WAKING UP PRAYERO Comforter! Within me as I drink my tea Jesus! Sunlight! Offering this new morning God of all small pleasures! Present cheerily Three-in-One in this glad day …
God of new beginnings, I embrace today Jesus! Healer! Friend! Come sit beside me Spirit give me power to dance Your merry Way O Gentle Three-in-One Most Mirthful!
Ho! Ho! What a morning!
—Celtic prayer, by Sharon Morgan
TOO HARD FOR SOME The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
—G. K. Chesterton in What’s Wrong with the World
BACKWARDS CREATION … you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
—Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird
THE DESCENT OF MAN Art is a reflection of a society’s most profound aspirations. … Cultures exalt their highest ideals. In the Middle Ages, it was the divine. For the 18th and 19th centuries, it was Man as Promethean hero. Today, it’s the depraved, life as a freak show. Our cultural mavens wallow in the sordid, celebrate the nauseating, dwell on their imaginary persecution.
—Columnist Don Feder in the Boston Herald(July 27, 1993)
CHRISTIANITY ISN’T COMPLICATED Just think, every promise God has ever made finds its fulfillment in Jesus. God doesn’t just give us grace, He gives us Jesus, the Lord of grace. If it’s peace, it’s only found in Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Even life itself is found in the Resurrection and the Life. Christianity isn’tall that complicated … it’s Jesus.
—Joni Eareckson Tada in Lamp Unto My Feet
LETTING GOD BE GOD Humility is facing the truth. It is useful to remind myself that the word itself comes from humus, earth, and in the end simply means that I allow myself to be earthed in the truth that lets God be God, and myself his creature. If I hold on to this it helps prevent me from putting myself at the centre, and instead allows me to put God and other people at the centre.
—Esther de Waal in Living with Contradiction: Reflections on The Rule of St. Benedict
TRUSTING IN THE UNREAL Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
—Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln’s Own Stories
THE HIGHLANDS OF HOLINESS When an observatory is about to be built, the site selected is always onsome high mountain. The aim is to find a place where there is a clear,unobstructed view of the heavens. Similarly, faith requires for its heavenly vision the highlands of holiness and separation, the pure sky of a consecrated life.
—A. B. Simpson in A Larger Christian Life
REAL FAITH Faith is not a contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one of self-surrender, it’s all contractual; people won’t know how to believe.
—Archbishop Francis George, from his 1990 doctoral dissertation (Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1997)
LIVING IN POVERTY We leave our places of worship, and no deep and inexpressible wonder sits upon our faces. We can sing these lilting melodies, and when we go out into the streets our faces are one with the faces of those who have left the theaters and the music halls. There is nothing about us to suggest that we have beenlooking at anything stupendous and overwhelming. … And what is the explanation of the loss? Preeminently our impoverished conception of God.
—John Henry Jowett in “The Ministry of a Transfigured Church,” from J. H. Jowett
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