So Much To Think About

Meeting God
We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longings we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we meet God, or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.
Jim Gordon

Knowing Who We Are
People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren’t. 
Whenever we do anything stupid, cruel, evil, or destructive to ourselves or others, we are, at that moment, unconscious, and unconscious of our identity. If we were fully conscious, we would never do it. Loving people are always highly conscious people. 
Richard Rohr – Breathing Under Water

Dreich
In Scotland ‘dreich’ is the word we reserve for days that are dull, damp, cold and relentlessly demotivating!
Jim Gordon
In a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can’t be expressed in language. I labour the point lest the devil should. hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is … Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.
C S Lewis

Truth telling
The historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The most revolutionary act one can engage in is […] to tell the truth.” Indeed! I think the revolutionary part of truth is that it can free us and those around us to live with greater certainty about what is real, even when it hurts, because we are no longer shackled to the energy lying requires of us. Lying demands the continuation of the lie and the amplification of the lie to keep the truth hidden.… Telling the truth creates ripples of authenticity that change the world.…
I believe truth is revolutionary; it’s part of the work of fierce love. Truth makes a personal, spiritual, ethical, and moral demand upon us. It wants to be said, known, told. It hurts and it’s inconvenient, but it’s essential to our well-being. It cleanses our spiritual palate and restores our souls. Truth is a drink of water to a parched traveler. It lubricates relationships. It liberates us from bondage. It builds trust and connections. It’s the beginning of authentic living and joy. Truth eludes us at times, and we have to pursue it. Truth invites us to be honest about who we are, about our flawed-but-beautiful, broken-but-healing selves. Truth leads to reconciliation and peace; without truth, there is no peace. In the light of truth, we are able to honor our journey and love ourselves. Truth-telling is a spiritual discipline that requires practice. We must not lie to others and, as Fyodor Dostoevsky suggested, we mustn’t lie to ourselves. Being honest with ourselves about ourselves is to love ourselves unconditionally, to love ourselves fiercely.
Richard Rohr -Truth-telling can be a very difficult journey on the way to freedom.
—Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love

You might be a fundamentalist if:
you have an intolerance for disagreement, are constantly line-drawing, endlessly hunting for heretics.
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Proverbs 18:2

Dissent
…words from the Supreme Court in Barnette: 
Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
David French

Best Ideas Learned in 2022
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them.

Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

“For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.”
In courtroom trials and political debates, anyone can find a subject-matter expert who supports their view, because having a PhD doesn’t make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

Consuming online content makes us feel like we’re learning, but 90% of the content is useless junk—small talk, clickbait, marketing—which crowds out actual info from our minds. As such, we feel we’re getting smarter as we get stupider.
OUCH!
https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-10-best-ideas-i-learned-in-2022?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Taliban+Continues+Clampdown+on+Afghan+Women+s+Rights

STILL ON THE JOURNEY