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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

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

George 0 Comments

pointillistic: composed of many discrete details or parts

It’s a Lie
Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And you want to know the hell of it?? MARK TWAIN DIDN’T EVEN SAY THAT!!!

Moral Principles
Moral principles are absolute, but only love submitted to the will of God can direct us on how they apply in a particular situation.
Greg Boyd – Repenting of Religion

Misdirected love
..we need guidance to make sure that the things we love are ordered beneath our ultimate love of God. Christians have often described sin as misdirected love — loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/opinion/jerry-falwell-liberty.html

Clutter and mess
clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.
Anne Lamott

Tidiness 
Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.
Anne Lamott

Perfectionism
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamont 

 peace-monger. 
By that I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a “middler,” someone who is so incapable of taking well-defined stands that his “disability” seems to be genetic, someone who functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats conflict or anxiety like mustard gas– one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask, and he flits. Such leaders are often “nice,” if not charming.” Edwin Friedman
A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, pg. 13-14

Can We be Good Without God?
The most compelling read this past week. Long but worthwhile. Here are several excerpts:
American Nationalism
…virtuous heroes kill bandits and lawless Indians.
This common model of life’s meaning is drastically irreligious, because it places reliance on good human beings and not on God. It has no room for the double insight that the evil are not beyond the reach of divine mercy nor the good beyond the need for it. It is thus antithetical to Christianity which maintains that human beings are justified by God alone, and that all are sacred and none are good.
Exalted Individual
If the concept of the exalted individual defines the highest value under God, the concept of the fallen individual defines the situation in which that value must be sought and defended.
Sin
Sin is ironic. Its intention is self-exaltation, its result is self debasement. In trying to ascend, we fall. The reason for this is not hard to understand. We are exalted by God; in declaring our independence from God, we cast ourselves down. 
Original sin is the quiet determination, deep in everyone, to stay inside the world. Every sinful act is a violation of the personal being that continually, in freedom, vision, and love, threatens the world. The archetype of sin is the reduction of a person to the thing we call a corpse.
Destiny
Destiny is not the same as fate. The word refers not to anything terrible or even to anything inevitable, in the usual sense of the word, but to the temporal and free unfoldment of a person’s essential being. A destiny is a spiritual drama.
A destiny is never completely fulfilled in time, in the Christian vision, but leads onto the plane of eternity. It must be worked out in time, however, and everything that happens to a person in time enters into eternal selfhood and is there given meaning and justification. My destiny is what has often been referred to as my soul.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/12/can-we-be-good-without-god/306721/

Endangered species sighting this morning:



So Much To Think About

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.

“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

Weekly Rerun 8-17-2020

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

Arsonist
“I think politicians are arsonists, the main thing the G.O.P. does is try to light the Democrats on fire, and the main thing the Democrats do is light the Republicans on fire. That’s why there’s so little trust in politics.”
Ben Sasse

Numbers
As ego-inflating (or deflating) as the case may be, when it comes to the kingdom of God, numbers are at best an unreliable source and at worst a deceptive measure of success.
J D Walt

Solid Ground
The psyche cannot live with everything changing every day, everything a matter of opinion, everything relative. There must be a sound container holding us long enough so we can move beyond survival mode. There has to be solid ground, trust, and shared security, or we cannot move outward. There has to be a foundational hope, and for hope to be a shared experience there must be agreed-upon meanings and shared stories that excite and inspire us all. If there are truly stories from the great patterns that are always true, they will catapult us into a universal humanity and pluralistic society. We will both stand on solid ground and, from that solid ground, create common ground. If it does not support our movement outward, then it is not solid ground at all.
Richard Rohr

Sins
…the sins a particular religious community is good at avoiding tend to be the ones identified as most important to avoid in the mind of that community, while the sins a community is not good at avoiding tend to be minimized or ignored altogether—regardless of what emphasis the Bible puts on those sins.
Greg Boyd -Repenting of Religion

Christians and power
There is a deep hypocrisy where Christians profess to believe that PEOPLE should take care of people — Not the government… But then they need the government to enforce their vision of morality. And they profess to believe that God is on control of things… But they don’t trust God to take care of things unless christians are electing leaders who give them more political power. Their longing for power belies a lack of faith.
The Boeskool 

The Bible
The Bible is first, middle, and last about revealing the name and nature of God to the world. The design of divine revelation is not to give us tips on how to live a better life or be a better Christian. No, divine revelation designs to draw our knees to the earth, our faces to the ground, and our hearts into the heavens where we cry out, “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
J D Walt

Going the Second Mile
For Christians, going the second mile isn’t unheard of; it is simply to do things God’s way. Healing for our brokenness, forgiveness for our sins, kindness towards us in Christ, welcome to the least, last and lost, new creation for the heart in the power of the Spirit, springs of living water welling up to eternal life; God did none of that out of necessity, but from love. Grace is the gift of the second mile God, who in Christ came amongst us, walked with us, lived a sinless life of self-giving love, and when sinful humanity, ourselves included, have nothing left to offer, no further steps to take, He walked the second mile for us, to Calvary.
Jim Gordon

Self Delusion
It’s taken me a long time to realize how self-deluded I’ve been. I convinced myself that my “tough love” was about the other person when in fact, it was about me being right. Or being unwilling to admit when I was wrong.
Jarod Byas

Be an ordinary human being
Be an ordinary person, one of the human race.
Be polite with everyone, first of all, family members.
Be faithful in little things.
Do your work, then forget it.
Be simple, hidden, quiet, and small.
Think and talk about things no more than necessary.
Flee imagination, fantasy, analysis, figuring things out.
Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.
Have no expectations except to be fiercely tempted to your last breath.
Fr. Thomas Hopko

Wonder
Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. . . .
Valarie Kaur

They will know us by our love
The book says they will know us by our love and that is true, as long as you’re not among the myriad groups we hate.
Phoenix Preacher

Paralysis
Our politics are paralyzing the country. We practice suspicion or contempt where trust is needed, imposing a sentence of anger and loneliness on others and ourselves. We scorch our opponents with language that precludes compromise. We brush aside the possibility that a person with whom we disagree might be right. We talk about what divides us and seldom acknowledge what unites us.
David French

Church History
Richard Halverson, former chaplain to the United States Senate once wrote, “In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next it moved to Europe where it became a culture, and finally it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”
via J D Walt

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT