Category: Notes Anthology

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New ideas
There are very few new ideas and there are even fewer new good ideas. If you ever spent time around young people who suddenly get inspired by an idea they think is new, you know that the vast majority of the time it’s because they don’t know that the idea is in fact very, very old. 
Jonah Goldberg

Return to church
Many will not return after the pandemic. 
You can watch a performance more comfortably at home…
Phoenix Preacher

The Cause
…the Cause is very compelling, it’s a vision of the good that is really, really attractive. Evil results because you’re pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Richard Beck

Fixing Others
When we assume that people won’t change unless we fix them—as if we don’t ourselves need fixing—we show that our ultimate trust is in ourselves, not God.
When we don’t simply trust God to change others, we effectively claim that our ability to shame, intimidate, or otherwise manipulate people into change is greater than God’s transforming Spirit.
Greg Boyd – Repenting of Religion

the meaning of the Cross today:
”We kill one another. We killed our best. We killed God who came to save us. When we kill another, we kill the God who made them and loved them, who was in them and who came to save us. This is what I see these days when I look at the cross.”
David Gushee

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. —James Baldwin (1924–1987)

Restorative Justice
…sin and failure are an opportunity for the transformation of the person harmed, the person causing harm, and the community. Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not just blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace” and an operative idea of restorative justice.
Richard Rohr

Fixers
Some of the people struggling most during the pandemic are the “fixers”… remember that you’re only responsible to be faithful, not for outcomes…
Phoenix Preacher

Fire Insurance
If there is nothing distinctly Christian about how you approach politics, there’s probably nothing distinctly Christian about how you approach anything else…and your faith is basically fire insurance…
Phoenix Preacher

Leading people to love
We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. Show me where that has worked. You cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1).
Richard Rohr

Fire Lighters
Isa 50:10-11
Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant?
Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.
But now, all you who light fires and provide yourselves with flaming torches, go, walk in the light of your fires and of the torches you have set ablaze.

For those who enjoy discovery because they know a good God is moving through the chaos toward a wonderful conclusion, mystery poses no problem. It is welcomed. Explain what you can, and relax even when you can’t. But for those ruled by a passion to explain, for those who insist on feeling confident in their own plans, mystery is offensive. They want to know exactly what they must do to provide for their economic future, to restore harmony in their relationships, to succeed in their career or ministry. Confusion is an enemy. Certainty is a challenge to overcome. 
God’s words through Isaiah tell us one way we can know if we are living in the flesh or in the Spirit. When we bump into something we can’t explain, when we find ourselves in a dark tunnel and aren’t sure how to get out, is our stronger impulse to trust God or figure out what to do? Do we quickly reach for a flashlight to help us see the road ahead? Or do we firmly grasp the hand of the only one who can see in. the dark?
Where is our confidence—in God or in our ability to come up with a good plan? If we walk confidently in the light of our own torches, Isaiah informs us that we are not relying on God. The demand to walk a path with a predictable outcome is an urge of the flesh. It needs to die. 
Larry Crabb

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“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

A Better Future
I don’t know who it was who said, “Every generation makes the mistake of assuming it lives at the most important time in history,” but it’s a healthy corrective. No, previous generations have been through worse than we’re enduring. And those generations emerged with enough optimism to dream of a better future and enough energy to start building it.
Michael Frost

Trauma
“People often think of trauma as a discrete event — a fire, getting mugged,” said Daphne de Marneffe, author of an excellent book about marriage called “The Rough Patch” and one of the most astute psychologists I know. “But what it’s really about is helplessness, about being on the receiving end of forces you can’t control. Which is what we have now. It’s like we’re in an endless car ride with a drunk at the wheel. No one knows when the pain will stop.”

The Battle Against Evil
…the battle against evil cannot be reduced to using power against it. Power used even in a just cause is only going to perpetuate evil. But it increasingly seems that this is the path our world is taking, the Good using power against the Bad. Using power in a just cause.
R Beck

A God who wears sandals
God stands among you and you do not recognize him because you do not know him. He stands among you in the midst of the crowd, unrecognized, hidden in the ordinary; in the frail frame of a human person. God is not in the temple. God is not some noumenal presence in the air creating a spiritual atmosphere in which people can experience him. No. God is somewhere in the crowd. He has a face. And he is wearing sandals.
Remember, God is a human being.
J D Walt

Christians and conspiracies
…the fact that Christians seem extra open to conspiracies does reveal that something is deeply broken in how people of faith are spreading their worldview. When Christianity is set up as a cultural battle instead of an opportunity to serve, others are seen not as people in need of love but enemies who need to be feared and mistrusted.
https://relevantmagazine.com/god/church/why-are-so-many-christians-falling-for-qanon/

Money
…money is a tool, a means toward an end, the created good itself. But due to money’s liquidity and fungibility, we stop using money as a tool and begin pursing money as an end in itself. Instead of seeking an experience of God’s goodness and grace in created gifts, our goal becomes simply to get money, and more of it. 
Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy – Mary Hirshfeld

Self Censorship
To break this cycle [self-censorship], we can’t just ask lone individuals to stand up in any given group. How many of us can make a habit of standing alone? No, we have to join the “voice of sanity” as the “one compatriot.” Do not let dissenters twist in the wind—stand up for their dignity when you disagree. Stand up for their argument when you agree. Because we have met the enemies of free speech, and they’re not the distant “other,” but the people in our own social circles who impose a direct and immediate relational cost on those who speak their minds.
David French

Struggles
.. know that there is no such thing as life without struggle. There is no one, not anyone, who escapes the soul-wrenching experiences that stretch the mind but threaten to calcify the spirit.
There is no one who has not known what it is to lose in the game of life, to feel defeat, to know humiliation, to be left standing naked and alone before the cold and staring eyes of a world that does not grieve for your grief.
Joan Chittister – Scarred By Struggle – Transformed by Hope

Traffic Lights
“This is a new invention, it’s called a traffic light. When it’s green, you can drive through it. When it’s red, you have to stop and wait for it to turn green.”
“Sounds like the government thinks it knows more than I do about how to drive my own car!”
“Well, people are dying in intersections. At a very sad rate. And getting hurt pretty badly, too. And this is something pretty easy we can all do together to keep people from dying and getting hurt.”
“But I haven’t died in this intersection. And I actually don’t know anyone else who’s died here either. You sure people aren’t maybe, like, falling off their roofs and you’re just saying they died in this intersection? To make us scared so you can control us?”
“People are definitely dying in this very intersection. But just look at the light, and go when it’s green. Stop when it’s red. We’ll add a yellow one so you know when it’s about to turn red.”
“But if I have to stop when it’s red, I won’t get where I’m going as fast. Sounds like you’re infringing on my freedom. Sounds like you don’t want me to get to work to earn a living and you want me to rely on the government for everything.”
“That’s….no. No one wants that. Look, we know no one’s going to like stopping at the red light. It’s going to be a small inconvenience for everyone. But again, if we all do this perfectly, together, we can keep people from dying in this intersection.”
“Well if people are so scared of this intersection, maybe they should just walk! Leave the cars to those of us who don’t want to live in fear!”
“That’s the thing – many of the people dying *are* pedestrians.”
“Look, how about if someone wants to stop at the light they can, but if someone else doesn’t want to stop, they don’t have to. It should be my choice. This is a free country, you know.”
“Again, this will work if everyone does it together. Just one person doing whatever they want has the potential to kill other people.”
Libby Jones

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!