Living Deeply

Deal With It (Brennan Manning)

Your ordinary self is exactly where God wants to work extraordinary miracles. The inconspicuous nobody who shivers when it's cold and sweats when it's hot, who wakes up so many days feeling not-at-all-ready to face the world, who can barely get dressed and show up on time and at the right place, who has to read the paragraph three times to understand it, who feels lonely and hopeless, isolated, crowded, left out, and taken in all at once -- YOU are the one God loves! Deal with it.

Before the Foundation of the World (Desmond Tutu)

  We were created by love, for love, and so that we should love. "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," is what God said to Jeremiah. These are words that apply to each of us. We were planned for from all eternity. None of us is a mere divine afterthought. No of us is an accident. Before the foundation of the world God chose us to be his children in Jesus Christ. . . .

There is nothing you can do that will make God love you less. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more. God’s love for you is infinite, perfect and eternal.

Jesus says, "I Dare You To Trust Me" (Brennan Manning)

When I was outside an alcohol and drug rehab center in New Orleans, and I was clutching a pint of Taaka vodka, what I did not want was the lifesaving treatment of detox in a 28-day program.

I kept on drinking, a drunken child crying out, "Jesus, where are you?" How do we experience trust in the midst of pain, suffering, heartache, and throbbing despair? I mean, is it possible to endure and eventually move beyond the bleak and melancholy landscape of evil and destruction, back to the experience of God as unconditional love? That's the problem I ask Christians. Do you trust that God loves you? Everybody says, oh yes, I've known that for a long time. Then just watch the way they live. There's so much fear, so much anxiety, and so much self-hatred. The best definition of faith I ever heard was Paul Tillich when he said, "Faith is the courage to accept acceptance."

Meaning? Faith is a code to accept that Jesus knows my whole life story, every skeleton in my closet, every moment of sin, shame, dishonesty, degradedness darkening my past. Right now he knows my shallow faith, my feeble prayer life, my inconsistent discipleship, and he comes beside me and he says, I dare you to trust. I dare you to trust that I love you, just as you are and not as you should be, because you're never going to be as you should be.

God Wishes All Humans To Be Saved (Kallistos Ware)

In a sense, God had to take the risk:  if He wanted there to be love, He had to give us freedom.  And by giving us freedom, He gave us the possibility of doing evil.  The world was not created evil.  But God took the risk because He wished there to be love.  This is the true meaning of the Christian doctrine of Hell, which is so widely misunderstood.

God does not condemn us to Hell; God wishes all humans to be saved.  He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept that love and do not respond to it.  And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of Hell.  Hell is not a place where God puts us; it’s a place where we put ourselves.  The doors of Hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside.

Christ Will Come Again (Pierre Teilhard De Chardin)

One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world.  And then will come the end.  Then the presence of Christ which has been silently accruing in things, will suddenly be revealed---like a flash of light from pole to pole.  Breaking through all the barriers within which the veil of matter and the water-tightness of souls have seemingly kept it confined, it will invade the face of the earth.  And under the finally liberated action of the true affinities of being, the spiritual atoms of the world will be borne along by a force generated by the powers of cohesion proper to the universe itself, and will occupy, whether within Christ or without Christ (but always under the influence of Christ,) the place of happiness or pain designated for them by the living structure of the Pleroma.  “As the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west . . . as the floods came and swept them all away . . . so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:27, 29).  Like lightning, like conflagration, like a flood, the attraction exerted by the Son of Man will lay hold of all the whirling elements in the universe so as to reunite them or subject them to his Body.

Infinite Mystery, Infinite Delight (Walker Percy)

This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to
arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of
it and have to answer, `scientific humanism.' That won't
do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love a delight.
Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for
nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite
delight.

God Looks Through Sin and Evil (Kathleen Norris)

God can look right through whatever evil we have done in our lives and get to the creature made in the divine image.  I suspect that only God and well-loved infants can see this way.  Peter denied Jesus, and Saul persecuted the early Christians, but God could see the apostles they would become.  Maybe that’s why we worship—to respond to this grace.  We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith that God has in us and in others.

Compassion (Marcus Borg)

It is striking that “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” so closely echoes “Be holy and God is holy,” even as it makes a radical substitution.  The close parallel suggests that Jesus replaced the core value of purity with compassion.  Compassion, not holiness, is the dominant quality of God, and is therefore to be the ethos of the community that mirrors God.

You Are God's Friend (Anonymous)

Do you ever reflect upon the fact that Jesus feels proud of you?  Proud that you accepted the faith which he offered you?  Proud that after he chose you, you chose him for a friend and Lord?  Proud that you haven’t given up?  Proud that you believe in him enough to try again and again?  Proud that you trust that he can help you?  Do you ever think that Jesus appreciates you for wanting him, for wanting to say no to so many things that would separate you from him?  Do you ever think that Jesus is grateful to you for pausing to smile and comfort one of his children who has a great need to see a smile, to feel a touch?  Do you ever think of Jesus being grateful to you for learning more about him so that you can speak to others more deeply and truly about him?  Do you ever think that Jesus can be angry or disappointed in you for not believing that he has forgiven you totally?

 

Jesus said, "I do not call you servants, but friends. . . ."  Therefore, there is the possibility of every feeling and emotion which can exist between friends to exist here and now between Jesus and you.

You Are Still Precious in God's Eyes (John O'Grady)

The savior knows that we have failures, even when we have committed ourselves to him.  The savior redeems us from all personal failure by telling his followers that in spite of our sin we have value in the eyes of God the Father.  A new possibility exists.  We can be more than we are at any one moment; we can always bring some sense of goodness to the fore and come closer to living the way that will bring us peace.  Even in the midst of personal failure the one who has been saved knows that he or she is still precious in the eyes of God, of Jesus and of his holy community.  The one who has been saved knows no sense of isolation.  Jesus is the friend who will never fail, the faithful one who will never be lacking in fidelity, even when people are unfaithful to him.

The Generous Mystery (Benjiman Britten)

God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Ye Christian people, of little faith, the clouds you so much dread, are big with mercy and shall break with blessings on your head.

A Prayer for the Lost (Thomas Merton)

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.