Notes Anthology

I use the iPhone Notes app religiously ( no pun intended). Most often I save quotes, quips, etc from daily readings. I save them, hoping to eventually post about them or share later. Mostly they stay hidden on my iPhone.This post starts a new category of posts “Notes Anthology”. Occasionally, I will post a random collection of saved notes. There is no intended theme or thread, but they may give some insight into the drumbeat in my head.

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May 11, 2020

“When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own truths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else’s ideas…the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn.”  Joan Chittister

A contemplative person is someone who knows that they don’t know everything and trusts that they are being held by something much larger, wiser, and more loving than themselves. Richard Rohr

Everyone has become an expert via the social media world so the truly trained experts are no longer respected or listened to. That expertise is a hard won critical democratic resource from and  for our culture. It’s a highest of egotistic behavior for citizens to reject it for quickly spun, spontaneous, non-expert opinion and conspiracy theories. Jim Hibbett

Conspiracy theories are a lot like Gnosticism.
They claim that only an enlightened few know what is actually going on in the world and what almost everyone else knows is a lie; that the knowledge available to the average person on the street is unreliable.
Kenneth Tanner, Love Rules the World, Not Conspiracy

It takes courage to stand up and tell the world that Christians are wrong. It take even more courage to tell Christians that they are wrong. But if we are going to follow Jesus, we have do it and keep on doing it. Michael Spencer

The power of God’s love is not coercive, but seeks the response of those so loved. The power of God’s love is not overwhelming force but inexhaustible mercy. The power of God’s love is exerted in patient persuasion, faithful persistence, forgiveness of wrong, and the freely borne cost of loving those who are undeserving, who are hard work, and who may even reject the gift of self that is the ultimate proof of love in its purest form. Divine love is indefatigable in imaginative creativity, uncalculating in generous openness to the one loved, so that what is suffered is borne because the one who is loved is worth it. 
Van stone via Jim Gordon

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.”? Andrew Murray

A Will For When I Am Dying, But Not Yet Dead

Whatever you do,
do not
sit me in front of a television.
Banish the screens.
Kill my television
and play for me
the B Minor Mass
and the Intermezzo.
Let them only be interrupted
by the voice of Billie Holiday,
lest I die before I’m dead.

Matt Redmond 

Digital Babylon
The power of digital tools and the content they deliver are incredible, and we are the first generation of humans who cannot rely on the earned wisdom of previous generations to help us live with these rapid technological changes. Instead of older adults and traditions, many young people turn to friends and algorithms.
Faith for Exiles