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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Category: Notes Anthology

Notes Anthology 5-25-2020

George 0 Comments
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. There is no intended theme or thread, but they may give some insight into the drumbeat in my head.

Life has changed
Life has changed for good – I know, the phrase is uncomfortably ambiguous. But for those of us later in life it’s hard to see how we will ever get back to life as we have known it for so long. And yet. Hopefulness grows out of looking for goodness, beauty, and truth in a God-made and God-loved world. If life has changed for good, perhaps it is our calling now to realise good out of the way life has changed.  
Jim Gordon

Life Viewed through  a Microscope
The up-close detail and what is immediately at hand, when isolated from its place within Providence as a whole, can appear to be something that it is not. Such a false focus can be one of many formulas for an anxious existence. The “truth” of our existence is only revealed in the fullness of the truth which is made known to us in Christ’s Pascha.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Broken spirituality
…we feel the spiritual yearning burning in our hearts and souls, but we struggle to keep this quest from devolving into superficiality and triviality. We long for spiritual depth, but fear our “spiritual but not religious” approach to faith is just some mystical tinsel we’d sprinkled over our consumerism and self-absorption.
Richard Beck

Really Jesus
“Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.””?

Slowing Down
This quarantine has done one thing in particular to every one of us: it has slowed us down. It’s making us dig for life’s meaning, scoffing at our ideas of productivity, and more often than not our days end with us having made very little progress towards anything of value. It’s implanting a book-pace into our media-paced lives, and forcing us to face the characters and settings with which we find ourselves before we get anything in return.

I don’t think it’s an accident that our daily rhythms have been disrupted; I think we’re being shown just what it means to let slowness be a good thing. In Living Prayer, Benson writes, “in the society in which we live, the primary rule of work seems to be to cram as much into the hours of the day as you can. If you ask people how they are doing, they will say good or bad depending on how their work is going, regardless of whether or not their marriage is failing or their kids are in trouble or their house is on fire. We rush through the present toward some future that is supposed to be better but generally turns out only to be busier. ‘Be careful what you treasure,’ I read somewhere once…”
Thomas Anderson

Expertise
To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly… Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality…  
Now, anyone can bum rush the comments section of any major publication. Sometimes, that results in a free-for-all that spurs better thinking. Most of the time, however, it means that anyone can post anything they want, under any anonymous cover, and never have to defend their views or get called out for being wrong.
In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something.
Tom Nichols
“The University of Google, is where I got my degree from.”

Disturbance
Dorotheus of Gaza, “The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself.” 

Let the Dance Begin . . .

Soon We now miss out on so much
the graduation of a granddaughter,
the wedding of a niece,
the Final Four,
the beginning of Baseball,
the great Easter liturgy,
the day by day interaction on the street.
The virus has imposed a huge silence among us.
It is a silence that evokes loneliness,
and domestic violence,
and job loss,
and the end of life in the bars,
and on the beach,
and in the street.

We wait; we may wait in despair,
or at least in deep disappointment.
But we may also wait differently:
we wait in confident faith;
we wait in eager longing.
we wait on the Lord.
We wait for the future and against despair,
because we know that you,
the God of life, will defeat the force of death.

We know that the Friday execution
could not defeat the life lived by Jesus
nor the life lived by his faithful people.
As we wait, we practice our next moves
for the coming dance; it is only a little while . . .
“yet a little while”; we will walk the long march of obedience;
we will run the race of discipleship;
we will soar like eagles into God’s good future of neighborliness.
We know that you will overcome the silence because the silence
. . . no more than the darkness
. . . can overcome the Lord of Life.
Amen.

Walter Brueggmann “Virus as a Summons to Faith”

Notes Anthology 5/17/2020

George 0 Comments
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.

May 17, 2020

Beehive Hairdos
Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy died this past week.
In the years after the mauling, Mr. Horn and Mr. Fischbacher tried to minimize what was widely reported as a ferocious attack. They said the tiger had been unhinged by a woman in the front row with a beehive hairdo and the sight of Mr. Horn tripping as he tried to step between them, and that the tiger had picked Mr. Horn up by the neck, as a tigress might a cub, and was attempting to carry him to safety.
I believe beehive hairdo is the most plausible explanation.

Really, Jesus! “
Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them: “Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall.”??Luke? ?11:17? ?NIV??

Mantra – A personal mantra is an affirmation to motivate and inspire you to be your best self. It is typically a positive phrase or statement that you use to affirm the way you want to live your life. … The true value of a mantra comes when it is audible, visible, and/or in your thoughts.
Thinking about what my personal manta is…?

Quarantine Illusions – If you squint you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. Nora Caplan-Bricker, Lost Illusions

Confession – I think it’s not so much the sin that offends God as it is the refusal to come clean and confess it as sin. It’s the hiding, blaming, excuses, and self-deception that grieves the heart of God. That’s the difference between an admission and a confession. An admission says, “I did it, but it was not my fault.” A confession is simple honesty before God about what is true.  J D Walt

Endurance – Endurance is patience. It is shortening your time horizon so you just have to get through this day. Endurance is living with unpleasantness. In fact, it is finding you can adapt and turn the strangest circumstance into routine. Endurance is fortifying. It is discovering you can get socked in the nose and take it. Above all, endurance is living with uncertainty. Sometimes, it’s remaining quiet in the face of uncertainty because no conjecture will really tell you what is coming. Endurance is the knowledge that the only way out is through and whatever must be borne will be borne. David Brooks

Job – “It is presumptuous to comment on the book of Job. It is so full of the awesome reality of the living God. Like Job, one can only put one’s hand over one’s mouth.” Francis I Andersen

Imagination – It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty [Imagination] that one moves towards faith. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says,’God and the imagination are one’, I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.” (A Poet’s View.) JimGordon

What the Fig Tree Said
Denise Levertov

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blurting for Him
in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me!—yet how could the Lord
be unfair?—so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
in His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits—compassion, comprehension—
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.

Highlight of the Week

Notes Anthology

George 2 Comments

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.

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

The problem of social hostility

George 0 Comments

…the problem of the increased social hostility we are witnessing today is first a moral one, and only subsequently an intellectual problem. That is, if we are not to be self-satisfied, self-righteous partisans, unwilling to entertain the possibility of good in other parties, we must develop a certain kind of character. The avoidance of sectarianism is not first and foremost a matter of intellect. It is a question of character. When you see a thorough-going sectarian who always repeats the party-line, you likely are witnessing a coward (because it takes courage to face the back-fire of cognitive dissonance) who lacks integrity (because it takes truthfulness to acknowledge we may be wrong). 

Lee Camp

A New Old Resolution

George 1 Comment

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

I have been blogging for 12-15 years and at various times I have been afflicted with what I have called “blog slog”. That has been my state for the past few months. Actually, like the quote from Anne Lamott predicts: I’ve been feeling like hell and I am resolved to “write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of my heart — my stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. M truth, my version of things, my own voice.”

I realize this is ambitious and will require some intentionality. Fortunately, our two month hiatus to Florida provides a perfect opportunity to get my rhythm back.

Blogging has become a digital dinosaur of sorts. Podcasts have emerged as the next best digital communication, along with Utube and other video media. Of 70 +/- blog links on my feed, there are only a dozen or so currently active. Oh well, what would would one expect from a 76 year old dinosaur? I suppose blogging is my equivalence of a flip phone.

In any case, the journey joyfully continues.