Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Forget the numbers
There never has been a power so dramatically opposed to Christianity as the daily press. Day in and day out the daily press does nothing but delude [people] with the supreme axiom of this lie, that numbers are decisive. Christianity, on the other hand, is based on the thought that truth lies in the single individual.
—Søren Kierkegaard in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
What if God is ugly?
The question “What if God is ugly?” has been going through my brain for about a year. The more I think about it the more sense it makes to me. Whenever we see something we think is beautiful (based on our own concept of beauty), we think of God. But we all have a different (cultural, individual) sense of beauty. So in heaven a lot of people will be disappointed.…
In my creativity class, students have to make a list of ugly and beautiful items. And the lists always surprise me. Under the heading “ugly” I will find the words “spider” and “feet”! How can they claim these are ugly?… What we call ugly is only our appraisal. My lifelong sermon message has been to acknowledge life wherever you are and whatever it is. For the ordinary is special.
—Reinhold Piper Marxhau in a letter to Martin Marty (Christian Century, March 23–30, 1988)
What’s the difference?
The standard of practical holy living has been so low among Christians that very often the person who tries to practice spiritual disciplines in everyday life is looked upon with disapproval by a large portion of the Church. And for the most part, the followers of Jesus Christ are satisfied with a life so conformed to the world, and so like it in almost every respect, that to a casual observer, there is no difference between the Christian and the pagan.
—Hannah Whitall Smith in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
A losing race
Technology is so far ahead of human relations! As for the latter, we are still in the Stone Age. Why do we human beings learn so much, so soon, about technology, and so little, so late, about loving one another?
—Henri Nouwen in New Oxford Review (June 1987)
God and the media
It could not possibly be the case that something men have invented, like the media, could never be serviceable to God.… For instance, once when I was standing waiting for a train in an underground station, a little man … came up to me and asked permission to shake my hand. I gladly, and rather absentmindly, extended a hand.… As we shook hands, he remarked that some words of mine in a radio program had prevented him from commiting suicide. The humbling thing was that I couldn’t remember the particular program he had in mind; doubtless some panel or another, to me buffoonery, and yet a human life had hung on it.
—Malcolm Muggeridge in Christ and the Media
APSALMON TWA FLIGHT 81
High above the clouds
six miles over earth
I think of Time
and Life
not timeless life
of coffee tea or milk
not living water
bread of life
of landing
on hard concrete strip
not flying on to meet
You.
I guess I fear that.
Earthbound in the
heavens
Lord not heavenbound.
Lord have mercy.
—Joseph Bayly in
Psalms of My Life:
Calligraphy by Tim Botts
