ve never been able to make it through a whole Austen novel; now I want to give her another try.
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“But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus’ own most fervent prayer...”
– Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (via stephanieberbec)
January 2012
26 posts
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“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was...”
– Stephen Colbert, a practicing Catholic, on the 1974 deaths of his father and two brothers, in Charles McGrath’s NYT Magazine profile. (via washingtonpoststyle)
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These passages in Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible were incredibly convicting: “Sometimes it seems as if believers—myself included—distract themselves with the more obscure, speculative, and cryptic issues related to scripture precisely in order to avoid having to face and act on the parts that are very clear and directive.” “Wanting and trying to...
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“The Bible is not about offering things like a biblical view of dating—but...”
– Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible As I read this passage, I just made a lot of these in the margins of my book: !!!!!
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“Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position...”
– Frederick Buechner, from Going on Faith
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godthings:
“The Japanese haiku poets understand perhaps as fully as anyone on earth the significance of inbreath and outbreath in poesis. A haiku poem is a breath poem that can be uttered in a single outbreath. It is a long outbreath — seventeen syllables, more or less. A long, slow, deep inbreath is needed to fuel the poem, and then:
An hour’s snow — Heaven and earth briefly settle All their...
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“The mind serves best when it’s anchored in the word of God. There is no danger...”
– Flannery O’Connor (via dailyflanneryoc)
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Read and listen to Leonard Cohen's lovely poem... →
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“You are what you are before God. That and nothing more.”
– St. Francis of Assisi (via klarita)
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Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands. You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you...
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“And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform...”
– D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
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The doubter
godthings:
by: Jeanne Murray Walker
Not that you couldn’t reach Him if you tried (maybe you couldn’t) but that you no longer try. Your last real prayer? In a plane, beseeching Him, don’t let me die. How actual He seems at 30 thousand feet, how passionately you love Him in your hope for solid ground. Not unlike that day you first felt Him ripping through your heart, you driving fast, believing...
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“Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, ‘Prove that...”
– Henri Nouwen
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“The Death of God” by Stephen Dunn When the news filtered to the angels they were overwhelmed by their sudden aloneness. Long into the night they waited for instructions; the night was quieter than any night they’d known. I don’t have a thought in my head, one angel lamented. Others worried, Is there such a thing as an angel now? New to questioning, dashed by the dry light...
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Faith Can Be So Darn Hard
becket:
There’s a funny thing to be said about going through a crisis of faith. In many ways, when the absence of faith is most acutely felt, is when it becomes most real.1 When the old motions are set aside and faith becomes a true, from-the-pit-of-your-being cry out to God. When you read Psalm 35 - How long, O Lord, will you look on? - and your heart just seems to break right open.
Click...
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T.S. Eliot, "The Rock"
invisibleforeigner:
LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service? Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers For life, for dignity, grace and order, And intellectual pleasures of the senses? The LORD who created must wish us to create And employ our creation again in His service Which is already His service in creating. For Man is joined in spirit and body, And therefore must...
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“Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, ‘How will next...”
– Henri Nouwen I needed this reminder today.
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“As long as we are not fully and thoroughly convinced that we have been...”
– Henri Nouwen
(via locusteaten)
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“In seminary Mister Rogers studied systematic theology with Dr. William S. Orr....”
– Won’t You Be My Neighbor? - Christianity Today (via triadic)
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“Ars Poetica?” by Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a...
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“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t...”
– from the best thing Andrew Sullivan has written (via wesleyhill)
December 2011
23 posts
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“About Fountains” by Rainer Maria Rilke Suddenly I know so much about fountains, those incomprehensible trees of glass. I could speak as though of my own tears, which, in the grip of such fantastic dreaming, I spilled lavishly and then forgot. Did I forget that heaven extends hands to many things and thrusts into our turmoil? Did I not always see unrivaled greatness in the rise of old...
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“We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of...”
– Dean Koontz, from Life Expectancy (with thanks to whiskeyriver)
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“… nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christmas Eve 1943, writing from prison to his niece and best friend (via wesleyhill)
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“Let us, then, meditate upon the Nativity just as we see it happening in our own...”
– Martin Luther (via wesleyhill)
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Mary Karr, "Descending Theology: Christ Human"
wesleyhill:
Such a short voyage for a god, and you arrived in animal form so as not to scorch us with your glory. Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk, sticky eyes smeared blind, limbs rendered useless in swaddle. You came among beasts as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying as we all do, because the human frame is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime. Any...