.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;} <$BlogRSDURL$>

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Zoe Heller - The Believers 

‘I see’, The rabbi smiled. ‘so he disapproves of the god in whom he doesn’t believe.’

The Hebrew word about it, Yom’, which is usually translated as day, can also refer to an undefined period of time

I know I’m supposed to do this, but I can’t just yet

Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thinket in her gut, two dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.

How much simpler life must be when you believed that your grade school opinions had the status of knowledge

This was not about God at all: it was the expression of some school girlish masochism, some hysterical need for rules and restrictions, The pettier and more arduous, the better.

It was hard for me to believe that he is such a pedant

Perhaps believing was like poetry in this regard. It required a delicacy or subtlety of mind that she had yet to attain

Accept the truth from Whom ever gives it

God doesn’t need our perfect understanding even our perfect faith what he wants is our commitment, our actions. 

#

PRIDE IN SUBTLE FORMS - Rolheiser 

PRIDE IN SUBTLE FORMS

The Pharisee, vilified in this story, is proud precisely of his spiritual and human maturity. That’s a subtle pride of which it is almost impossible to rid ourselves.  As we mature morally and religiously it becomes almost impossible not to compare ourselves with others who are struggling and to not feel both a certain smugness, that we are not like them, and a certain disdain for their condition. 
Spiritual writers often describe the fault in this way: Pride in the mature person takes the form of refusing to be small before God and refusing to recognize properly our interconnection with others. It is a refusal to accept our own poverty, namely, to recognize that we are standing before God and others with empty hands and that all we have and have achieved has come our way by grace more so than by our own efforts. 
During our adult years pride often disguises itself as a humility that is a strategy for further enhancement. It takes Jesus’ invitation to heart: Whoever wants to be first must be last and be the servant of all! Then, as we are taking the last place and being of service, we cannot help but feel very good about ourselves and nurse the secret knowledge that our humility is in fact a superiority and something for which we will later be recognized and admired.
As well, as we mature, pride will take on this noble face: We will begin to do the right things for seemingly the right reasons, though often deceiving ourselves because, in the end, we will still be doing them in service to our own pride. Our motivation for generosity is often more inspired by the desire to feel good about ourselves than by real love of others.
Pride is inextricably linked to our nature and partly it’s healthy, but it’s a life-long moral struggle to keep it healthy.

#

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Mature Discipleship - Rolheiser... 

THE MAJOR IMPERATIVES WITHIN MATURE DISCIPLESHIP • Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy: Few things in life, including our own hearts and motives, are black or white, either-or, simply good or simply bad. Maturity invites us to see, understand, and accept this complexity with empathy so that, like Jesus, we cry tears of understanding over our own troubled cities and our own complex hearts. • Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred rather than give them back in kind: Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will retransmit. In the face of jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred we must be like water purifiers, holding the poisons and toxins inside of us and giving back just the pure water, rather than being like electrical cords that simply pass on the energy that flows through them. • Let suffering soften rather than harden our souls: Suffering and humiliation find us all, in full measure, but how we respond to them, with forgiveness or bitterness, will determine the level of our maturity and the color of our person. This is perhaps our ultimate moral test: Will my humiliations soften or harden my soul? • Forgive: In the end there is only one condition for entering heaven (and living inside human community), namely, forgiveness. Perhaps the greatest struggle we have in the second-half of our lives is to forgive: forgive those who have hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own shortcomings, and forgive God for seemingly hanging us out unfairly to dry in this world. The greatest moral imperative of all is not to die with a bitter, unforgiving heart. • Live in gratitude: To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Let no one deceive you with the notion that a passion for truth, for church, or even for God can trump or bracket the non-negotiable imperative to be gracious always. Holiness is gratitude. Outside of gratitude we find ourselves doing many of the right things for the wrong reasons. God is a prodigiously-loving, fully-understanding, completely-empathic parent. We are mature and free of false anxiety to the degree that we grasp that and trust that truth.

#

Monday, January 15, 2018

Cycle of Grace - Rolheiser 

We are also too anxious about how we are perceived, about having a good name and about being respected in the community. We see this in Jesus’ warning about how we are to imitate the lilies of the field in their trust in God and his multiple warnings about not doing things to be seen by others as being good. But we’re always anxious about these things, all of us, and our fear here is not necessarily unhealthy. Nature and God have programmed us to have these instincts, though Jesus invites us to move beyond them. More deeply, beyond our anxiety for our physical needs and our good name, we nurse a much deeper fear. We’re fearful about our very substance. We’re fearful that, in the end, we are really only, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, vanity, vapor, something insubstantial blown away in the wind. We are so anxious about our substance and immortality and are always trying to create this for ourselves. But, as Jesus, often and gently, points out, we cannot do this for ourselves. No success, no monument, no fame, no tree, no child, and no book, will give ultimately still the anxiety for substance and immortality inside us. Only God can do that. ( In essence, leave some indelible mark on this planet. Guarantee your own immortality. Make sure you can’t be forgotten.) Real consolation lies in knowing that our “names are written in heaven”, that God has each of us individually, lovingly, and irrevocably, locked into His radar screen. Real consolation lies in recognizing that we don’t have to create our own substance and immortality.

#

Cycle of Grace - Nouwen 

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved."

#

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Step over Nouwen 

Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one," "the forgotten one," or the "discarded one." Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on.

#

Monday, January 08, 2018

Cycle of Grace - John Ortberg 

Cycle of Grace - John Ortburg from Frank Lake

The Cycle of Grace

"I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete"

Identified by the Christian psychologist Frank Lake with theologian Emil Brunner and rediscovered by Renovaré speaker and author Trevor Hudson and Gary Moon, founder of the Renovaré Institute

1.  Acceptance - like Jesus we are first baptised and given acceptance and identity.  Dallas Willard said "joy is not pleasure, a mere sensation, but a pervasive and constant sense of well-being, hope is the goodness of God in joy's indispensible support".  Nehemiah said "the joy of the Lord is your strength".

2.  Sustenance - like Jesus we have practices we can engage in every hour of every day such as prayer, a close circle of friends, the practice of vulnerability, he went into the synagogue "which was his custom", he fed his mind on Scripture, he enjoyed God's creation (mountain, garden, lake), he took long walks, he welcomed children (he hugged them), he went to parties and was called "a glutton and a drunkard".  "The problem is people think of them as obligations that will actually drain them" says John Ortberg.

3.  Significance - like Jesus we have a place in this world that is for us to occupy.  Collectively we have been told that "your are the salt of the earth... you are the light of the world... like a city set on a hilltop that cannot be hidden...".  The invitation to us is to discover our significance and let it work as salt and light in the world.

4.  Achievement - like Jesus we are able to achieve things in this world.  Jesus did kingdom work out of grace and, therefore, out of joy.  He taught, traveller, healed, explained, recruited, put a team together, developed people, confronted, achieved.  "My food is to do the will of him who has sent me to finish the work".

Faced with huge suffering in the world Rudolph Bultmann said "it is in the nature of joy that all questions grow silent and nothing needs explaining" or, as Jesus put it, "I'm a little while you won't see me (it will seem a ling time) but then you will see me and all will be well...".

#

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?