I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that’s just different.
I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, I felt like shit. I had a vague realisation that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate.
No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement.
The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.
Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.
What makes us saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.
Every time I go look for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross, in death and resurrection. This is our God.
God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.
God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.
Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” not forgive us and smite those bastards who hurt us.
I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.
And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it’s real it means we don’t “deserve” it. … And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world.
The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while on the one holding it can claim with impunity that “this is from God.
Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.
This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.
There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay,” Matthew later told me. “Fight to change it.