Metanoia

Ross Douthat: Celebration of the Passion or Self-Grooming?

"Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming." I never expected to read this in a publication like the New York Times, but Ross Douthat gave a glimpse of his own faith in a review of a recent Commonweal article by Luke Timothy Johnson.

George Herbert: Man

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Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,

That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit;

That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,

And both thy servants be.

-- George Herbert from "Man" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Jean Vanier: To accept the risk of personal consciousness

 

To accept the risk of personal consciousness and growth to inner freedom can be painful; it is never easy to follow the light of oneself when others do not seem to agree.  Communities can tend to close in upon themselves.  But belonging should always be a means to personal becoming.  It is accepting the risk of dying to aggressiveness and rivalry in order to discover a new freedom and a new fecundity - a new way of giving life to others, to be in "one body" with them.

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

Is Your Work Profane?

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Is your work profane?

Most of us yearn for a sense of fullness in our lives, a sense of flourishing in which two things are present. First, we’ve a sense that we’ve been delivered from those moments of confusion, melancholy, distance, and even isolation that sometimes make us feel utterly lost and alone in the wilderness. Second, in spite of the dailiness of life, we feel connected and moving towards a time in which all things are given eternal meaning, a destiny in which we rest in truth, beauty, justice, and joy.

Right now, we Christians only glimpse this our destiny in a fragmentary way, darkly, as through a mirror. But those glimpses are immensely important; they sustain us and direct us in our journey towards joy. And the name we give to such moments - and to the places and habits where we regularly encounter this fullness to which we are called - is “sacred.”  Sacred is the name for our windows to the holy. 

Fred Craddock: How to Begin Each Day

The great preacher, Fred Craddock, shared at a recent conference that, for more than thirty years, he has begun each day with the following prayer: 
 

Lord, thank you for giving me work to do that is more important than my feelings about it on any day. Amen.

Wendell Berry: Again I resume the long lesson...

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Again I resume the long

lesson: how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc

the woods this morning is

almost unnaturally still.

Through stalled air, unshadowed

light, a few leaves fall

of their own weight.

The sky

is gray.  It begins in mist

almost at the ground

and rises forever.  The trees

rise in silence almost

natural, but not quite,

almost eternal, but

not quite.

What more did I

think I wanted?  Here is

what has always been.

Here is what will always

be.  Even in me,

the Maker of all this

returns in rest, even

to the slightest of His works,

a yellow leaf slowly 

falling, and is pleased.

-- Wendell Berry in Given: Poems

T.S. Eliot: There are three conditions which often look alike

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There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between

     them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives - unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle.  This is the use of memory:

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past.  Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent.  History may be servitude,

History may be freedom.  See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

       -- T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding in T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays

Wendell Berry: On Ducking Doctrines

Cover of Leavings: Poems

If I'm a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.  Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air.  Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil's only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God's own only true interpretation of the Scripture:  these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, hour after hour, day after day; year after year - such is my belief - in Hell.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems

William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas: Being a Christian is not natural....

 
Being a Christian is not natural, not a by-product of being an American.  To be Christian is to be adopted by a new nation, the kingdom of God.  For the first time in our lives, those old labels and divisions that cause such grief - male/female, slave/free, rich/poor, New Jersey/Texas - are washed away, overcome, not by saying that such divisions don't mean anything, but rather by showing how they have been relativized, subordinated, and washed by our new citizenship.  Now, the only division that makes much difference to us is church/world.

--William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in Lord, Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer & the Christian Life

Stanley Hauerwas - Life is Sweet When We are in Love

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Loving Lord, where would we be without friends?  We would literally be no place.  Alone in your creation, yet unable to recognize it as creation.  It would be just another lonely place.  But you place us next to one another, and being so placed we are forced to recognize that others exist.  Bodies.  Attraction.  Recognition.  Friendship.  Love.  How wonderful and frightening.  We are not alone.  You created us passionate beings hungry for one another.  You want to make us your friends, and in that doing make us friends of one another and even ourselves.  Life is sweet when we are in love.  Praise you for giving us one another. Amen. -- Stanley Hauerwas in Prayers Plainly Spoken.