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Notes Anthology 6-29-2020

George June 29, 2020 Notes Anthology 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.

Love your neighbor as yourself
Question to ask.
How would you know you are loving your neighbor as yourself?
Sean Palmer

Marriage
Marriage is not a hierarchical, power-oriented relationship. Paul takes great care here to define marriage as a mutually submissive and mutually beneficial relationship. Each belongs to the other. One cannot claim a debt on the other, yet each can assert their indebtedness to the other. In marriage, it’s always, “I owe you,” and never “You owe me.”
J D Walt

Feeling Offended
“The feeling of offendedness is invigorating. . . . But we must never settle for it. We must not confuse an accelerated pulse rate for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We must interrogate our offendedness, hold it open for question. . . . If we’re more opposed, for instance, for what we take to be ‘bad language’ and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. We have yet to understand the nature of real perversion. . . . “Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It’s easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people”
David Dark

Add a little grace
In the play The Man of La Mancha Don Quixote said on his deathbed, “I just wanted to add a measure of grace to the world.”

Viewpoints
Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.
David Brooks

Terrifying
Few things are more terrifying in the spiritual arena than those who absolutely know but who are also unloving, hostile, proud, superstitious and fearful.
Dalles Willard

Good manners
Manners play all sorts of important functions in society, but near the top of the list is that they’re the way we show respect to other people. Americans are an extremely egalitarian people, so it’s no surprise that we have done away with nearly all of the forms of good manners that suggest one person is better than another person.
Jonah Goldberg

How are You?
“How are you?” These are the three most useless words in the world of communication. The person asking doesn’t really want to know, and the person responding doesn’t tell the truth. What follows is a lost opportunity and meaningless exchange with zero connection.
Harvard Business Review

Those who commit evil
The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.

Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil?
M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie

Slogans
The problem with slogans is they are propaganda. They are meant to do something besides say what you believe. They are more marketing than anything else. And because they are terse, they can be used to mean many things by a variety of people. And that can cause confusion. And what do you think about the ones who will not use the slogan you think is needed? Will you assume the best of them? Also, slogans are usually for a moment or a movement and not for the long haul over a lifetime. We ought to be very cautious with them.
Matt Redmond

Love Like Jesus
If you want to love like Jesus loved when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” I recommend starting with the cars that cut you off as you drive to and from work.
Matt Redmond

Joy in the Journey
Lifted from David French’s Sunday post

Joy in the Journey
Michael Card

There is a joy in the journey,
There’s a light we can love on the way.
There is a wonder and wildness to life,
And freedom for those who obey.
All those who seek it shall find it,
A pardon for all who believe.
Hope for the hopeless and sight for the blind
To all who’ve been born of the Spirit
And who share incarnation with him;
Who belong to eternity, stranded in time,
And weary of struggling with sin.
Forget not the hope
That’s before you,
And never stop counting the cost.
Remember the hopelessness when you were lost?

Source: LyricFind

Discovery of the Week,

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

Notes Anthology 6-21-2020

George June 21, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Unseen realities
Most every action and statement prescribed by the culture-makers (believer and unbeliever) assumes the highest realities are the seen realities. Think of how different things would be if we all took Paul seriously when he told us to keep our eyes on what is unseen. Not only would it not make us more kind, it would make us more patient, and gentle. And loving.
Matt Redmond

Bridges and reconciliation
The life of reconciliation is bridge shaped. Bringing together two sides, joining what is divided, refusing to function as a wall, overcoming estrangement in the power of Christ’s love, seeing our neighbour’s interest as our own, spanning and supporting the road to friendship and the two way travel of mutually acknowledged dignity, rights and obligations.
I like bridges. They take you places. They introduce you to the other side. They are meeting places, a two way conversational encounter of people travelling in opposite directions. The life of reconciliation is such a bridge.
Jim Gordon Living Wittily

Retirement
When work ends, we survive the retirement. It is finding ourselves useless that swallows us up day after day.
Joan Chisttier

Shalom
Shalom is actually this state where every single person is flourishing. That’s God’s ultimate dream for the world: every single person, even creation itself is be flourishing to its fullest potential as beings made in the image of God.

So how can we know if there is shalom in a community? How can we know if there’s flourishing? You look the most marginalized. If they’re doing good, you’re doing good. The whole society is doing good. That’s such a fascinating way of looking at it. I don’t think, as Americans, we’re trained to do that. We’re trained to look to the top. How are the business people doing? Are they doing OK? How’s the stock market doing? We aren’t trained to look at who God has been trying to tell us to look at. How are the people who are the farthest away from the seats of power, the farthest away from economic stability? How are they doing? And if they’re not doing well, then nobody’s doing well.
D.L. Mayfield’s ‘The Myth of the American Dream’

The Remarkable Ordinary
I certainly am always at war one way or another with myself, and some of them are wars I must fight to try to slay the demons, to kill the dragon, to lay the ghost to rest. But there are other wars you fight with yourself that are really not worth fighting at all. The war to make yourself be more, do more than you have it in you really to do or to be. I think of that wonderful line from one of the poems of my beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins where he says, “My own heart let me more have pity on.” My own heart let me more have pity on. That’s a lovely phrase. Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you’re driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn’t have to think about doing.
• Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary (p. 111)

Crisis in American Christianity
Ancient Christianity caused something of a crisis in Rome when monasticism suddenly burst on the scene. The children of the rich were renouncing their wealth and power at such a rate that it was feared the empire would be wanting in leadership. American Christianity has never had a crisis of wealth and power. The virtues of the marketplace and the virtues of the faith have become synonymous.
Fr. Stephen Freeman https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2020/06/16/the-importance-of-failure/

Fear of Failure
There is a fear that if we do not fear failure, we will never succeed. It is the same mentality that imagines the gospel to only be successful if it is backed by the threat of hell. It is, I think, the voice of shame and shaming. My experience is that when the world is seen through this lens, success itself brings no satisfaction. It is always haunted by the possibility of failure that waits around the corner.

St. Paul said that he would “boast of his ‘weaknesses,’” noting that, “in my weakness His strength is made complete.” Many times the strength of God is made complete simply as we sit in His presence and acknowledge our failure. This acknowledgement is bearable when we allow our failure to be captured and swallowed by His strength.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Identity
Our big problem is the way we confuse our identity with our role, mistaking our worth as a person with our performance of a job. When our identity is linked up with our performance, our performance becomes a way of validating ourselves—which makes everything we do, no matter how apparently noble it may be, a back door way of serving ourselves. This is the essence of slavery to self.
J D Walt

Gospel affiliations
If you associate the Gospel with any political affiliation, then you arbitrarily limit the reach of the Gospel…which is one reason why so much of this Gospel soaked country ignores it…
Phoenix Preacher

Struggle with age
I wrestle with the fact that my age and experiences may make it difficult for me to judge current events righteously…
Phoenix Preacher

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!
Saved this one for last

We’ll be fine.
…this was Kid Rock’s bar here in Nashville this weekend. Don’t worry, y’all… The guy in the middle right wearing a green shirt coughed into his elbow. Everyone should be fine…

Notes Anthology 6-12-2020

George June 15, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

A better future
…if you start from the philosophical premise that the past has nothing to teach you and the present is just the poisoned fruit of the past, you’re not destined to recreate something better. You’re virtually guaranteed to recreate something worse
Jonah Goldberg

Some day
…making ourselves imperious so that there will never be a doubt in anyone’s mind who is the god of the day, the messiah of the moment, the king of the mountain, the goddess of heaven, the person in charge, the abbot, the boss, the president, the power. But down deep, that may be the most powerless position of all. If we refuse to ask for help, if we distance ourselves from the strengths of others, if we cling to the myths of authority and power where trust is needed, we leave out a piece of life. We condemn ourselves to ultimate failure because someday, somewhere, we will meet up with the thing we cannot do and our whole public self will depend on our being able to do it.
From “Scarred by trouble, Transformed by hope.”

The Crowd
The passions of crowds often seem to empower a group to do something that a single individual would never dare or even wish. There is an anonymity that comes about in which personhood begins to be obscured and lost. It is a dangerous episode in the life of any nation, regardless of the cause.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Courage
Courage is not nearly so rare a quality as we sometimes like to think it is. We forgive ourselves the responsibility to muster it on the grounds that it is the unwonted virtue of unusual people in momentous circumstances. The truth is that courage is what carries simple people through an average day. It is not an action; it is an attitude. It is the spiritual strength that gives direction in the midst of confusion. It is no more uncommon than fear. It is, in fact, the child of fear.
Joan Chisttister

Common Ground
The first and most basic area of common ground is that we are all made in the image of God. Without agreement on this most basic assertion there can be no agreement on anything else. …The denial of that fundamental equality, in thought or practice, is not simply a denial of the stated laws of most modern nation states, it is a denial of God’s work in creation and of Christ’s Incarnation.
Phoenix Preacher

Speak to be heard
“you must speak (or write) in a way that people can hear you.” If you simply write to offend, no one will listen other than people who already agree with you. It seems that many don’t care anymore if anyone can hear them or not, they just love the sound of their own voices and the offense they create…
Phoenix Preacher

Listening
Younger people realize you haven’t been listening. It’s not the position people hold that is offensive. It is the fact you don’t value people and their view point enough to be able to articulate it to other people. You aren’t capable of the hard work of listening, the reason is you’re not humble.
We are led by people who have always been in power. When you are in power you don’t have to listen, people do what you want.
Josh Graves

Internet
The internet is a biopsy of the human soul. A context where what is inside of us is pulled out of us and is made public, revealing any malignancy within us.
Erwin McManus

Preaching the Gospel
Preaching the the Gospel does not begin with being verbal. You can not talk people into love, surrender, love of truth. We must be verbalizing experience and experience that doesn’t ring true won’t go far.
Richard Rohr

The Mind of Christ
To get the mind of Christ we must practice, practice, practice.
Landon Saunders

Free Advice

So much to think about.

Notes Anthology – 6-8-2020

George June 8, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

It has been a crazy week. So much information it’s hard to winnow it down, but here goes.

Forgiveness
Desmond Tutu wrote: “Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of the possibility of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.”

No atheist in a foxhole?
Godfrey Diekmann, a legendary Benedictine liturgist, recounted being sunk up to his hips in a swamp while gathering watercress and having to be pulled out by a truck hoist. It was delicate and dangerous business. In the Christmas letter he wrote following the event he said that after more than fifty years of monastic life, “What bothers me is that during the entire ordeal of about twenty-five minutes I didn’t have a single pious thought!”
from “Scarred by Suffering, Transformed by Hope”

The Essence of Life
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that’s all right.
Joan Chittister

Self-Deception
In their own eyes they flatter themselves
too much to detect or hate their sin.
Psalms 36:2

NT in one sentence
It will take the Word of God in concert with the Spirit of God to transform people of God into the image of God so they can participate in the will of God to redeem the world of God. If I had to reduce the New Testament to one sentence, that would be it.
J D Walt

Racism
“I recognize that most people who make this declaration of racism being ‘a sin issue, not a skin issue’ have good intentions. They rightly infer simple legislation can’t establish racial harmony. However, it is dangerous for the church and its relevance in society to continue to infer racism will only be made better by personal sin management. We must address the deeper complex implications of racism being an issue of idolatry. Otherwise the church will continue in it’s legacy of being complicit in the persistence of the racial divide.”
Mike Frost

Power to be
And what of social or political arrangements–however important in their own right–can guide and empower me to be the person I know I ought to be? Can anyone now seriously believe that if a people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is “right?”
Dallas Willard

Loving the unlikable
In the Church, we talk about loving our enemies. But truth be told, our enemies are not the hardest people to love. It’s not those who antagonize us, but the pariahs, the socially awkward—the people with boundary issues, the guy with the wildly inappropriate jokes, the girl who talks like she’s paid by the word count—who pose the real challenge.
Some people are just unlikable. Try as you might, you cannot muster the desire to spend time with them. You don’t want to talk to them, and when given the opportunity, you will go out of your way to avoid the awkward, culturally expected niceties.
We tell ourselves we love them; we just don’t want to spend time with them or be seen in public with them. One trick we are taught to master from a young age is the ability to justify. We rationalize not liking certain people because they just aren’t likable.
Yet Jesus has the audacity to tell us to love other people. Not just that, He says it’s the second most important commandment in all the law. The only thing more important than loving other people is loving God Himself.
Tyler Edwards

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 I 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

Doing Nothing
My experience is that questioning our responsibility for history’s outcome will always be met with anxious objections that we would be agreeing “to do nothing” and the results would be terrible. Keeping the commandments of Christ is not doing nothing. It is, however, the refusal to use violence to force the world into ever-changing imaginary versions of the good.

Think with me for a moment and ask yourself this question – “Have you so rationalized the world around you that prayer and obedience to Christ and his teachings now feels like doing nothing?”
Fr Stephen Freeman

Remember this the next time you complain about having to walk your dog.

Notes Anthology 5-25-2020

George May 25, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

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”

Category: Notes Anthology

Notes Anthology 6-29-2020

Notes Anthology 6-21-2020

Notes Anthology 6-12-2020

Notes Anthology – 6-8-2020

Notes Anthology 5-25-2020

Grandkids