Category: Notes Anthology

Front Porch View

Peter Kuzmich once said, “Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future. Faith is having the courage to dance to that song today.”

Cynicism 
The cynic cloaks himself in the wise disguise of a realist. Truth be told, realism is just another name for a defeated idealism. Cynicism is the bitter fruit of a desecrated imagination. Cynicism treats the sickness of our hopelessness with the topical ointment of our thinly veiled anger.
J D Walt

Purity
Purity means embracing your unity with Christ and, in that unity, becoming free to open yourself fearlessly to others in ways that are safe and healthy and truly loving—in ways that draw others into fellowship with Christ too. Blessed are the pure in heart, Jesus said, for they shall see God. But such purity is not something to achieve through careful rule following. It is something to receive as the gift of God to you in Christ, and it is something that can never be lost.
Peterson, Amy. Where Goodness Still Grows (pp. 85-86). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. 

Hope
The existence of hope does not depend on us. It does not rely on our virtue or wisdom. It is a delivery from elsewhere.
Michael Gerson

More than Raw Matter
…it is possible to live honorably in revolt against a meaningless universe. But it is also possible to live dishonorably with the same justification. If raw matter is all that is, ideals such as justice are ultimately rootless. Consciousness would be a brief gap between oblivions. And death would always win in the end.
Michael Gerson

Fruits of Repentance
…the greatest prophet who ever lived said to “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” Fruits worthy of ­repentance—it is a fascinating concept. Fruit comes at the end of a process, not the beginning. Maybe checking the box of a donated coat isn’t the ticket. Fruit begins with breaking up fallow ground, and sowing, and cultivating, and watering, and more cultivating, and waiting, and finally by God’s grace, fruit. Maybe repentance can’t be reduced to a transaction at Goodwill. Maybe repentance takes sustained attention and effort. By the power of his Word and Spirit, Jesus wants to reach deeper than mere behavior and into our dispositions, desires, and affections. 
D Walt

Reflecting the image of God
…reflecting the image of God is more than passive reflection, like that of a mirror….Because of the plasticity of human nature, reflecting the image of God is active, developmental, and formational. Unlike a mirror reflecting back light, human nature is changed in the process of reflection, becoming a clearer and brighter reflection, a better and better mirror if you will. Alone in creation, only humans have this ability to reflect back the image of God to greater and greater degrees.
Richard Beck

Absolute Faith
Everyone talks about the importance of having faith. Well, these guys had faith, absolute faith. And there’s one really desperately upsetting…ideologically, there’s one desperately particularly upsetting moment where – in the book – where I talk about how Himmler and Hoss most admired, as prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses. They pointed to them and said, see that faith? That’s the kind of faith we need in our führer – absolute, unshakable faith. (from an interview with Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History) Richard Rohr

The Circle of Life

Listen of the Week

Still on the Journey

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Kindness
…practicing kindness requires, at minimum, a willingness to see the image of God in, and to find a point of honest connection with, every person—even, and especially, those I dislike.
Amy Peterson

Beauty
…what draws us to the good is that it is also eternal beauty. God himself is beauty, that is, and in the end, for Christians, we are joined to him in seeking the beautiful as he has taught us to recognize it in Christ, and in therefore seeking in every circumstance, however unanticipated, to express that beauty always anew, in ever more novel variations on that original “theme”—that unique and irresistibly attractive manner. At times, a sense of style really is everything.
David Bentley Hart

Noetic Perception
“Noetic perception” is a phrase that describes the ability of the human heart to perceive that which is Divine. As such, it is our capacity for communion with God and the whole of creation.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Prayer for Biden
…my simple prayer for President Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wisdom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the stamina to withstand the rigors of the most difficult job in the world. May his virtuous plans prevail and may his unrighteous efforts fail. And may God protect him from all harm.
David French

Luck?
People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance…deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they’re on their own. And that fills them with fear. Yeah, there are those people. But there’s a whole lot of people in group number one…they’re looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever’s going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope. See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? (unknown)

Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

 Lynn Ungar (3/11/20)

Love your neighbor
Karl Rahner wrote,
“There is no love of God that is not, in itself, already a love for the neighbor; and love for God only comes to its own identity through its fulfillment in a love for neighbor. Only one who loves his or her neighbor can know who God actually is. And only one who ultimately loves God … can manage unconditionally to abandon himself or herself to another person, and not make that person the means of his or her own self-assertion.”

Disenchanted Life
We are captivated by the “surface” of things, failing to see what lies beneath. It causes us to be anxious and driven by things of insignificance. If there is a constant temptation for us in our present time, it is to lose confidence that there is anything unseen or eternal, at least in the sense that such things impinge on our daily existence. Our disenchanted, secular world is a siren song that promises the power of control while robbing us of the reality of communion. We “manage” the world when we should be in love with it.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Apart from me you can do nothing.
These are not the words of a good to great life enhancement guru to upper-middle-class minivan and SUV drivers. This is the piercing clarity of the Word of God. Actually, we can do something apart from Jesus. We can do a lot. It will just amount to nothing.
J D Walt

Front Porch View

Listen For the Week

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Cell phone
Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy:
In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but what it may actually translate from one language to another?
Mark Sullivan 1953

Free fallin’
We are, as author Jonathan Dodson writes, living in a “state of existential vertigo”; as the late, great Tom Petty put it, we’re free, free fallin’.

Moral life
If the moral life is like learning to play an instrument, creative artistry built upon a foundation of technical skill, your early lessons are going to be rote and rudimentary. It’s only later, with advancing skill, where you’ll be able to preform and create in beautiful ways
Richard Beck

Unseen
Merle Haggard says, country music is “about those things we believe in but can’t see, like dreams and songs”–
It’s telling us that there is in front of us a kind of rational world, in which one and one always equals two, but that the thing that compels us forward as human beings, is that we look for one and one equaling three. We find that in our faith. We find that in our art. We find that in our love of each other.
Ken Burns

Christianity
Christianity is not a religion that allows us to make ourselves acceptable to God. If we believe we have become acceptable to him, we have missed him. Instead, Christianity is a relationship with a God whose heart is drawn towards the sinful, the broken, the outcast and the excluded. God sides with sinners and eats with them, warning those of us who are religious that, by declaring ourselves well, we stand in danger of not hearing the voice of our Creator calling us to himself.
Michael Spencer 

Sin
Sin is more than making a mistake or “missing the mark.” Sin is a slavery that penetrates to the deepest recesses of our being. 
Richard Beck

Truth
Truth has a side. These days everybody wants to be on the right side of history. No one seems to care too much about being on the right side of the truth.
J D Walt

Cynicism
…cynicism is simply too easy and smirking is childish. Neither allow for the deeper truths of joy and beauty
Stephen Kamm

Encountering people
Do the people you encounter this day feel safe, seen, and loved by you? Not just and only our best friends during an intimate chat over coffee, but complete strangers whom we bump into the rough and tumble of the day in our hurry, distraction, and stress. Do those people, the mass of strangers, receive from you the beautiful gesture?
Richard Beck

Listen for the Week – Just Keep On Dancing

Still on the journey.