“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”
Orson Welles
Resentment
…resentment, even where justified or at least understandable, is never a constructive emotion: for in any given situation, it suggests to the one who feels it: all that he cannot do to improve his situation rather than all that he can, thus inhibiting effort. And even when, despite his resentment, he makes successful efforts at improvement, his resentment often sours his success. Many are the successful men and women who carry their resentment with them to their grave.
Theodore Dalrymple
https://lawliberty.org/against-history-as-nightmare/
Disorder
There must be, and if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. Normally a job, a fortune, or a reputation has to be lost, a house has to be flooded, an illness has to be endured. Some kind of falling, what I call “necessary suffering,” is programmed into the journey. By denying our pain or avoiding our necessary falling, many of us have kept ourselves from our own spiritual depths. We still want some kind of order and reason, instead of suffering life’s inherent disorder and tragedy.
Richard Rohr
Bonds of Love
The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die — I almost believe, rationalist though I am — that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.
Isaac Asimov, It’s been a good life
Atheist’s musings on Morality
What is real is a shared, by and large, understanding of morality. And that understanding is shared across boundaries. Only extremists shout that one can kill left, right, and centre – most of humanity do not agree.
I often find that some religious people assume that once you are an atheist, you do what you want irrespective of morality etc. That is balderdash – because morality is evolved behaviour (with some humans a bit behind), and, rationally considered, harm to others harms me too, as everything is interconnected. The chickens will come home to roost.
Klasie Kraalogies
Moving
“The moving ever shall stay,” [twelfth-century Hindu mystic and poet] Basava said.
Those words contradict so much of our inherited religious sensibility. “Stay the same. Don’t move. Hold on. Survival depends on resistance to change,” we were told again and again.
“Foment change. Keep moving. Evolve. Survival depends on mobility,” the Spirit persistently says. . . .
If you want to see the future of Christianity as a great spiritual migration, don’t look at a church building. Go look in the mirror and look at your neighbor. God’s message of love is sent into the world in human envelopes. If you want to see a great spiritual migration begin, then let it start right in your body. Let your life be a foothold of liberation.
Richard Rohr
Eckhart Tolle once wrote, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.”
Being Right
Being right is one of the hardest burdens human beings have to bear. Few succeed in bearing up under it gracefully.
Dallas Willard
God speaking to us
His speaking to us does not in itself make us important. If we allow God’s conversational walk with us to make us think we are people of great importance his guidance will certainly be withdrawn.
Dallas Willard
Help from the outside
Help must come from the outside…God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth…The Christ in their own hearts is weaker than the Christ in the word of other Christians. Their own hearts are uncertain; those of their brothers and sisters are sure.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Forgiveness
To forgive is to condemn the wrongdoing but not count the wrongdoing against the wrongdoer. It’s hard to forgive because it’s hard not count the wrongdoing against the wrongdoer. It’s hard to receive forgiveness because it’s hard to experience our wrongdoing named and condemned.
Miroslav Volf
A Final Word
Critique Fatigue
Everyone gets tired of critique after a while. We cannot build on exclusively negative or critical energy. We can only build on life and what we are for, not what we are against. Negativity keeps us in a state of victimhood and/or a state of anger. Mere critique and analysis are not salvation; they are not liberation, nor are they spacious. They are not wonderful at all. We only become enlightened as the ego dies to its pretenses, and we begin to be led by soul and Spirit. That dying to ourselves is something we are led through by the grace of God.
Richard Rohr
I am exhausted