Category: Notes Anthology

Christian Witness
There is a beautiful story from years ago about an interview Dan Rather did with Mother Teresa. He was asking her about prayer. Here’s how I remember it. Rather asked Mother, “When you pray, what do you say to God?” She replied, “I don’t say anything. I listen.” He then prodded further, “What then does God say?” She responded, “God doesn’t say anything. He listens.” Then she wryly added, “And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it.” 

Listening to the Bible
…one of my big problems with both progressive and evangelical Christians is that neither group listens to the Bible as each already knows exactly what the Bible has to say. Why read the book when you already know all the answers? Both groups pin Jesus in the case as a specimen of their preferred politics. Neither group realizes that Jesus is their critic and crisis.
Richard Beck

Beauty and Wonder
Over the years, I have come to believe more deeply in the importance of regularly engaging with things that move us to awe and wonder. So much of our early adult years can be spent trying to nail things to the floor (theological, relational, philosophical, spiritual, or otherwise) that simply cannot be wrangled in that way. Engaging with beauty and wonder pries our grip off of our felt need to lock things in so we can control them. Russ Ramsey

Context
…what I mean by context is, “stuff you might want to know if you were going to have a compelling conversation about stuff going on,” or, “stuff people leave out of the conversations I see on TV.”
Jonah Goldberg

Christian ? Witness
A gentleman in this park invited us to join (after paying the cost of course) a group for Easter dinner outside over by the club house. This guy, I’m sure you’ve seen/maybe met, was in charge of this Lord’s Luncheon to break bread together and I’m sure he would lead us all in a lengthy Easter prayer. He proudly touts his christian faith. After asking me if I wanted tickets (following the cable/internet public meeting), I said I would speak to my bride and seek her opinion. I did mention we would be just getting back from Disney, as it is Barb’s birthday wish to go there for the 50 year  anniversary. Before I could even finish, I was bashed and ridiculed as to why would anyone go to Disney! He stated, and I quote,” the place is full of gays and those LGBTQ people, I will never go there and I hope DeSantas closes the place down.”
We are not attending the Easter dinner, and we are going to Disney to support those folks. 
We have to have a name for the masses of Christian wanna bees. Christian is not what they are.
A non- wannabe Christian friend

Rembrandt’s Transformation

Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.”
In his younger work, he flexed for the viewer, showing off his technical abilities, which were unmatched. To think a man in his mid-twenties painted The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is hard to get my mind around. As impressive as it is, however, it’s not that intimate. But later, he paints the same scene again, only this time he is an old man, approaching death. He has suffered. He has lost a wife, three children, his fortune, and reputation. This version is intimate, warm, and simple. In his early painting, he wanted to show us what he could do, but in the later version, it’s as though all the old man wants to do is hold Jesus. Those two paintings come together to tell the story of one man, and how youthful self-assurance gives way humility and dependence—and often by way of suffering.

Capturing it all.
Some years back, my wife and I stood beside the Grand Canyon. I had bought a small camera for the trip and felt a deep frustration as I tried to take pictures. Every picture I took, no matter how I pointed the camera, no matter how I adjusted the lens, was a failure. Every picture was entirely accurate. However, no picture could capture what I saw and felt. The Grand Canyon, and the experience of standing on its edge, cannot fit in a standard camera (if any). I think that reason is somewhat like that. It can do an amazing job of expressing and understanding certain things. It cannot, however, do everything. If there is a “reason” that can comprehend the whole of things, then it is unknown to human beings.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Reenactment
This past week we traveled to Abilene, Texas for Ann’s brother and wife’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration. Ann and I met on our first day of college at Abilene Christian College. We had a great celebration and visit with family and friends. Walking around the campus of Abilene Christian University, we located the place where we had our first kiss. We reenacted the event. It was as good as the first one 62 years ago. Actually, it was better.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Fankle
a better F word
…unfankling the fankles, and deciding to live with the odd unfankleable knot. ‘Fankle’ is a wonderful Scottish word for an unholy mess of thread, string, rope so tangled and entangled it takes inordinate patience to restore it to a useable skein.

Attachments
In Maps of Meaning Peterson describes how neurosis is often the product of unhealthy, excessive, and rigid attachments. Because of these attachments we often fail to move into newness and opportunity. We fail to meet the challenges of life with flexibility. Primarily because some things must be “let go” or “sacrificed” in order to move forward. Fearing to face this loss and grief, and clinging to the safety and predictability of the past, we neurotically cling to psychic lifeboats that can no longer save us and have outgrown their usefulness. Symbolically, we remain “children,” playing it safe, and fail to move heroically into the risks of “adulthood.” We have to be willing to “sacrifice” to keep moving into an ever-changing future. 

Preaching
Scott Swain wrote something that defines preaching this way:
In preaching, we are heralds of the king, announcing that he has come and that he is coming again. In preaching, we are friends of the bridegroom, wooing the bride to embrace her beloved Lord. In preaching, we are ministers of the new covenant, presenting Jesus Christ, clothed in all the promises of the gospel, and summoning hearers to engage him in covenant union and communion.

What is a woman?
The prominence of the woman in the Scriptures parallels the Spirit’s. She is present and yet backgrounded. She is visible, yet obscure. However, in the unfolding she comes increasingly into view until she looms as large as day in Revelation, the bride as the final symbol of mankind. Redeemed humanity is a mankind who has become “womankind,” the exalted son’s sister and bride. The final corporate identity of mankind is feminine. So, the woman is obscure in the Scripture not because she is less, but because she is last. She is indicative of things to come, yet she is treasure worth finding as she represents what eye has not seen, what ear has not heard, neither has entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those that love him.
Aimee Byrd

Language
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
George Orwell

Lived Theology
If you take a look at what Christian living is actually like for those in your community and circles, you will discover — usually not creeds and confessions — but “lived” theology. The lived theology of a suburban and urban life will not be identical. 
Scott McKnight

This is what I’ve come to understand about prayer.
Prayer is like breathing. Prayer is metaphysical respiration. Release and receiving. Escaping the trap of your subjectivity into an experience of gratitude and gift. Renunciation and grace.
If you refuse to pray, it’s like going through the day holding your breath. You become trapped within yourself, like a stagnant pond. To keep the waters clear you need inflow and outflow. 
But when you look at the world, everyone is holding their breath. 
All the world is suffocating.
Richard Beck

Paradoxical thinking
The truth in paradoxical language lies neither in the affirmation nor in the denial of either side, but precisely in the resolution of the tug-of-war between the two. The human mind usually works on the logical principle of contradiction, according to which something cannot be both true and false at the same time. Yet that is exactly what higher truths invariably undo (for example, God is both one and three; Jesus is both human and divine; bread and wine are both matter and Spirit). Unfortunately, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, we Western, educated people have lost touch with paradoxical, mystical, or contemplative thinking. We’ve wasted five centuries taking sides—which is so evident in our culture today!
Richard Rohr

Doctrine
Doctrine gets a bad wrap. It gets portrayed as flat, fixed, and even fossilized truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Doctrine is revelatory truthwhich has been crystallized, like a many faceted diamond, into the brilliance of a refracted clarity. Doctrine never replaces Scripture, but it collects and collates these sacred texts into dynamic exhibits of revealed truth. Think of doctrine as a theological art gallery. Doctrine presents Scripture as a series of theological works of art. 

Part of the problem with doctrine is how over the years it has become like the Cliff Notes on the Bible. It’s like trying to reduce a movie to a series of still images. The Bible is like an epic movie series. Doctrines are like select scenes from the movie put into still images. The images only have meaning if you have seen the movie, but if you have seen the movie, they hold enormous significance. 

Our doctrine, though, cannot be confused for for our experience. Doctrine helps us understand and interpret our experience, but too often, it has been a substitute. We ask people to accept a set of doctrines when we need to be helping them to encounter and experience Jesus Christ. Doctrine does not save people. Only Jesus does that. 

Then there is the peril of substituting our experience for our doctrine, or worse, defining our doctrine according to our experience. The deception of sin has shipwrecked many souls on the shoals of changing our doctrine to accommodate our broken human condition. 
There is a supreme irony in the interplay of these two scenarios. Because we have been willing to allow an approach to doctrine that settles for mere acceptance instead of pressing on toward personal experience, we have perpetrated an approach to personal experience (whatever it may be) that elevates it to its own doctrine. In other words, the Truth has been exchanged for “my truth” and “your truth.” 
the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.
Richard Rohr

Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear indicts us. How willing are we to lead with the fact that we’ve got a lot of things in us that aren’t right?
This is how God sees his people. We are fully exposed in our short-comings, and at the same time we are of unimaginable value to him. Because this is so, this is how we should see others, and it is how we should be willing to be seen by others—broken and of incalculable worth.
Russ Ramsey

German theoretical physicist Max Planck was told by his professor not to go into Physics as “almost everything is discovered already”. So Planck said he did not want to discover anything & just wanted to learn the fundamentals. He went on to originate Quantum theory & won a Nobel Prize. – a recent fact that came to my attention.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY