Category: Notes Anthology

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune

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Rebuke

Rebuke is not something that exists outside a good relationship, brought in only at crisis moments. Rebuke is not a radical moment of truth-telling, with a long list of stern indictments against a person who is significantly rebellious or who has tragically wandered away.

The Bible presents rebuke as a cord of ongoing honesty in an ongoing relationship, a normal part of loving your brother or sister daily. Rather than one big moment of scripted accusations, rebuke is many mini-moments of spontaneous, gentle confrontation.

Paul Tripp

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Self Critique

Christianity has the internal tools and resources to think through new challenges, to engage in self-critique, and to bring itself to a more coherent and consensual account of its own faith. It is possible to integrate creeds, consequences, and contexts according to metrics given by the Lord Jesus.

As Augustine said:

“So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them.”

Michael Bird

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Power

Power is always tempted to reject reality. If you are on the margins of society, reality is pretty apparent.

Samuel Kimbriel

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Contemplation

Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be a silent prayer. It refuses the very distinction between action and stillness. Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.  

The reason why the true contemplative-in-action is still somewhat rare is that most of us, even and most especially in religion, are experts in dualistic thinking. And then we try to use this limited thinking tool for prayer, problems, and relationships. It cannot get us very far. The irony of ego “consciousness” is that it always excludes and eliminates the unconscious—which means it is actually not conscious at all! Ego insists on knowing and being certain; it refuses all unknowing. Most people who think they are fully conscious (read, “smart”) have a leaden manhole cover over their unconscious. It gives them control but seldom compassion or wisdom.  

Richard Rohr

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Lament

“The resurrection of the church begins with lament.” This is difficult for many Americans and others living in Western countries to grasp. Our culture teaches us to embrace a triumphalistic and success-oriented posture. Thus we avoid lament. Americans are prone to move quickly to try to fix things, and often we need to lament, mourn, and grieve first to fully experience and understand what has taken place. In cases of injustice and atrocities such as genocide, the only real response we can have at first is to lament. Scripture teaches us that we can’t move toward hope, peace, transformation, and reconciliation without going through sorrow, mourning, regret, and lament…. 

Lament is a demonstrative, strong, and corporate expression of deep grief, pain, sorrow, and regret. Lament and repentance deal with issues of the heart. They pave the way for outer change. Lament is a personal and corporate response to many things: evil, sin, death, harm, discrimination, inequality, racism, sexism, colonization, oppression, and injustice. It is about mourning the painful, shameful, or sorrowful situation, about confessing sin and complicity and sorrow, about calling God to intervene and to change the situation. Finally, lament is about offering thanksgiving and praise to God, knowing that God will intervene and bring change, hope, and restoration. 

Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill 

https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-eijhyg-tlkrtilrty-z

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Right Worship

“right worship.” This is the very heart of our life. It is the true home and heart place of the Church’s teaching. The sublime institution of the Eucharist was a revelation of all that Christ had said and done, as well as its ultimate fulfillment on the Cross – all of it made manifest in what would become the central act of worship in the life of the Church. It is a dynamic presence of theosis (bread-become-God) set in our midst.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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Grievance

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Frank Bruni NYT

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Borrow money from pessimists — they don’t expect it back. Steven Wright

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the advantages of reading:

Reading transports us to worlds we would never see, introduces us to people we would never meet, and instills emotions we might never otherwise feel. It also provides an array of health benefits. Here are six scientific reasons you should be picking up more books.

1. Reading reduces stress.
2. Reading (especially reading books) may add years to your life.
3. Reading improves your language skills and knowledge of the world.
4. Reading enhances empathy.
5. Reading boosts creativity and flexibility.
6. Reading can help you transform as a person.

via Scot McKnight

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Divine Love

Those who are self-sufficient remain outsiders to the mystery of divine love because they will always misuse it. Only the need of a beloved knows how to receive the need and gift of the lover, and only the need of a lover knows how to receive the need and gift of the beloved. 

Richard Rohr

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Generosity

• generosity starts by paying attention;
• generosity demands that the gift be appropriate to the receiver;
• a gift is not a gift unless it is released;
• giving is reciprocal;
• giving strengthens human relationships;
• gifts change the people involved.

Michael Moynagh – https://amzn.to/3X9aCke

God doesn’t need us to accomplish his purposes.

Josh Graves

Protests

In the four years since mass protests broke out over the killing of George Floyd, cities across the US have settled more than 130 lawsuits involving police misconduct with payouts totaling nearly $150m to protesters, journalists, legal observers and bystanders, according to an analysis of the lawsuits published this week.

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Mercy

The story comes to mind of the little fish swimming up to its mother, all in a panic: “Mama, Mama, what’s water? I gotta find water or I’ll die!” We live immersed in this water, and the reason we miss it is not that it is so far away but, paradoxically, so close: more intimate to us than our being itself.…  

[Mercy] is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…  

The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God

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Religious Right

“Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary. There was no rhetoric to appalling, no alliance too shady, no biblical application too sacrilegious. Letting go – aphiemi [Greek] – was not an option.”

Scot McKnight – The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

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Modernity

…the problem that I want us to see is how Modernity works – and particularly how it works within us. We have internalized the myth of progress and utility. We not only believe that the world and the things around us can be better, but that it is our God-given task to make them so. We push this same cultural mandate into the Scriptures as well. We imagine the parable of the good stewards (those who invested their talents of money and made a profit) to be stories of how God praised and rewarded them for their productivity and usefulness. We fail to wonder what actually constitutes faithful stewardship in the Kingdom of God.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz, Anglo-American novelist (1887-1985)

Culture War Christians

“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.”

…if we want to frank about it, culture war Christians are walking down a path that leads straight to hell. I don’t delight in that assessment, I’m just connecting the dots. I mean, Jesus is the guy who looked the moralism religious folk directly in the eye and said, “I assure you that the tax collectors and sex workers are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” I would not want to be a social media Pharisee wagging a finger at the world the day the Lord returns. I’d rather be sitting at a table being lambasted as the friend of sinners. Just sayin’…

And maybe this why, to return to the issue of mathematics, only “a few find it.” Because you can grow a church with the culture wars. A church fueled by resentment can become “mega.”  
I guess what I’m trying to say is this:
Size makes me suspicious. A wicked Christianity is a scalable Christianity. You can grow a rotten church.
Authentic Christianity is possible, but few find it. 
Richard Beck

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY