Knowing our desires

“In the basic decisions of life, God moves persons to will freely whatever He wills for them.”

Francis Kelly Nemeck and Marie Therese Coombs

Theology

Theology is the name we give to the efforts of our minds and hearts to catch up with the work of the Living God in the world. Or… theology is the name we give to the effort of our minds and hearts to grasp the world conjured by God and construed by Scripture. Or… theology is our successfully imagining the world imagined by Scripture, which reveals the world imagined by God.

• • Luke Timothy Johnson

Messy Spirituality

You and I are incomplete. I'm unfinished. I'm unfixed. And the reality is that's where God meets me is in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness. I thought he did the opposite, he got rid of all that stuff. But if you read the Bible, if you look at it at all, constantly he was showing up in people's lives at the worst possible time of their life.

- Mike Yaconelli

Tolkein on Evil

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: The millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their 'causes' and 'effects'. No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

J.R.R. Tolkein

Incarnation

“… only a reality that is not a being in the world, even the supreme being, could ever become a creature while at the same time remaining true to itself.”
Robert Barron

Guidance

God’s purpose in guidance is not to get us to perform the right actions. His purpose is to help us become the right kind of people.
John Ortberg

Community and Conversion

“The monks have come to know that their community is constituted by their commitment to conversion. And they know that conversion is turning from themselves to their brethren in community; and to Christ in prayer; and to God in Christ.”
John Main, O.S.B.

The Human Search

I think we can state the message like this: The search of all people in every age has been a search for some ultimate meaning perceptible among all the complexities and paradoxes of life. It is also a search for some ultimate authority in whom and on whom we can place complete reliance and certainty without losing our human self-respect or integrity. Idolatry and mere religiosity have only ever provided temporary satisfaction for this search. Our particular message which we have received by the manifold disclosure of God’s self-revelation that culminates in the person of Jesus is that these ultimate goals of meaning and authority are to be found within the depths of the human soul – within the mystery of our own personhood. It is the treasure buried in the field of our own hearts.
John Main, O.S.B.

Proof of God?

“a cable which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probablilities, separately insufficient for certainty, but when put together irrefragable.”
John Henry Newman

Liturgy and Justice

I note that while there are several places where God rejects liturgy for want of justice, I know of no biblical location where God rejects justice for want of liturgy. Liturgy is the symbolic celebration of divine justice so that in the latter's absence the former is empty.
John Dominic Crossan

Defining love

“God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16). But someone eager to define this is blindly striving to measure the sand in the ocean…
John Climacus

Analogy

The mystery that is beyond God himself,
The Ineffable,
That gives its name to everything,
Is complete affirmation, complete negation,
Beyond all affirmation and all negation.

Dionysius the Areopagite

Contemplation

“Contemplation is a habit of mind which enables the soul to keep in a state of recollection in the presence of God whatever may be the work with which we are occupied.”

Bede Griffiths

Resurrection

“A community which trusts in God rather than in the righteousness of its “cause” can always be crushed, but from that crushing will come resurrection. There is a hidden strength in being vulnerable, open, and non-violent, in being a people of the resurrection, knowing that we are loved and that God is guiding us, in all our fragility and littleness.”
Jean Vanier

Responsibility for Creation

The world was not made by man.
The earth is the Lord’s,
Not a derelict.
What we own, we owe.
“How shall I ever repay to the Lord
All his bounties to me!” (Psalm 116:12)

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Living

Living is not a private affair of the individual.
Living is what man does with God’s time, what man does with God’s world.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Trust

The great problem in the life of man is whether to trust, to have faith in God. The great problem in the life of God is whether to trust, to have faith in man.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Worship

Worship
Is a way of seeing the world
In the light of God.

Abraham Joshua Heschel